Top IoT industries, use cases, and trends

/ dec 12, 2020

In every sector of the economy, companies embrace IoT technology to curb costs, create new value, and modernize their product roadmaps. Naturally, some industries are better positioned for IoT adoption than others. Also, specific IoT use cases can have a broad appeal across multiple industries. This infographics offers a snapshot of popular IoT industries, use cases, and trends in order to help you better understand where IoT technology stands as of now and where it has the most promising growth opportunities.

01 . Most popular IoT use cases: utilities, physical security, and manufacturing

According to Gartner, the Utilities sector is the highest user of IoT endpoints, totaling over 1 bn active devices, mostly smart meters. Physical security is the second most widely implemented IoT use case, which typically includes surveillance cameras, motion detection sensors, and other devices for intrusion detection. The industry-agnostic nature of these two solutions naturally gives them broader appeal compared to industry-specific IoT solutions, among which manufacturing, retail, and automotive have chalked up the most endpoints so far.

IoT Endpoint Market by Segment, 2018-2020, Worldwide (Installed Base, Billions of Units)

02. Fastest growing: building automation, automotive, and healthcare

Building automation is currently the most popular IoT use case due to a peaking demand for smart lighting solutions as well as comprehensive smart home / smart office systems. The automotive segment is also booming thanks to innovations that include IoT-powered infotainment and navigation systems, and rapid proliferation of third-party fleet management solutions. In third place is Healthcare with chronic condition monitoring devices as a key driver for IoT healthcare innovations.

03. Smart meter market

As one of the most widely adopted IoT applications today, the smart meter market in the US and Europe has already reached a penetration rate of 40%, with some regions having over 80% of utility consumers using smart meters. However, the global market remains highly fragmented and, while many tier-1 utility providers have been rolling out smart meters at large scale, there is still plenty of room for smart meter implementation by smaller deployments from many small cooperative and municipal utilities as well as private commercial deployments.

IoT Endpoint Market by Segment, 2018-2020, Worldwide (Installed Base, Billions of Units)

IoT for physical security

Physical security solutions have greatly benefited from IoT by adopting real-time connectivity between devices and automated data processing.

Now it is easier than ever to bring together various motion sensors, surveillance cameras, and asset tracking devices to create intelligent security solutions that instantly report on any abnormalities, apply geofencing rules for perimeter security, and effectively store and analyze security logs.

Leading industrial IoT use cases

Industrial IoT stays among the leading IoT segments due to its vast potential in empowering manufacturing companies with real-time operational intelligence, remote asset monitoring, predictive maintenance, and remote service capabilities.

Industrial IoT roadblocks

In order to unlock the full potential of Industrial IoT, companies have to do their homework and lay out a fine-grained strategy for IoT adoption, including answers to questions, such as how to focus and how to scale.

The inherent complexity of Industrial IoT will also require manufacturers to carefully choose the needed technology stack, which may include an IoT platform, modern analytics tools, cloud infrastructure, connectivity protocols, etc.

04. Overarching challenges for IoT adoption by businesses

01
Clear understanding of IoT-based business value to specific business processes
02
Support and maintenance of diverse IoT-enabled assets
03
Integration of IoT into existing business applications
04
Device and data security
05
Data ownership

05. Impact of Covid-19 on IoT investment

Amidst the Covid-19 lockdowns, some companies reduced their spending on new technologies while others accelerated their digital transformation efforts to become more resilient and efficient. According to the latest data, it looks like IoT has become a growing priority for businesses, which can be explained by clear ROI, good cost-saving opportunities, and process optimization benefits from IoT solutions.

06. Technologies to further empower IoT

To make the most out of IoT, it is important to view it in the context of other technological trends and cross-domain use cases. Together with other enablers for enterprise digital transformation, IoT has so much more to offer.