Mistras Group
Bain Studies IoT and Enterprise Adoption in Inspection
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Enterprise customers remain bullish on the Internet of Things, but their enthusiasm has been tempered by the realization that complete solutions may take longer to implement and yield a return than they had originally expected. Even so, we expect the markets for IoT hardware, software, systems integration, and data and telecom services to grow to $520 billion in 2021, more than double the $235 billion spent in 2017 (see Figure 1).

Since Bain's last extensive survey on the Internet of Things and analytics two years ago, customers believe that vendors have made little progress on lowering the most significant barriers to IoT adoption—including security, ease of integration with existing information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems, and uncertain returns on investment. So these customers have extended their expectations about when those use cases will reach scale in their organizations. On average, they are planning less extensive IoT implementations by 2020 than they were planning just a couple of years ago.

Priorities are shifting, too. Predictive maintenance emerged as one of the first attractive IoT use cases as sensors and analytics helped companies determine more precisely when maintenance or replacement was necessary. Schindler, for example, worked with GE’s Predix Platform to implement a broad predictive maintenance program designed to optimize maintenance on more than 60,000 elevators and escalators worldwide. But some of the interest in predictive maintenance has waned because customers found that the returns on investment have taken longer than expected. Legacy data formats and missing historical data are part of the problem, and insights have been harder to glean than first promised.

Interest in remote monitoring, on the other hand, has risen because it tends to be an easily integrated or standalone application. Industrial equipment leader ABB, for example, bundles remote monitoring into its connected robotics systems and connected low-voltage networks, which allows customers to troubleshoot and quickly identify issues requiring greater attention.

Read the full report at Bain & Company.

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