It’s that time of year where people start think about the new year and what lies ahead. It’s pretty safe to say 2017 has been the year of IoT hype, with no shortage of media and analyst attention. Beyond the hype, we wanted to hear from those that are developing, deploying, and stitching together IoT solutions in the field every day. Sigfox USA reached out to a few IoT thought leaders across various industries, those who are on the ground working tirelessly to bring IoT solutions to market, to find out what they predict for the industry in 2018. Here’s what they had to say.
COMPUTING AT THE EDGE
“Next year I believe there will be a strong push for more computing at the edge. Instead of sending so much data from a device over the network, there will be more decisions made at the device level before data is sent. In other words, at the sensor level, instead of sending a message every time something happens, it’ll know whether that something matters before it sends.”
Sean Horan, Sales Director, Sigfox US
HYBRID DEVICES & IIOT
“I believe in 2018, the first hybrid (Sigfox+Cellular) devices will be deployed, which is very exciting. Also, new lower cost devices will solidify the business case for ISM band LPWAN. Finally, Industrial IoT “IIoT” will become more prevalent as business realize new ROI models through end-to-end seamless integration with their ERP systems. It’s going to be a great year.”
Ajay Rane, Senior Director of Global Ecosystem Partners, Sigfox
SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY
“In 2018, we will see the first massive IoT deployments, leading from thousands to millions of devices providing data to a common platform. Also, semantic interoperability will play a more important role when interconnecting IoT systems. Connected home and industrial IoT verticals will be the first ones to benefit from the integration of different IoT systems to common control platforms, some of them based on voice-controlled services.”
Juan Carlos Zuniga, Senior Standardization Expert, Sigfox and Internet Area WG Co-Chair, IETF
MACHINE LERANING & REDUCED COSTS
“I think that next year we are going to start to see machine learning on low power devices. This will reduce overall traffic to the cloud and therefore reduce costs. In addition to this, I expect that we will see more general purpose IoT devices that can be provisioned and changed from the cloud.”
Tom Groenland, CEO, mcThings
A.I. WILL BE MAINSTREAM
“AI will enter mainstream IoT. Whereas AI has been reserved for consumer home applications and advanced robotics, we believe we’ll see simple forms emerging in mainstream IoT applications where machine learning can now be based on data from the past few years of device and data gather proliferation. AI will no longer be reserved for computers and mini computers but will also be found in microcontroller environments. We’ve already seen exciting examples through 2017 and amongst others with our introduction of Pybytes, we firmly believe the evolution will continue.”
Bettina Slater, Co-Founder & COO, Pycom
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY & CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES
“Blockchain technology, and the combination of cryptographic processes behind it, will converge with the Industrial Internet of Things. Blockchain for IoT is promising for the same reasons as cryptocurrency and will be the glue holding the IoT ecosystem together to secure distributed, decentralized transactions through a network of users where each record is recorded in a block and linked to adjacent records, ensuring accountability and tamper resistant records.”
Brent McAdams, VP Strategic Initiatives, OleumTech
SMART HOME & COST REDUCTIONS FOR ASSET TRACKING
“In 2018, I expect to see some big companies pushing the IoT in the home very aggressively. Now that 802.15.4 radios are shipping in many smart home voice assist products, I think this will regenerate an interest in the smart home technologies and I also believe this interest will help to generate volumes needed to push the costs down to further accelerate adoption. Also, real industry cost reductions will be made possible through adoption of LPWAN asset tracking technology that can and will fund adoption at a very aggressive rate. Example markets will include food tracking, agriculture, medical assets, and pallet shipping.”
Dan Clement, Principal RF/IoT Engineer, OnSemiconductor
Thank you to our amazing ecosystem who shared their expertise and predictions. Even smarter devices, interconnected IoT systems, machine learning from low power devices, blockchain for IoT, and smarter homes – sounds like 2018 is a year to look forward to!
