Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Steve Latham, CEO, Banyan Hills Technologies

Top 5 IOT Predictions for 2018

With over 20 billion devices reportedly now connected around the globe, smart enterprises in 2018 will now start to focus their attention on results and making the most out of their investments to drive customer satisfaction, improve operations excellence and enhance and advance their businesses.

Here are Top Five Quick Predictions for you to put in your back pocket and think about during the course of the year. Hold on tight, it is going to be a fun ride.

1.      Winners vs. Non-Winners Emerge

Over the past several years, the IoT industry has received an increasing amount of attention across nearly every market segment. The potential and hype around this technology has led to the rapid emergence of entirely new industries, businesses, subject matter experts, standards, and innovative solutions. The market has exploded with innovative Internet connected solutions, at the same time exposing potential vulnerabilities, that have never been considered before. Because of these trends, we've watched the IoT industry start to show signs of maturation, with the rise of governance and standardization increasingly becoming an area of emphasis.

In 2018 we can expect the maturation of the industry to continue. 2018 will be the year that clear leaders start to emerge. Platform "winners" will begin to show traction in the market, providing hardened solutions that businesses and consumers can obtain with more confidence.  We will start to see some of the smaller startups that followed the hype into the IoT industry begin to disappear. The emerging trend for these smaller organizations will be that they begin pivoting towards other emerging market trends, some will be acquired, and others will simply fade out.              

2.      Socio-Economic Trends

The IoT industry introduces automation to enterprises in a manner that is extremely productive in driving operational efficiencies. The technology is disruptive, in that it enables smart solutions with the ability to start making and reacting to decisions without human intervention.  This is obviously attractive for businesses that are looking to reduce operational costs through the onset of technology, but it brings to light some socio-economic issues that require attention.

The displacement of a human labor through technology such as IoT is already starting to surface questions around what happens to the human workforce that is being replaced. 2018 will be a year where we begin to observe rising socio-economic pressure how to best address some of these issues. Questions around how organizations will be taxed when replacing humans with machines, how organizations will be incented to drive productive human labor, how to cross-train the workforce to support emerging technology, and the role of the government in the industry are only a several of the important concerns that will start to receive attention.

3.      New Industry Uses

We will start to see new uses for the IoT in industries that have traditionally been lacking in technical innovation and/or the use of advanced technologies. For example, industries such as Payments, Sports & Entertainment, Automotive, Food & Beverage, and Facility Management are only a few of the industries already leveraging IoT to drive operational efficiencies and enhance the customer experience.

Just as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged as a new category, we'll start to see some exciting new categories emerge in 2018.  It's exciting to see how industries such as Self-Storage, Criminal Justice, and Healthcare, for example, are beginning 2018 having IoT integrated into their technology roadmap. We can expect to see some impactful solutions within these industries begin to show traction during 2018.

4.      IoT becoming even more Powerful through Integration

As the IoT continues to mature, new technologies are beginning to take over the hype.  Examples of technologies that fall into these spaces include the following: 

Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is a mainstream factor in enterprise computing. We'll begin to see more "things" designed with AI capabilities and leverage machine learning. IoT endpoints will be configured to deal with the massive amounts of data being captured making it possible for data to be used in more meaningful ways. Predictive analytics and self-diagnostics, self-healing and even customer experience will become more human-like as AI and IoT overlap. 

Security: Block Chain has overshadowed the headlines of IoT, which doesn't mean IoT is going away, it means that IoT has now has the potential to become even more powerful through integration. IoT solutions will begin considering how the concept of a distributed ledger such as Block Chain can start to help secure communication between device and enterprise components of an IoT solution.

Biometrics:  Biometrics will become more and more widely used as more connected devices become enabled with biometric technology, like fingerprint and facial recognition. Monitoring and managing IoT devices will be increasingly important to reducing security vulnerabilities in an IoT implementation. We'll see industries like Financial Services, Healthcare, and Pharma start to implement biometrics to support increased security efforts.

We've noticed for example in 2017 the rapidly increasing attention that Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency (powered by Blockchain) have received in the industry. The integration and/or application of these emerging technologies within the IoT are expected to make IoT even more powerful. IoT solutions will leverage AI to help customers make better use of their historical data, introducing automated decision making that is derived through historical trends being driven through their technology platforms.

Simply said, in 2018 we'll start to see IoT will leverage these emerging technologies to drive more powerful solutions in the industry.

5.      New Standards

Standards and protocols for IoT have sort of been like the "wild-wild-west" over the past several years. Standard wars will start to come to an end in 2018, and the winners will emerge.  As with any rapidly developing industry, standardization will have to emerge so that the industry can scale to its full potential. 2018 will be the year where we see standardization and governance really start to take shape for IoT.

Conclusion:

2018 is going to be yet another exciting year for the ongoing expansion of IoT. According to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, IoT will become the backbone of the future and the landscape that will deliver and enable connected products and business processes. We look forward to being on that journey and are excited for all that 2018 will bring!

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About the Author

 

Steve Latham, founder, and CEO of Banyan Hills Technologies is an Internet of Things expert and strategic technology leader. Latham founded the company in 2013 to impact the world through technology and a deep commitment to social responsibility. Latham has a strong track record of leveraging cloud-based technologies to optimize and accelerate business strategy and is highly regarded by his peers for his deep industry knowledge in Retail, Entertainment, Healthcare, and Financial Services. Latham has successfully led architecture, implementation and delivery for one of the largest self-service, retail exchange kiosk systems in the world. Earlier, Latham served as CTO for the Entertainment division of NCR, where he helped orchestrate a successful divestiture of the business to Redbox for $125M. Prior to NCR, he held various technology leadership positions at Harland Clarke and led the consolidation of their e-commerce platform to a unified product offering for its customers. Latham serves on the board of directors for various businesses and academic institutions providing technical leadership.