In a three-part series, Cisco Investments and McRock Capital are partnering to share their predictions on top trends for the next decade of Industrial IoT.
Part 1: A Market Shift from Horizontal to Vertical
Many IoT startups, IT product and service vendors, and industrial solution vendors initially tried to approach Industrial IoT from a more horizontal perspective by combining IoT projects with broader enterprise digital transformation projects, in an effort to find solutions that worked across multiple industries and applications. However, over the past 5–7 years, and after several billion dollars spent on deployments, that perspective has evolved. Today, many have come to understand the wisdom of a more vertical approach for addressing specific customer pain points and use cases in an effort to deliver tailored solutions and measurable outcomes.
Part 2: Edge Computing. Think Big. Go Small.
By 2025, the research firm Gartner predicts 75% of all enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud, compared to 10% today. In our previous article, we emphasized how applications, not standards, are driving the IoT market with a multitude of use cases and a wide array of personas for any given vertical. Across today’s IoT landscape, asset and application sprawl, harsh industrial environments, limited compute per node, security vulnerabilities, and changing network conditions persist as challenges, paving the way for dedicated edge computing infrastructure to unlock real value.
Part 3: Embracing AI in the Post-COVID World
Following the pandemic, many industries will, without a doubt, look entirely different from what they were before. New challenges and opportunities will surface, and questions previously overlooked will now demand answers. Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology which was in the nascent stages of adoption in industrial verticals, will lay the foundation for significant investments in digitization and automation in the post-COVID world.