86% of enterprises expect to increase IoT investment in 2019

This year, the annual spend on Internet of Things (IoT) in the enterprise rose to $4.6 million - an average increase of 4% from 2017. This is according to data from Zebra Technologies' second annual Intelligence Enterprise Index.  Overall, the firm interviewed 918 IT decision makers across a range of industries. Participants also included decision makers from the UK, US, France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, and Japan.

IoT forecasts

While there was a 4% increase in IoT spending this year, 86% of respondents expect this figure to increase in the next 1-2 years. Almost half (49%) predict that their investment will increase by 11-20%. Moreover, 55% of enterprises have an IoT vision and are currently executing their plans. Although just 38% currently have company-wide deployments, 30% of companies plan to deploy IoT company-wide in the future. In addition to this, 29% of companies insist that they have almost completed their current IoT plan. This is a 1% decrease since last year, but the percentage of enterprises just starting their plan also decreased by 2%. 84% expect to complete their IoT implementations within the next 2 years. At present, 69% of companies are almost complete in implementing their current plan.

IoT deployment

In 2017, 54% of respondents anticipated that their implementation would be complete within 12-24 months. In 2018, however, only 51% of respondents expect to conclude their deployment during this timeframe. Despite this, enterprises are expecting to fully implement their IoT strategies quicker this year. 33% of IT decision makers predict to complete their plan within the next 12 months - an 8% increase since 2017. According to a recent KPMG study, 85% of C-Suite executives expect IoT, AI, and robotics to drive business transformation over the next three years. The largest portion of respondents (17%) said that IoT will drive the greatest transformation. A Dresner report also found that IoT adoption in the enterprise has risen since 2017. The 2018 IoT Intelligence Market Study states that 32% of enterprises are investing in IoT and 48% are planning to in 2019.

IoT adoption barriers

Although enterprises are committing to implementing IoT into their operations, some CIOs warn that IoT could become a major burden. This is due to the exponential complexity of IoT, which could damage a company's performance. This is according to a Dynatrace report, which outlines the major concerns of CIOs when it comes to implementing IoT. An overwhelming 74% said they worry that IoT performance will directly impact business operations and damage revenues. In addition to this, another Dynatrace study states that IoT is failing to perform for 64% of users worldwide.  Despite widespread adoption, over half of users reported performance issues in an independent global survey of 10,000 consumers. Dave Anderson, CMO of Dynatrace noted that businesses are "already struggling" with cloud complexity. However, he said that "IoT magnifies this a thousand times with sensors, masses of new data and dynamic containerised workloads.”