We must be prepared for the Internet of Things (IoT) Tsunami, but it will not be in 2020 as many of us believed. The good news is that it is approaching but now more quietly than a few years ago.

For the most pessimistic or unconvinced of the IoT, I must say that much of the hype around the Internet of Things is not really hype anymore. I will say one more time: “IoT’s here to stay”.

In Ten Trends of IoT in 2020, Ahmed Banafa considers that in the year 2020 we will hit all 4 components of IoT Model: Sensors, Networks (Communications), Analytics (Cloud), and Applications, with different degrees of impact. If we pay attention again to the predictions by 2020, the IoT is predicted to generate an additional $344B in revenues, as well as to drive $177B in cost reductions. In his article, Mr, Banafa explore the impact of many technologies on IoT and predict what is next for IoT.

No doubt that disruptive new trends will emerge over the next few years that will pave the way for a complete overhaul in the way we view and interact with our world and the Internet of Things will continue its brisk and steady rise as our planet and everything in it becomes connected.

Nevertheless, some shadows continue to appear for IoT like we can read in “IoT in 2020: awkward times ahead” . The pain points are the usual suspects:

• Security – The divide between IT and OT is one of the central causes of the security problem
• Lack of complete solutions - IT companies have been aggressive in partnering up with OT companies, and there’s a general recognition that most complete IoT solutions will involve products from multiple vendors.
• No single vendor is able to offer a complete solution to a given IoT problem and, therefore, unable to solve the broader issues with IoT technology in a unitary way.
• Edge networking- One of the major trends for 2020. The cloud can be a limiting factor in a lot of IoT deployments.

I was pleased say that I have included some of the Top 5 IoT trends released by Ecosystm in this free report “The Top 5 IoT Trends For 2020”. Here's what we think 2020 has in store for IoT:

• 5G Providers Will Be Forced to Operate Outside their Comfort Zone
• Satellite IoT Connectivity Solutions Will Start to Compete Against and Work with LPWANs
• IoT Sensor Analytics Will Become the Fastest Growing AI Workload
• Construction Will Become the Unsuspecting Influencers for IoT Adoption
• The Edge Will No Longer Be at the Edge 

Following the tradition of previous years, I have been collecting links to other sources with IoT Predictions and Trends for 2020. You can read more predictions in these links:

Previous Predictions collected in my articles

2020 IoT Predictions  - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2020-iot-trends-predictions-prepared-tsunami-francisco-maroto  

2019 IoT Predictions  -  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yes-we-continue-making-iot-predictions-2019-francisco-maroto/

2018 IoT Predictions -   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/have-we-already-bored-predicting-iot-francisco-maroto/

2017 IoT Predictions - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finally-2017-year-internet-things-i-do-think-so-francisco-maroto/

Key Takeaway                

This year there are fewer predictions about IoT. This is not bad. On the contrary, it is a symptom that the hype has disappeared and the IoT has evolved and has become more real.

For my part, every year I am lazier to read predictions and trends. Many articles are written by non-IoT experts, are repetitive and do not add great value.

Let´s keep the positive messages of 2020 IoT Predictions and Trends:

1. IoT is developing at a fast pace
2. The maturity phase of IoT has just begun, and it is soon to become a full-blown business in the coming years.

We, the IoT Pioneers, know that IoT development isn’t something that will happen overnight but we also know that IoT will star developing in 2020 at a fast pace.

Back in 2000, futurist Paul Saffo warned that in 2020, we’ll be “living in an age of technologically induced creative destruction.”

We're far from that. Expect a 2020 year of less IoT technology news and more business news.

No matter if you are running a small business, a medium or large company or a multinational, IoT is going to find its way into your business. So, be prepared for the IoT Tsunami that is coming!

Over the last couple of years, the Internet of Things grew into a huge gate between the reality and the digital world, and CES 2018 was the event that nailed it. IoT dominated the event with a vengeance, and it could be roughly divided into two major areas: smart home (with a nod to smart city) and industrial Internet of Things (with a nod to the much-hyped Industry 4.0).

The event showed the inevitable changes in the industrial sector that are likely to reward early adopters with shares on the market. Meanwhile those who avoid innovation get left behind in the long run. Such companies as Bosch reinvent the way manufacturers run their facilities, with a focus on increased performance and care for safety of human workers.

