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Our 2021 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption survey results are out now. 

In this second edition of the survey, we wanted to gain a better understanding of the overall IoT & edge ecosystem challenges and concerns of today’s organizations. This year’s survey not only focuses on how today’s organizations are perceiving IoT and edge adoption on a macro level, but also to gain valuable insights on the overall IoT & Edge ecosystem’s challenges and concerns. We found — as organizations adapt to market changes and a world impacted by COVID-19 — that IoT and edge adoption has risen. 

Here are some of the key findings from the survey:

• IoT technologies are being adopted at an accelerated rate. 47% of respondents currently deploy IoT solutions and an additional 39% plan to deploy within the next 12 to 24 months.
• Edge computing adoption is also picking up. 54% of organizations are either utilizing or planning to utilize edge computing technologies within 12 months. Another 30% have plans to evaluate edge deployments over the next 12 to 24 months.
• 74% of organizations factor open source into their deployment plans, a 14% increase over the  2019 survey. This clearly demonstrates that the dominant IoT & Edge platforms will either be open source or based on open source.
• The top 3 IoT and edge operational challenges are: 1) End-to-end IoT solution monitoring and management; 2) Device management; and 3) Securing the network / devices / data.
• There is a trend towards a Hybrid Cloud strategy. 44% of respondents suggest that their IoT deployments are using, or will use, a Hybrid Cloud (i.e. composed of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures such as private and public), an increase from 22% in 2019.

Reading Between The Commercial Lines

The survey asked respondents to identify the requirements, priorities, and challenges they’re facing as they are planning, implementing, and managing commercial IoT and edge solutions, including those based on open source technologies. The survey ran for two months in early 2021 and received responses from more than 300 individuals from a wide range of industries and organizations. You can download the 2021 IoT & Edge Commercial Adoption Survey Report now.

As our survey results revealed, each player in the IoT and edge ecosystem has an important role in driving commercial adoption. Here are some key recommendations broken down by stakeholder group.

• Enterprises:
  • Should select vendors and service providers that embrace open standards and the use of customizable, production-ready open source building blocks. Open source enables scalability and flexibility in IoT and Edge solutions, while avoiding the lock-in and cost issues associated with proprietary solutions.
  • Should start planning deployments of IoT and edge technologies at scale. The ecosystem has matured significantly, allowing enterprises to be more ambitious in their IoT and Edge initiatives. With a robust ecosystem, industry leaders can confidently deploy and start realizing the full benefits of the technology.
• Solution Providers:
  • Should incorporate open source platforms that are capable of running seamlessly across all environments (i.e. at the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud), with a focus around hybrid, multi-cloud and private cloud offerings that enable customers to avoid using a public cloud for their mission-critical data.
  • IoT-focused solution providers should add edge computing into their offerings. Enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of the benefits of edge computing, including reduced latency and bandwidth savings. To stay competitive,  solution providers need an edge computing strategy if they do not have one already.
• Platform & Software Vendors:
  • Should implement data security and sovereignty solutions across devices and applications. Organizations must pay particular attention to their ability to retain control over data flow and storage, e.g. for data gathered from IoT sensors and devices.
  • Should create offerings that optimize certain workflows and/or mitigate specific challenges.  While Enterprises and Solution Providers are adept at integrating and deploying the various components, broadscale adoption will be accelerated through targeted platform innovations that simplify critical processes and resolve deployment challenges out of the box. 

Be Part Of Something Big

It will take a diverse community co-developing a uniform set of building blocks based on open source and open standards to drive the broad industry adoption of IoT and edge technologies. If you’re interested in participating in the industry-scale collaboration in open source IoT and edge technologies, please visit Eclipse IoT and the Edge Native Working Group to get involved. As an added benefit of membership, Eclipse IoT and Edge Native members receive early and exclusive access to detailed industry research findings and expert guidance.

The results of our 2020 IoT Developer Survey are in, revealing a number of interesting trends that will impact all IoT ecosystem players. Whether you’re a technology manufacturer, a service provider, an enterprise adopter of IoT solutions, or an individual developer, this year’s survey results provide insight that will help you better understand how developers’ choices are impacting IoT strategies and businesses.

This year, more than 1,650 individuals from a broad range of industries and organizations around the globe responded to the IoT Developer Survey and I want to thank them for their time. Their valuable input will help ensure the Eclipse IoT Working Group and the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group continue to focus on developers’ top priorities for cloud-to-edge IoT solution development.

Here are just a few of the highlights.

Smart Agriculture Is the New Industry Focus Area

One of the most significant findings in this year’s survey is that smart agriculture is now the top IoT industry focus area, jumping from 21 percent in our 2019 IoT Developer Survey to 26 percent this year.

IoT-based solutions are increasingly being used to boost yields, lower costs, reduce waste, and achieve other efficiencies on farm and dairy enterprises, as well as within food processing plants. Optimizing food production is vital to every country in the world, and a quick internet search on the topic confirms our survey results reflect the overall growth in the global agriculture IoT market.

Interestingly, last year’s top industry focus, home automation, dropped significantly in this year’s survey. At 19 percent, this category fell behind industrial automation, education, automotive, and smart cities, which tied for second place at 21 percent.

Artificial Intelligence Is the Top Choice for Edge Computing Workloads

IoT and edge computing are intrinsically linked, so it was natural to include questions related to edge computing technologies in this year’s IoT Developer Survey.

Notably, the results show that developers are now more focused on artificial intelligence (AI). AI was the most frequently selected edge computing workload at 30 percent. However, other applications follow closely behind:

• Control logic: 29 percent
• Data exchange: 27 percent
• Data aggregation and filtering (sensor fusion): 27 percent

The relatively even rankings among these four options confirm they’re all being actively used for edge computing workloads. It will be interesting to see how their usage evolves over time and how quickly AI adoption progresses.

IoT Is Synonymous With Open Source

The survey results also reveal that 65 percent of respondents experiment with, use, or contribute to open source projects. In the database domain, open source almost completely dominates with only four percent of survey respondents relying on a proprietary database. These are very strong endorsements of the value developers see in open source software for IoT solutions.

At the Eclipse Foundation, we’re experiencing first-hand the momentum toward open source software in IoT.

Over the last few years, the Eclipse Foundation IoT community has grown to become one of the largest open source collaborations in the world with 45 projects, 350+ contributors, 40+ corporate members, and more than eight million lines of code produced. Eclipse IoT projects have been adopted by some of the world’s leading companies, including Bosch, Red Hat, Eurotech, and many others, to deliver commercial IoT solutions and services. 

Get the Complete Survey Results

The findings I’ve highlighted here provide just a small glimpse into this year’s IoT Developer Survey results. I encourage everyone to download the full 2020 IoT Developer Survey results to gain additional insight into:

• The top IoT developer concerns
• The most widely used security techniques in IoT and the growing momentum of distributed ledger technologies
• The most widely used programming languages for IoT solutions
• The top edge computing artifacts and deployment choices
• The top IoT middleware choices
• The top public IoT and cloud platforms

Download the 2020 IoT Developer Survey results.

Get Involved in Eclipse IoT Communities

To stay current with the happenings in the Eclipse IoT Working Group, join the mailing list here.

To join the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group conversation on Slack, click here.