Gartner: IoT market growth shows no sign of slowing

Gartner forecasts that the enterprise and automotive Internet of Things (IoT) market will grow to 5.8 billion endpoints in 2020, a 21% increase from 2019.

By the end of 2019, 4.8 billion endpoints are expected to be in use, up 21.5% from 2018.

Utilities will be the highest user of IoT endpoints, totalling 1.17 billion endpoints in 2019, and increasing 17% in 2020 to reach 1.37 billion endpoints.

"Electricity smart metering, both residential and commercial will boost the adoption of IoT among utilities," says Gartner senior research director Peter Middleton.

"Physical security, where building intruder detection and indoor surveillance use cases will drive volume, will be the second-largest user of IoT endpoints in 2020.

Building automation, driven by connected lighting devices, will be the segment with the largest growth rate in 2020 (42%), followed by automotive and healthcare, which are forecast to grow 31% and 29% in 2020, respectively (see Table 1).

In healthcare, chronic condition monitoring will drive the most IoT endpoints, while in automotive, cars with embedded IoT connectivity will be supplemented by a range of add-on devices to accomplish specific tasks, such as fleet management.

Table 1
IoT Endpoint Market by Segment, 2018-2020, Worldwide (Installed Base, Billions of Units)

Source: Gartner (August 2019)

"Overall, end-users will need to prepare to address an environment where the business units will increasingly buy IoT-enabled assets without policies for support, data ownership or integration into existing business applications," says Gartner research vice president Alfonso Velosa.

This will require the CIO's team to start developing a policy and architecture-based approach to support business units' objectives while protecting the organisation from data threats.

"Technology providers will need to clearly and loudly communicate their IoT-based business value to specific verticals and their business processes if they are to succeed in this crowded arena," says Velosa.

Forecast methodology

IoT is a set of individual markets and verticals. Gartner tracks commercial IoT (healthcare, smart buildings, smart cities, retail, agriculture, etc.), industrial IoT (utilities, transportation, manufacturing, etc.) and the automotive markets.

With the integration of Machina Research, Gartner now publishes a unified IoT forecast dataset using a new forecast methodology that places the projects organisations are carrying out at the centre of the forecast.