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Aussie businesses want an open IoT ecosystem

Aussie businesses want an open IoT ecosystem

IoT decision makers are putting a high priority on open standards for data and connectivity and on open source software standards

There will be an estimated 2.7 million connected commercial vehicles, 1.7 million connected pets and 1.8 million connected healthcare appliances in Australia by 2020, according to IDC, reinforcing that the Internet of Things (IoT) is about connecting things that weren't originally intended to be connected to the internet.

Findings from IDC's recent Global IoT Decision Maker Survey, which polled more than 4500 respondents from more than 25 countries worldwide across industries including manufacturing, retail, utilities, government, health, and finance, found that the total IoT market in Australia will grow to be worth over $18 billion by 2020.

And with the pie being shared across both traditional vendors and vendors traditionally associated with operational and industrial technologies, open systems feature highly on IoT decision makers’ radars in Australia.

IDC research manager, Jamie Horrell, explained that IoT decision makers are putting a high priority on open standards for data and connectivity and on open source software standards.

In the study by IDC, 81 per cent of organisations ranked common data and connectivity standards as extremely or very important, while 63 per cent rated open source software standards the same.

"This is unsurprising," Horrell said. "IoT will be an open ecosystem of horizontally specialised players, bringing their own best of breed technology to the table. Open standards are critical to interoperability and it would be a bold move to rely on proprietary standards or vertically integrated players to deliver operational transformation.”

In addition, the study found that security and privacy concerns are the biggest perceived inhibitors for the deployment of IoT solutions in Australia, with Australians remaining nervous about how organisations treat their data following recent security breaches and attacks.

ARN recently reported that IoT devices attract hackers, because they're plentiful and overlooked, and it's up to vendors to build in security and allow for automatic over-the-air updates.

On 23 March, a group of hackers, named Turkish Crime Family, threatened to wipe data from millions of Apple devices in two weeks if the company doesn't pay them US$150,000, highlighting how vulnerable connected devices can be.

And the risk is set to increase, with IDC predicting that the number of connected devices and connections will continue to grow, with freight monitoring, manufacturing operations and connected vehicles being the top three applications of enterprise spending by 2020.

"This is the crux of IoT. It is not about driving IT efficiency but rather operational efficiency. Applications like supply chain are obvious targets for this,” Horrell added.

A similar report by 451 Research suggested that organisations are forging ahead with IoT initiatives and opening their wallets to support IoT deployments. Specifically, IoT deployments and usage will be particularly strong in enterprise initiatives around data and transactional intensive workload categories, such as data analytics and security.

IoT-specific projects include things like data collection and analysis of financial, healthcare or industrial functions; the uptime/reliability of mission-critical line of business servers and applications; as well as monitoring the efficiency and costs related to a specific business operation or department such as a hospital emergency room.

“When it comes to IoT adoption, pragmatism rules,” 451 Research director, Laura DiDio, said previously.

“The survey data indicates enterprises currently use IoT for practical technology purposes that have an immediate and tangible impact on daily operational business efficiencies, economies of scale and increasing the revenue stream.”

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