Research highlights three trends in machine-to-machine (M2M), IoT and Internet of Everything (IoE) that will deliver, and three that won’t.
ABI Research claims that in 2020, there will be greater adoption of continuous intelligence (CI) technologies that will elevate IoT analytics way beyond traditional operational levels and have a greater impact on strategic planning and organisational change.
“After a tumultuous 2019 that was beset by many challenges, both integral to technology markets and derived from global market dynamics, 2020 looks set to be equally challenging,” says Stuart Carlaw, Chief Research Officer at ABI Research.
Three trends that will fly
Continuous intelligence – “The concept of CI will be consolidating in the IoT analytics market, enabling more advanced analytics in near-real time,” said Kateryna Dubrova, M2M, IoT & IoE Analyst at ABI Research.
She added, “Since the emergence and expansion of streaming analytics and streaming technologies, the ability to continuously analyse and extract value from the IoT data is growing.”
This extended application of CI is possible due to the combination of cloud vendors and vendors offering end-to-end platforms, greater capabilities through digital twinning, big data technologies and machine learning algorithms, ABI reckons.
Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) begun under 4G, with LTE-M and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) being “forward-compatible” with the forthcoming 5G New Radio (NR) standard.
This resulted in a race between 17 baseband vendors emerge, but only four supply most of the hundreds of LTE-M and NB-IoT products now available – HiSilicon, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and RDA (UNISOC).
This situation will continue as we move to Release 16 of the 5G standard, and “the full coexistence of LTE-M and NB-IoT with 5G New Radio (NR), that is, the ‘official’ start of the mMTC market,” said Jamie Moss, M2M, IoT & IoE Research Director at ABI Research.
He added, “Nothing succeeds like success and only those with strong early adoption, regardless of slow initial sales, will be there to enjoy the boom years to come.”
China will drive the sharing economy 2.0 – Uber and Airbnb could be considered the Sharing Economy 1.0. “But China is showing the world what the next phase of the sharing economy will look like – shared power banks.
According to Dan Shey, VP of Enabling Platforms at ABI Research, shared power banks have been a major driver of cellular connections in China today: “the newer applications in the more ‘connected’ version of the sharing economy will continue to grow across the world, albeit at a more measured pace than seen in China.”
Three trends that won’t get off the ground
The IoT platform market will not consolidate – “For many years, there have been predictions that the IoT platform supplier market will begin to consolidate, and it just won’t happen,” according to Shey. “There are more than 100 companies that offer device-to-cloud IoT platform services and for every one that is acquired, there are always new ones that come to market.”
Unlicensed, proprietary low power, wide area tech (LPWA) will not merge with licensed open standards as, “The two cannot be reconciled at the standards level, for the premium that cellular commands stems from the cost of its licence, and the control that its owners have over their blocks of spectrum, providing a secure, managed, quality of service-based guarantee to IoT customers,” said Adarsh Krishnan, M2M, IoT & IoE Principal Analyst at ABI Research.
Edge will not overtake cloud – “The accelerated growth of the edge technology and intelligent device paradigm created one of the largest industry misconceptions: edge technology will cannibalise cloud technology,” commented Dubrova.
“In fact, in the future we will see a rapid development of edge-cloud-fog continuum, where technolog[ies] will complement each other, rather than cross-cannibalise.”
For more trends that won’t happen in 2020, and the 35 trends that will, download the 54 Technology Trends to Watch in 2020 whitepaper.
.