News

Eclipse Foundation's 2020 IoT Dev Survey

• By John K. Waters
• October 20, 2020

The Eclipse Foundation's annual EclipseCon 2020 event got underway online this week, inviting developers, architects, and open-source business leaders from around the world to log on to the free event and learn about Eclipse technologies and share best practices. It's the Foundation's biggest event of the year, and it serves as something of a touchstone for the Eclipse ecosystem.

The scope of the technologies shepherded by the Foundation has grown to include an enormous range of open-source runtimes, tools, and frameworks for the cloud and edge applications, IoT, artificial intelligence, connected vehicles and transportation, digital ledger technologies, and much more.

At the launch of this year's event, the Foundation also published the results of its 2020 IoT Developer Survey. Administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the survey was developed to provide insights into the IoT (Internet of Things) industry landscape, the challenges developers are facing, and the opportunities for enterprise stakeholders in the IoT open source ecosystem, the Foundation says. This is the sixth annual IoT industry survey conducted by the Foundation, but it was the first time the survey asked respondents about edge computing usage. The results of that line of inquiry " will influence the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group roadmap," the Foundation says.

"As the Internet of Things continues to grow, so do the opportunities and challenges faced by IoT developers," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "This survey provides everyone, from hardware and software vendors to service providers and enterprises, with insights into how the choices made by developers are impacting the latest IoT strategies and businesses."

The online survey was conducted over a period of three months (May-July 2020), during which time 1,652 people from a broad set of industries and organizations participated.

The list of key findings includes:

• In 2020, Smart Agriculture has emerged as the leading industry focus
  
• Security (39%), Connectivity (27%) and Data Collection & Analytics (26%) remain the top three concerns for IoT developers in 2020
  
• Artificial Intelligence (30%) was the most frequently selected edge computing workload
  
• Privacy is a growing concern for 23% of respondents, as awareness of the issues increases among organizations and consumers alike
  
• Distributed Ledgers have gained momentum as a way to secure IoT solutions
  
• Java is the most widely used programming language at the Edge (20%) and in the Cloud (24%)
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The survey data also includes details on edge computing workloads, top concerns by IoT developers, and breakdowns by market. It can be downloaded here.