Your guide to IoT platforms

Unlike most ICT models, the Internet of Things (IoT) arguably started as a ‘bottom-up’ concept: its inventors foresaw massed ranks of connected objects and devices before thinking through the connectivity and middleware that would manage comms links, devices, data, and application development. Filling the gap, IoT platforms emerged as the hierarchical layer that directs the ‘things’ as they fulfil their roles as efficiency improvers and revenue enablers.

IoT platforms can be configured to facilitate interaction between endpoint ‘things’, and to provision more complex infrastructures for distributed computing and the development of distributed applications. Described as a ‘central backbone’ for the IoT, they are assuming an important part in the establishment and deployment of IoT systems and applications.

As such, IoT platforms have become a market sector that’s hot, and going to get hotter. A forecast from IoT Analytics sees the IoT platforms market growing at a CAGR of 33 per cent up to 2021, with annual revenue topping $1.6 billion over the same period. The market analyst notes that while the markets for many IoT hardware components (such as sensors) and IoT connectivity solutions (such as 3G) have been around for years, the IoT platforms market was basically nonexistent before 2013. An estimated 300 vendors describing themselves as IoT platform providers are addressing this nascent product category.