The importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to grow significantly in the next five years, according to IT professionals, including C-level executives, engineers and developers.
According to the Harvey Nash Technology Survey 2017, nearly three quarters of IT professionals (74 percent) believe that the Internet of Things will be important to their companies in the next five years.
However, just over half (52 percent) of technology professionals believe IoT is important to their organisations now. A higher proportion of respondents believed that mainframe (84 percent), cloud (80 percent) and big data (70 percent) were important to their businesses now.
But IoT still figured above the likes of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and wearable technology – which some argue is a part of IoT – in terms of importance.
The importance of IoT
Robert Grimsey, director of recruitment firm Harvey Nash plc told Internet of Business that from a skills perspective, he sees two phases for growth in the Internet of Things.
“The first is the build out of the infrastructure – from devices, data collection, cloud platforms and so on. This phase is causing a huge amount of investment in related technologies. The second phase builds upon the prior one and is being stimulated by vertical market solutions in bringing together data, connected and smart devices, and machine learning to create value,” he said.
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Grimsey added that the firm is seeing a big increase in demand for people with skills who can operate in IoT.
“Clients are looking for people with experience in cloud platforms, data and devices, and increasingly looking for specific vertical experience, for instance telematics,” he explained.
“In our experience, IoT can be used to combine existing tech and apply that to a new sector, offering a greater level of insight on which to base new business models. As our ability to understand and use data increases, IoT powered applications will lead indirectly to growth in a range of different fields,” he added.
Harvey Nash surveyed more than 3,000 technology professionals from 84 countries between July and November this year. This included C-level technology leaders (nine percent), software engineers and developers (14 percent) and technology project managers (10 percent). Respondents were from the UK, US, Australia, Switzerland and several other European countries.
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