‘Tis the season for predictions, and research firm IDC has joined in the end of year ritual with its look at the Internet of Things market, identifying ten trends to watch out for in the coming years (there’s a webinar here). And TelecomTV will be paying even closer attention to IoT developments next year, building on the work we started several years ago with our M2M coverage.

"The Internet of Things will give IT managers a lot to think about," said Vernon Turner, SVP of Research at IDC. "Enterprises will have to address every IT discipline to effectively balance the deluge of data from devices that are connected to the corporate network. In addition, IoT will drive tough organizational structure changes in companies to allow innovation to be transparent to everyone, while creating new competitive business models and products."

Big numbers first: IDC believes that within the next five years, more than 90 per cent of all IoT data will be hosted on service provider platforms, as cloud computing reduces the complexity of supporting IoT data blending – the process of creating useful and actionable information from numerous data sources or sets. This is going to particularly important in applications with large numbers of sensors, of various types, such as might be deployed in cities. Which is why IDC says local government, as it competes to build innovative and sustainable smart cities, will represent more than 25 per cent of all government external spending to deploy, manage, and realise the business value of the IoT by 2018.

And whilst today, over 50 per cent of IoT activity is centred in manufacturing, transportation, smart city, and consumer applications, IDC believes that within five years all industries will have rolled out IoT initiatives. This, of course, adds pressure to both the telecoms and enterprise networks.

The firm says that by 2018, 40 per cent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analysed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge, of the network. For IT managers, IDC says they will have to contend with ever-increasing network traffic and the inevitable security problems. Within three years, 50 per cent of IT networks will transition from having excess capacity to handle the additional IoT devices to being network constrained with nearly 10 per cent of sites being overwhelmed. And within two years, 90 per cent of all IT networks will have an IoT-based security breach, and Chief Information Security Officers will be forced to adopt new IoT policies.

By 2017, IDC says 90 per cent of data centre and enterprise systems management will adopt new business models to manage non-traditional infrastructure and BYOD device categories. By 2018, 60 per cent of IT solutions originally developed as proprietary, closed-industry solutions will become open-sourced, allowing for the creation of vertical-driven IoT markets.

Finally, IDC says we should not forget the impact of the Millennial demographic. By 2018, 16 per cent of the population will be so-called Millennials and will be accelerating IoT adoption due to their reality of living in a connected world. This, incidentally, will also impact on wearables, and by 2020 the firm says 40 per cent of wearables will have evolved into a viable consumer mass market alternative to smartphones.