Vodafone report suggests IoT budgets are on the rise

Telecommunications giant Vodafone has published its fourth annual IoT Barometer Report.

In the company’s fourth annual IoT offering, Vodafone’s IoT Barometer report suggests some interesting trends for businesses looking to harness Internet of Things technologies.

The global survey measures business sentiment regarding innovation and investment in IoT, and was conducted by Circle Research in April and May 2016. More than 1,096 companies across Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the UAE, the UK and the USA took part.

Vodafone: IoT budgets on the increase

The main findings of the 2016 Vodafone IoT Barometer Report were that:

89 percent of companies investing in IoT have increased their budgets over the last 12 months
76 percent of all companies interviewed believe that taking advantage of IoT technologies will be critical for the future success of any organisation;
63 percent of IoT adopters are seeing “significant” returns on investment, up from 59 percent in last year’s Report
IoT investment now accounts for 24 percent of the average IT budget, on a par with cloud computing or data analytics

Speaking exclusively to Internet of Business, Carl Atkey, Chief Technology Officer at Appello, outlined why “significant” returns on investment are up from last year.

“The beauty of IoT is that it has a lovely cyclical return,” he said. “The deeper it is deployed, the more you establish its use and effect. This includes the devices you are running. You start to understand their function and efficiency through the rich data they collect, which enables you to add further smart technology in a more informed pattern. Completing this cyclical pattern is the point that as the devices themselves absorb further into the consumer psyche and are more readily adopted, the product pipeline widens to meet their needs.”

“From gathering better information throughout the supply chain or offering improved customer experience to customers, the adoption of IoT has the opportunity to pay large dividends.”

Consumer electronics firms drive IoT growth

The report also found that IoT technologies play a key role in mainstream business activities in an increasing number of companies. Highlights included:

48 percent of companies interviewed are using IoT technologies to support large-scale business transformation, rising to 61 percent in the Asia-Pacific region;
52 percent of consumer electronics companies interviewed are using IoT technologies as the basis for a new generation of applications for connected homes; and
46 percent of all companies interviewed said they intend to develop new IoT-based products and services over the next two years.

Vodafone Group IoT director Erik Brenneis said, “Three-quarters of the companies we interviewed now recognise that the Internet of Things is a new industrial revolution that will change how people work and live forever, and almost half the companies surveyed across multiple countries and sectors told us they’re already planning to bring connected network intelligence to millions of devices and processes over the next two years. 2016 is the year the Internet of Things entered the mainstream.”