This question was posed by a visiting Internet of Things (IoT) expert recently. The New Zealand IoT Alliance hosted international IoT expert, IDC’s Vernon Turner to hear his advice on how to successfully connect New Zealand.
“IoT isn’t a technology revolution, it’s a business revolution, enabled by technology,” he says.
Vernon discussed IoT Readiness in Asia Pacific, noting New Zealand’s third place ranking due to high ICT spend per capita, ease of doing business and innovation. Top current IoT use cases in New Zealand include environmental monitoring, fleet tracking, asset tracking, remote asset tracking and production performance management.
However, Vernon says research shows that New Zealand sees IoT as more tactical than strategic. As a result, IoT’s slow uptake is due to indecision. Potentially, the market opportunity may be misunderstood, he says.
Currently, with a fragmented market, there is hesitation to deploy IoT due to difficulty in creating standardised, repeatable solutions. Longer Return on Investment (RoI) cycles and smaller profits per deployment are also contributing factors.
The New Zealand IoT market is predicted to be worth $3.7b in 2021. It will include manufacturing operations, connected vehicles, freight monitoring, production asset management, smart utilities, food/agriculture and healthcare. Meanwhile, real time data is growing 1.5 times faster than the growth of all content and 95% of real time data is driven by IoT. The industry must respond by reducing latency and increasing data transfer, says Vernon.
“The value of the IoT solution is proportional to the speed and the number of times the original IoT data is analysed,” he says.
Admittedly, “the hardest thing about digital transformation is the transformation part,” says Vernon. Islands of IoT innovation, an urgent need to transition to the Cloud and strain on ageing infrastructures are digital transformation imperatives.
Vernon introduced current IoT hot topics; Platforms, The Edge, Gateways, Connectivity, and the biggest challenge to IoT, Security. His guidance for New Zealand includes IoT use case adjacency opportunities, IoT as a Service business models and embracing digital transformation.
About Vernon:
Vernon Turner serves as IDC’s Senior Vice President of Enterprise Systems and IDC Fellow for The Internet of Things (IoT). He has helped drive research on the evolution of IoT, next generation Internet Infrastructure. Vernon created IDC’s IoT research domain and is a member of the IoT World Forum Steering Committee. IDC provided research for the New Zealand IoT Alliance’s recently published report, The Internet of Things, Accelerating a Connected New Zealand.
