Key findings include the following:

• Future hardware growth markets fueled by IoT include microcontrollers, sensors and communications chips.
• Chip manufacturers that offer excellent power envelopes, small size, competitive pricing, along with the possibility of integration of multiple applications (security, networking, sensors) will offer additional competitive products.
• Unlike the x86 Intel dominated microprocessor space, a degree of customization for applications and a diverse product line are important factors for a successful microcontroller producer.
• The sensor market carries risks of commoditization and favors those companies that can amass and package multiple sensors.
• We remain far from settling on dominant standards for IoT, and a number of different communications protocols are competing. Communications chip makers will need to both remain flexible and ally themselves with standards bodies that have support and excellent interoperability.

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Simultaneously, deployment of industrial IoT has created a situation in which the CIO must have an eye toward developing ways to securely connect machinery and sensors while also producing valuable returns for those investments. With that in mind, industrial IoT has an array of potential benefits, including improved operational efficiency, remote monitoring, preventative maintenance, safety/regulatory compliance and asset tracking.

The CIO is already aware of the need to move toward a more connected enterprise, but a lack of industry-wide knowledge and examples of use cases are inhibiting implementation and even strategy. While each industry will necessarily have its own challenges and opportunities, the examples used in this report come from different sectors to create a framework CIOs can use to guide their own industrial IoT deployment.

Key findings in this report include:

• The current challenges to industrial IoT include the need for industrial standards, security risks, power efficiency of machines, and new hiring needs.
• Operational efficiency remains the number one benefit to IoT, including everything from simple point solutions in waste management to complex networking ecosystems in advanced manufacturing like semiconductor fabrication.
• Remote monitoring and asset tracking are set to grow as tools that the enterprise uses to manage labor costs, improve supply chain efficiency, and gain real-time visibility on inventory.
• Preventative maintenance will be redefined under IoT to include not just equipment failure but also the continual fine-tuning of equipment in order to maximize production efficiency.
• Safety and regulatory benefits of IoT should not be overlooked, as sensor data can be used as a tool for lowering compliance costs or even justifying infrastructure changes that can drive new revenue.

Thumbnail image courtesy of alengo/iStock.

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This 2015 outlook examines where the near term growth in this space will come from as well as the trends within industries that will be most important over the next 12 to 24 months. The smart home, smart grid, IoT platforms, and industrial IoT applications are key sectors that will lead in innovation.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Henrik5000/iStock.

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The most promising offering among all of these over the next couple years will be security and smart locks. Nest’s June 2014 acquisition of cloud-surveillance provider Dropcam was another vote of confidence to this area. Meanwhile, the leading home automation and monitoring company in the U.S. is a security company: ADT, which is itself eying strategic investments in the smart home.

Smart door locks are not an entirely new industry. We’ve seen attempts to innovate the traditional lock and key with numerical keypad locks. But the ubiquity of smartphones and low-power communications protocols, along with improved technologies related to geo-locating an individual, have created a new opportunity to present a user experience that is preferable to the 1,000-year-old lock and key. In addition, consumer behavior has continued to shift toward wanting all functionality absorbed into the smartphone, a trend most recently exemplified by the introduction of Apple Pay.

This report examines the nascent smart-lock market, its potential end markets, and the differentiating factors involved in the technology.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Maxiphoto/iStock.

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One other technology with sustainability benefits that is now vying for data center business is the hydrogen powered fuel cell. Fuel cells have been tested and implemented in transportation and megawatt scale fuel cell parks for utilities. In both of these applications, the technology faces fossil fuel competitors that have been steadily improving their technologies for over a hundred years and benefit from the deployment of costly infrastructure to support mainstream technologies like gasoline powered cars.

But mission critical infrastructure like data centers could prove to be a promising market for fuel cells due to a confluence of factors and market timing. As data center operators hone in on power options that increase reliability and provide power cost predictability over decades-long time scales, fuel cells have advantages that will allow them to compete. To be sure, the current market remains small for fuel cells in the data center. But the technology’s advantages, combined with price declines in fuel cells and slowly rising retail utility prices for power, make the next few years a potential point of inflection for fuel cells.

Key findings from this report include:

• The top drivers for data centers considering fuel cells are increased reliability and long term pricing predictability. Both of these advantages allow for risk mitigation at data centers and are built around using the grid as backup and being able to control power costs over the long term.
• Fuel cell power at the rate of 12-13 cents per kilowatt-hour makes fuel cells competitive in regions like the Northeast and California. For fuel cells to expand the market further, economies of scale will need to bring that cost closer to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.
• The increasing focus on energy efficient modular data centers opens the door for fuel cells as a power option due to the fact that fuel cells are ideal for scaling power supply incrementally.

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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This report reviews a host of data driven services, which can have a valuable role to play on the farm.

Key findings include:

• As the global population increases, weather volatility grows, and petroleum dependent agriculture is increasingly sensitive to fossil fuel pricing, there will be more incentives to leverage new technology to increase crop yields and manage risk.
• Opportunities for big data applications in agriculture include benchmarking, sensor deployment and analytics, and using better models to manage crop failure risk.
• Key challenges for companies entering the market include proving the effectiveness of data centric technologies to improve yield as well as building trust with farmers.

