SYDNEY, March 21st, 2017, Open systems feature highly on IoT decision makers radars in Australia, according to recently published IDC research. IoT decision makers are putting a high priority on open standards for data and connectivity and on open source software standards. 81% of organisations rank common data and connectivity standards as extremely or very important, 63% rate open source software standards the same.

"This is unsurprising" says IDC research manager Jamie Horrell, "IoT will be an open ecosystem of horizontally specialised players, bringing their own best of breed technology to the table. Open standards are critical to interoperability and it would be a bold move to rely on proprietary standards or vertically integrated players to deliver operational transformation".

Security and privacy concerns are the biggest perceived inhibitors for deployment of IoT solutions in Australia, with the Australian public remaining nervous about how organisations treat their data following recent well publicised security breaches and attacks. Despite this, IDC sees the number of connected devices and connections continuing to grow with freight monitoring, manufacturing operations and connected vehicles being the top three applications of enterprise spending by 2020.

"This is the crux of IoT" said Jamie "IoT is not about driving IT efficiency but rather operational efficiency. Applications like supply chain are obvious targets for this".

IDC expects to see 2.7 million connected commercial vehicles, 1.7 million pets and 1.8M healthcare appliances in Australia by 2020, reinforcing that IoT is about connecting things that weren't originally intended to be connected to the Internet.

The total IoT market in Australia will grow to be worth over $18B AUD by 2020? with the pie being shared across both traditional vendors and vendors traditionally associated with operational and industrial technologies.