If ever there was a market where potential participants attempted an over-ambitious kick-start: getting the cart moving briskly by projecting all sorts of big numbers in the hope that the horse would catch up later, it must be Internet of Things ( IoT).

The cart we’ve all heard about - huge numbers of connected devices projected enabled by ubiquitous networks and tiny, inexpensive sensors to feed back the data…  perhaps best summed up by the catch-phrase “whatever can be connected will be connected”.

But now that ‘things’ are well and truly under way, where’s the horse and, furthermore, how frisky is it?

The International M2M Council (IMC) is attempting an answer and has today announced the results of a study into Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications by quizzing over  5,000 OEMs and enterprise users - people that actually deploy connected devices.

“This is a pure distillation of IoT buyers – we call them our IMC Adopter Members. The study was designed to screen out responses from companies that sell IoT solutions,” the press release quotes IMC executive director Keith Kreisher saying.

The survey, conducted by Beecham Research for the IMC, was launched to help understand technology buying patterns. Two findings stood out, says the IMC. First, buyers of IoT solutions in very diverse markets often share similar profiles. That’s potentially important since a strong strand in some of the thinking around M2M has been that the IoT/M2M market is and will remain quite vertical with specific technology sets and solutions being developed almost independently for each vertical. This result seems to suggest that more horizontal approaches might work too.

Secondly, that a significant proportion of the users are planning substantial ‘upswings’ in deployment numbers. The data suggests that many users aren’t just ‘playing’ but are convinced and ready to ramp up.

Specifically, according to Kreisher, “the buyers polled expect that over 14 per cent of their IoT deployments will incorporate more than 250,000 connected devices in three years’ time, a huge increase on current deployments. While less than 20 per cent of the IoT projects currently underway involve the deployment of more than 10,000 connected devices, buyers do expect that tally to be 53 per cent in three years,  The study also shows strong movement away from using IoT/M2M technology to simply reduce costs, and towards using these solutions to meet customer requirements and build new revenue streams.”

A report on the study, which includes the additional survey data, is available on the IMC website and on request from the IMC.