Whether it’s Internet of Things, Internet of Your Things, Industrial Internet of Things, Internet of Very Different Things, or simply IoT, it’s a Mega trend that is taking shape, projected to be bigger than the PC and Smartphone markets combined.  Just about every key technology company on the planet has a strategic plan to capture opportunities in this rapidly evolving Mega trend.  There are different credible analysts study and predict there will be more than 50 billion IoT devices by 2020, some projected as high as 212 billion devices by 2020.

Whatever the potential number of IoT devices may be, the IoT trend has humongous potential and will trigger new opportunities in different vertical market segments, including the automotive, consumer, commercial, government, home/building automation, industrial automation, manufacturing, medical, smart energy, transportation and etc..

What’s new in this IoT trends that we have not already done?

When we dissect an IoT solution and look at each individual components, we can see that many of these components and associated technologies have been around for a while.  The improvement in automation, connectivity and high performance computing power available in smaller packages, at lower cost are part of the natural progression in the market that is expected.  In addition to the expected progress, the key to this IoT evolution is how we learn to better utilize the technology resources we have, learn to extract valuable data from the existing business processes, perform data analytics that help us gain better insight about the business that help improve efficiency, lowering cost, minimize risk and greatly improve customer experience, which directly contribute to the business’ bottom line.

In the consumer space, technology solutions evolved from the IoT trend enable us to gain better knowledge about our environment and enhance quality of life, such as home automation system, intelligent appliance, personal wearable device and etc..

For those of us that have been around the embedded market in the early days, the marketing buzz around the term “embedded” was similar, in a smaller scale, talking about what is the embedded market and the potential for the embedded marketplace, where the term “Embedded device” is a vague term that does not directly link to any particular market.

Similar to “Embedded device”, “IoT device” is a vague term that does not directly link to any particular market. 

As part of this IoT Mega trend, there will be huge opportunity for “IoT device” (Embedded device) and will create hug career opportunities for “Embedded device” developer.

Perhaps, “Embedded device” developer will evolve and become “IoT device” developer.