Oyster Bay, New York - 27 Jul 2017: In a recent B2B technology survey of 455 U.S.-based companies across nine vertical markets, ABI Research finds that 67% of manufacturing respondents do not currently have IoT solutions in operation. Of those, 74% are either investigating, assessing, or planning to deploy such solutions in the next 12 months. Survey results show that while a lot of the activity in non-connectivity categories are relatively simplistic deployments, industrial IoT (IIoT) applications share a common propensity for automation enablement.

“Companies with industrial and manufacturing operations are looking to connect their HMI, SCADA, and control networks to higher level enterprise systems as well as the cloud,” says Ryan Martin, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. “Exposing data to enterprise-level systems provides better support for analytics and the management of people, processes, and systems."

At the onset, the IIoT ecosystem was predominantly anchored by proprietary M2M applications with limited interoperability between internal operational data and external systems/processes. Today, it is starting to become more open as the focus shifts from simplistic to more complex applications (monitoring versus control, automation). In fact, 35% of respondents in manufacturing are now assessing artificial intelligence (AI) and 47% have either deployed or plan deploy robotics solutions in the next 12 months.

“The value of leaner systems, processes, and procedures is greater than the sum of its parts for players in industrial end markets,” concludes Martin. “These are generally large organizations with a set of well-understood needs and slim margins, though the ability for IIoT technologies to serve as an infrastructure amplification engine is unbounded.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Industry Survey: Transformative Technology Adoption and Attitudes report. This report is part of the company’s Industrial Internet research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights.