Gartner's Top 10 Internet Of Things Technologies For 2017 & 2018

By Louis Columbus, Forbes, Feb. 28, 2016 – 

• Gartner predicts that low-power short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks.
• For enterprises to adopt and gain the full value of these technologies, significantly higher investments in training are needed.
• Gartner's Top 10 IoT technologies provide a glimpse into what their clients are most interested in today.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is extending existing business models and leading to the proliferation of entirely new ones as companies push beyond the data, analytics and intelligence boundaries that held them back in the past. Gartner's recent analysis of the top 10 IoT technologies provides a glimpse into which areas of IoT their clients care the most about from the standpoint of building out enterprise infrastructure, security, scalability, standards, and performance.

Key takeaways from Gartner's top 10 Internet of Things technologies for 2017 and 2018 include the following:

• IoT Security - Gartner predicts that hardware and software advances will make IoT security a fast-evolving area through 2021 and the skills shortage today will only accelerate. Enterprises need to begin investing today in developing this expertise in-house and also begin recruitment efforts. As many security problems are the result of poor design, implementation and lack of training, expect to see market leaders adopting IoT investing heavily in these areas.

• IoT Analytics - IoT analytics require entirely new algorithms, architectures, data structures and approaches to machine learning if organizations are going to get the full value of the data captured, and knowledge created. Distributed analytics architectures the capitalize on pervasive, secure Internet of Things (IoT) network architectures will eventually become knowledge sharing networks. For more information on how Toyota accomplished this, please see the research completed by Dr. Jeffrey Dyer and Dr. Nobeoka, Creating and Managing A High-Performance Knowledge-Sharing Network: The Toyota Case (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000).

• IoT Device Management - The challenges of enabling technologies that are context, location, and state-aware while at the same time consistent with data and knowledge taxonomies is an area Gartner believes will see significant innovation in the next few years. IoT Device Management will most likely break the boundaries of traditional data management and create data structures capable of learning and flexing to unique inbound data requirements over time.
Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks - Low-power, short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks.

• Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks - According to Gartner, traditional cellular networks don't deliver a proper combination of technical features and operational cost for those IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating cost, and high connection density.

• IoT Processors - Gartner predicts that low-end 8-bit microcontrollers will dominate the IoT through 2019 and shipments of 32-bit microcontrollers will overtake the 8-bit devices by 2020.It's interesting to note that Gartner doesn't see 16- bit processors ever attaining critical mass in IoT applications.

• IoT Operating Systems - Minimal and small footprint operating systems will gain momentum in IoT through 2020 as traditional large-scale operating systems including Windows and iOS are too complex and resource-intensive for the majority of IoT applications. It's been my experience that these operating systems are excellent at exception- and event-driven tasks and can a few support the essential of multithreading as well.

• Event Stream Processing - Gartner predicts that some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that must be analyzed in real time. Systems creating tens of thousands of events per second are common, and millions of events per second can occur in some telecom and telemetry situations. To address such requirements, distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged.

• IoT Platforms - According to Gartner IoT platforms bundle infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product. The services provided by such platforms fall into three core categories. These include low-level device control and operations such as communications, device monitoring and management, security, and firmware updates; IoT data acquisition, transformation and management; and IoT application development, including event-driven logic, application programming, visualization, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.

• IoT Standards and Ecosystems - Although ecosystems and standards aren't precisely technologies, most eventually materialize as application programming interfaces (APIs). Standards and their associated APIs will be essential because IoT devices will need to interoperate and communicate, and many IoT business models will rely on sharing data between multiple devices and organizations.
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