China, India leading IoT revolution

A new study has found that businesses in India and China are leading their global peers, with 75 per cent already tapping or with ready plans to deploy IoT applications and another 20 per cent expressing interesting in doing so.

In comparison, 52 per cent of respondents in Latin America had deployed or were planning to deploy IoT, while 32 per cent were keen to do so, says the Forrester study.

Among European markets included in the report, 42 per cent had implemented or were planning to implement IoT, while 33 per cent were interested to do so. The online survey polled 3,627 business and IT decision makers in several markets including China, India, Australia / New Zealand, Germany and the UK.

With customer relationships increasingly digital, organisations across all industry segments were looking to transform their business to support this trend, said Forrester analysts Michele Pelino and Frank E. Gillett, who wrote the report.

"IoT solutions help companies bridge the physical and digital worlds, ingesting information and context through sensors from the physical world into the digital, and taking actions in the physical world via actuators based on digital insights," they penned.

Across the globe, 19 per cent said they were already using IoT products and services, while 31 per cent expressed interest in doing so.

According to Forrester, grocery chain Kroger was tapping sensors and IoT to gain deeper visibility into retail store inventory and operations, while Lufthansa Airlines used its weather data sensors to improve its time management and optimise operations.

The study revealed highest levels of deployment and planned deployment among businesses in the utilities and telecom, chemicals and oil / gas, as well as transportation.

Common deployments of IoT involved security and surveillance, supply chain management, inventory and warehouse management, and customer order monitoring.

(Also see: India's IoT market to reach $15 bn by 2020: Nasscom report)