The Economist has recently published an IoT survey that looks at the business trends in the IoT industry. This is the third year the Economist has completed this type of survey so they can show some interesting trends. There has been some interesting commentary on the survey results.
Some key takeaways:
Why IoT Needs a Cloud-Native IoT Messaging Service
Today, there are two main challenges to building an IoT application that provides bi-directional communication between IoT devices and IoT cloud platforms:
- The big cloud providers use IoT solutions that lock-in customer devices to the individual cloud provider.
- Managing and deploying a messaging service requires considerable expertise and resources. These factors are serious barriers for many companies that want to deploy production IoT applications.
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Why MQTT Has Become the De-Facto IoT Standard
This week, Andy Standford-Clark announced in a tweet the 20th anniversary of the first MQTT release. In those 20 years, it is clear that MQTT has become the de-facto standard for IoT. All major IoT cloud providers support MQTT, many popular IoT Platform vendors support MQTT, and survey results show MQTT is widely used for building IoT applications.
An interesting question to ask is “Why has MQTT has been successful?” What were the factors that led to the MQTT domination of IoT?
Why MQTT Is Essential for Building Connected Cars
The automotive industry is embracing the idea of building a connected car. They see opportunity in using telemetry data from vehicles to create new revenue opportunities, and to build a better user experience. However, implementing a connected car service that can scale to support millions of cars can present some challenges.
For most connected car services, there is a requirement for bi-directional communication between the car and the cloud. Cars will send telemetry data to the cloud and enable apps like predictive maintenance, assisted driving, etc. Similarly, the car needs to be able to receive messages from the cloud to respond to remote commands, like remote lock/unlock door and remote activation of horn or lights.
IoT on the Edge
Edge computing has become an important trend for the Internet of Things (IoT). Gartner identifies edge computing as one of their top Tech Trends for 2019. Companies implementing IoT solutions are seeing real benefits of processing data on the edge, closer to the 'things', before it is sent to the cloud. Confirming this trend, a recent Micron/Forrester survey found in the next three years, 53 percent of respondents expect to be analyzing complex data sets at the edge. This is why some have made the bold prediction that 'the edge will eat the cloud. '
Edge computing is gaining attention since it addresses some of the key issues of implementing industrial IoT use cases.
Open-Source IoT Edge Projects
Edge computing is a key trend this year in the IoT industry. This past week, Baidu announced a new open-source project, called OpenEdge, that targets edge computing. OpenEdge is certainly not the first open-source project for edge computing. Over the last number of years, there have been many new open-source projects started to address edge computing. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to see how some projects are doing in terms of community and popularity.
It appears most of the projects in the survey have an active core contributor community. Most projects are supported by a main contributing company and accept PR and issues from the wider community. Over time, it will be interesting to see if one of these projects does develop a more robust open-source community of contributors.