Thumbnail image courtesy: Fuse/Thinkstock

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Depending on what you’re counting, market projections vary, but all imply 15 percent to 20 percent growth rates into 2020, and billion-dollar segments. Gigaom Research’s conservative home automation forecast projects $11 billion in home service automation in 35 million homes by 2017, but we can also envision a scenario supporting five times that many homes. Projections that count entertainment services put the annual revenue between $50 billion and $60 billion by 2020.

Declining chipset pricing is driving the proliferation of the smart home – and more generally, the internet of things (IoT) – to the point where making any device connected, be it a light bulb or a blender, has decreasing marginal cost for manufacturers. The proliferation of these devices is real, with more than 20,000 new devices featured at CES 2014, a show that highlighted the smart home. Additionally, near ubiquitous broadband and smartphone penetration has created truly connected consumers, who show increasing interest in monitoring, measuring, and controlling their lives from their devices. Cloud infrastructure and analytics have also matured so that managing larger volumes of data in the cloud and producing positive outcomes for business and consumer in real-time is easily accomplished.

This report creates a five-year map of smart-home development and addresses technology principles that could guide smart-home evolution so that the most robust and consumer-serving market can materialize.

Key findings from this report include:

• The early hub market, which aimed to bring device fragmentation under one controlling application, has been a critical evolutionary step in moving to the platform from the point solution. The presence of the hub has also managed resilience where internet connectivity can’t always be guaranteed. Combining the ability to manage fragmentation and resilience aims to remove the complexities from the user to ensure the continuity of customer experience. As the market develops, successful platforms will have the flexibility to deploy the important functions the hub performs in a number of ways through distributed logic, where software can operate in the hub, on another gateway device, and in the cloud – and therefore continue to provide the flexibility and resilience consumers expect.
• Alongside this, abstraction of hardware descriptions and communications protocols to the software layer will further progress the potential for a true IoT physical graph, where open systems allow devices to utilize the data and hardware resources derived from other devices to connect humans in a beneficial and convenient way with their home and the “things” in their lives.
• Four major technology principles will ensure the individual success of businesses in the smart home (as well as the market as a whole): interoperability, communications simplicity, intelligent analytics, and open ecosystems.
• The potential value to businesses of making home devices smart are threefold:
  • The value data will play in product development and iteration
  • The importance of data for creating efficiency, business model innovation, and new services for the customer
  • Connectivity will be vital for any business wishing to participate in the larger inclusive smart home market
• Examining the potential value and guiding principles for the consumer in the smart home, we see several primary value propositions:
  • The ability to connect with the home for remote monitoring, convenience, and efficiency beyond pure return on investment (ROI)
  • Extensibility
  • Real home intelligence through data

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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On the renewable energy front, the twin darlings of cleantech, SolarCity and Tesla, furthered their vertical integration by breaking ground on two factories. Multiple solar IPOs are on deck, a sign that the capital markets have a renewed openness to solar and cleantech. Finally, fuel cell technology, long a dog of cleantech investing, may be turning a corner as signs that distributed generation for corporations with mission critical infrastructure looks more and more like a viable niche market.

This report will examine the following events and their implications for the near term:

• Samsung’s acquisition of hub maker SmartThings marks further focus on the smart home for the consumer IT giant. The tide is turning toward IT leaders that can manage device fragmentation while keeping smart home ecosystems as open as possible.
• The state of Nevada has won the competition to land Tesla’s massive new lithium ion battery factory, which should produce batteries for 500,000 EVs by 2020. Arguments over whether the $1.25 billion incentives package was worth it for the state are ongoing but in the long-term states like Nevada are eager to reinvent themselves as tech hubs.
• Intelligent Energy IPO’ed, becoming the most valuable publicly held fuel cell company in the world. Fuel cells continue to search for a promising end market application but distributed power generation for customers with mission critical infrastructure (like data centers) is looking like a promising market.
• With multiple solar industry IPOs in the works, latter stage capital is flowing toward solar, encouraged by SolarCity’s share price success. The rooftop solar industry will get increasingly competitive as SolarCity vertically integrates and squeezes its competition.

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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Key findings include:

• Venture capital is flowing toward a number of IoT platform startups. Consumer IoT and the smart home are immediate markets. Industrial IoT will also be a key market, though it will recognize revenue more slowly, due to longer equipment lifecycles.
• The value to manufacturers of making their devices connected includes consumer ROI, product development, and product differentiation.
• Companies in the IoT platform market will seek to differentiate themselves on a number of key factors that include hardware form factor, security, cost, and scalability.
• IoT platform providers are currently focused on the security and HVAC systems. They are expanding into lighting and home appliances, and will ultimately move beyond smart homes to the industrial sector, which will bring competition from large, established companies.

Thumbnail image courtesy of: iStock/Thinkstock

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Those experiments and implementations at many leading data centers hold lessons for smaller data centers that may not have the dedicated engineering and facilities staffs to fine-tune their efficiency.

Key findings in this report include:

• The main method for improving data center efficiency is more power efficient IT hardware — servers, storage, and communications.
• Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software tools can be a key part of assessing the energy footprint of a data center, improving uptime, and improving individual server utilization rates.
• The leading option for most data centers in search of clean power is working with the local utility to put more clean power on the grid through investment. This can become part of a larger strategy for carbon neutrality at a company.
• Estimates show that raising the temperature of a data center even one degree can result in up to a five percent energy savings.

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