News

IDC: Global Spending on IoT to Top $1 Trillion 2022

• By Michael Desmond
• June 14, 2019

Worldwide spending on software and hardware around the Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to grow rapidly, from $726 billion in 2019 to $1.1 trillion in 2023, according to a report from market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

The figures, published in IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Internet of Things Spending Guide, projects a 12.6 percent compound annual growth rate for IoT spending across commercial and consumer segments through the period.

The study identifies discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, and transportation as the three most active commercial sectors for IoT spending, accounting for nearly a third of global spending around IoT in 2023. Consumer market spending, meanwhile, is expected to grow at a brisk 16.8 percent CAGR through 2023, vaulting it past discreet manufacturing as the largest source of IoT spending by 2023. Smart homes and connected vehicles currently lead IoT spending in the consumer space.

Significantly, IDC reports that in 2019 spending on IoT services outstripped spending on IoT hardware, and will remain the top technology category through the 2023 period. IDC expects vertical industry IoT platforms and cloud deployments for IoT software to dominate. The report states: "More than three quarters of all spending on IoT platform software -- middleware that provides the device management, connectivity management, data management, visualization, and applications enablement for connecting IoT endpoints -- will go toward software packages that integrate and support devices, applications, data schemas, and standards of a single industry."

According to Carrie MacGillivray, group vice president, Internet of Things, 5G, and Mobility at IDC, organizations can also expect to see increased spending to handle data produced by IoT deployments.

"While organizations are investing in hardware, software, and services to support their IoT initiatives," MacGillivray says, “their next challenge is finding solutions that help them to manage, process, and analyze the data being generated from all these connected things."