When most people hear the term IoT, their mind jumps to smart toasters and Amazon’s Alexa. But that is just the top of the IoT mountain. The biggest effect that the Internet of Things is having on the world today, is how businesses operate and optimize their processes.

In short, IoT is making businesses smart, secure, and more efficient.

Today, we want to share an interesting Microsoft report on the topic: the IoT ecosystem. Information was collected across all industries and countries and was compiled into a rather comprehensive report.

Adoptions rates, changes, benefits, challenges – it’s all there. To make this report, Microsoft interviewed 3,000 decision makers across many industries. The report reveals how IoT is branching out and becoming more diverse. In addition, IoT is no longer a buzzword. It is becoming more commonplace and mainstream.

IoT transformation benefits

IoT benefits are not always visible at first glance. It’s not always that one has an increase in revenue. For most decision makers in the IoT industry, production efficiency is one of the major benefits of IoT implementation.

Companies can take advantage of IoT in 2 big areas:

• the optimization and control of industrial processes (known as Industrial IoT);
• the development of new IoT products or connecting existing products.

From our own experience with customers, the top three benefits of Industrial IoT are:

• Increased efficiency of industrial processes
• Increased production capacity
• Reduced operational costs

Of course, there are plenty of other benefits. This depends on the industry, and the type of machinery involved. Increased reliability and availability of their equipment, reduced human errors, improved safety conditions, and better business decisions, are just some benefits that our customers have reported.

Concerning the development of new IoT connected products, the situation in the field is somewhat different. In most cases, the benefit of IoT implementation are:

• New business opportunities based on IoT connectivity
• Increased competitive advantage
• Increased revenue
• New revenue streams
• Lower operational and maintenance costs.

Of course, the benefits vary from industry to industry. For example, the medical industry receives more value from tracking of inventory, and tracking of staff, whereas the manufacturing industry’s main benefits are production flow monitoring and industrial automation.

If you would like to learn more about the impact of IoT for each industry, check out the report. Perhaps, you’ll gain some useful insights on how to proceed in your own field.

Challenges of IoT implementation

Many businesses find IoT solutions too technically challenging and complex to implement. Or, they think that it takes too long to implement them.

Another important issue is the high overall cost of scaling. Of course, this becomes more complex when you introduce different solution providers into the equation.

This is why Zerynth is the choice for so many companies. We offer a complete IoT software-hardware solution that easily adapts to the technology stack that you have in your company. Thanks to our platform, companies can smoothly go from prototyping, to scaling, to production.

Discover how Zerynth helped companies to drive their digital transformation – visit the case studies page.

Read the IoT Signals report

Reference: “IoT signals Report” (2020), Microsoft