Open systems feature highly on IOT decision makers' radars in Australia, according to a new report which reveals that 81% of organisations rank common data and connectivity standards as extremely or very important.
The report, by global analyst firm IDC, also found that 63% of Australian organisations rate open source software standards as extremely or very important – with security and privacy concerns a major worry.
But, IDC research manager Jamie Horrell says the findings of the survey are “unsurprising”.
"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.
{loadposition peter}“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,” Horrell said. "IoT is not about driving IT efficiency but rather operational efficiency. Applications like supply chain are obvious targets for this."
IDC says it expects to see 2.7 million connected commercial vehicles, 1.7 million pets and million healthcare appliances in Australia by 2020, “reinforcing that IoT is about connecting things that weren't originally intended to be connected to the Internet”.
According to IDC, the total IoT market in Australia will grow to be worth over $18 billion by 2020 with the pie being shared across both traditional vendors and vendors traditionally associated with operational and industrial technologies.