Smart homes and smart commercial buildings will represent 45 percent of total connected things in use in 2015, due to investment and service opportunity, and Gartner estimates that this will rise to 81 percent by 2020, representing steep growth of 1.1 billion connected things in 2015 to 9.7 billion by 2020.
“Smart cities represent a great revenue opportunity for technology and services providers (TSPs), but providers need to start to plan, engage and position their offerings now,” said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner defines a smart city as an urbanised area where multiple sectors cooperate to achieve sustainable outcomes through the analysis of contextual, real-time information shared among sector-specific information and operational technology systems.
“The majority of Internet of Things (IoT) spending for smart cities will come from the private sector. This is good news for TSPs as the private sector has shorter and more succinct procurement cycles than public sectors and cities,” said Tratz-Ryan.
Residential citizens will lead the way by increasingly investing in smart-home solutions, with the number of connected things used in smart homes to surpass 1 billion units in 2017. Connected things include smart LED lighting, healthcare monitoring, smart locks and various sensors for such things as motion detection or carbon monoxide.
Smart LED lighting will record the highest growth of IoT consumer applications, from 6 million units in 2015 to 570 million units by 2020. Light will move from being an illumination source to a communications carrier incorporating safety, health, pollution and personalized services.
“Homes will move from being interconnected to become information- and smart-enabled, with an integrated services environment that not only provides value to the home, but also creates individual-driven ambience. The home will become the personal space that provides assistance or personal concierge experiences to the individual,” said Tratz-Ryan.
In addition to residential IoT investments, there are a number of IoT deployments for on-street and off-street parking guidance, road traffic guidance and traffic flow metering.
“Electric mobility, charging stations and embedded IoT will generate additional IoT opportunities in smart cities,” said Tratz-Ryan. “This could be, for example, IoT in vehicles, or vehicle batteries sensing and communicating with the driver, or the next charging station to negotiate charging terms.” New and transformative business environments and ecosystems will emerge.