Smart home was represented not only by a huge variety of standalone products, but also by closed ecosystems created by such consumer tech giants as LG.

Automotive industry always has been leading in innovation with self-driving and connected cars being part of the IoT market. This year all major car manufacturers hosted a kind of car show inside CES, introducing new automotive IoT products.

Besides these spheres, there were two more major followers of IoT trends: healthcare and retail. Both aim for automation of operations, provision of personalized experience to customers, and overall transformation of the ways they operate.

By Ahmed Banafa

IoT is one of the transformational trends that will shape the future of businesses in 2017 and beyond. Many firms see big opportunity in #IoT uses and enterprises start to believe that IoT holds the promise to enhance customer relationships and drive business growth by improving quality, productivity, and reliability on one side, and on the other side reducing costs, risk, and theft. By having the right IoT model companies will be rewarded with new customers, better insights, and improved customer satisfaction to mention few benefits.

With all this in mind, let’s explore some of the trends of IoT impacting business and technology in 2017:

1) IoT and Blockchain Will Converge

Blockchain is more than a concept now and has applications in many verticals besides FinTech including IoT. #Blockchain technology is considered by many experts as the missing link to settle scalability, privacy, and reliability concerns in the Internet of Things. Blockchain technology can be used in tracking billions of connected devices, enable the processing of transactions and coordination between devices; allow for significant savings to IoT industry manufacturers. This decentralized approach would eliminate single points of failure, creating a more resilient ecosystem for devices to run on. The cryptographic algorithms used by Blockchain would make consumer data more private. In 2017 IoT will converge with Blockchain for better security and privacy opening the door for a new category in applications, hardware, and talents.

 2) IoT Devices and More DDoS Attacks

Forrester thinks that the recent #DDoS attack that hit a whopping 1600 websites in the United States was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the threat that the connected device poses to the world. That attack confirmed the fear of vulnerability of IoT devices with a massive distributed denial of service attack that crippled the servers of services like Twitter, NetFlix , NYTimes, and PayPal across the U.S. on October 21st , 2016. It’s the result of an immense assault that involved millions of Internet addresses and malicious software, according to #Dyn, the prime victim of that attack. "One source of the traffic for the attacks was devices infected by the Mirai botnet". All indications suggest that countless Internet of Things (IoT) devices that power everyday technology like closed-circuit cameras and smart-home devices were hijacked by the malware, and used against the servers.

3) IoT and Many Mobile Moments

IoT is creating new opportunities and providing a competitive advantage for businesses in current and new markets. It touches everything—not just the data, but how, when, where and why you collect it. The technologies that have created the Internet of Things aren’t changing the internet only, but rather change the things connected to the internet. More mobile moments (the moments in which a person pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants, immediately and in context) will appear on the connected device, right from home appliances to cars to smartwatches and virtual assistants. All these connected devices will have the potential of offering a rich stream of data that will then be used by product and service owners to interact with their consumers.

4) IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Containers

In an IoT situation, #AI can help companies take the billions of data points they have and boil them down to what’s really meaningful. The general premise is the same as in the retail applications – review and analyzes the data you’ve collected to find patterns or similarities that can be learned from so that better decisions can be made.

The year 2017 would see Internet of Things software being distributed across cloud services, edge devices, and gateways. The year would also witness IoT solutions being built on modern Microservices (an approach to application development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular services. Each module supports a specific business goal and uses a simple, well-defined interface to communicate with other modules) and containers (lightweight virtualization) that would work across this distributed architecture. Further, machine-learning cloud services and Artificial Intelligence will be put to use to mine the data that would be coming in from IoT devices.

5) IoT and Connectivity:

Connecting the different parts of IoT to the sensors can be done by different technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Low Power Wi-Fi , Wi-Max, Ethernet , Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the recent promising technology of #Li-Fi(using light as a medium of communication between the different parts of a typical network including sensors). In 2017, new forms of wireless connections, such as 3GPP’s narrowband #NB-IoT, #LoRaWAN, or #Sigfox will be tested. Forcing IoT decision-makers to evaluate more than 20 wireless connectivity options and protocols, which is one step in the right direction of having standards for connectivity.

6) IoT and Talent-Shortage

Organizations launching IoT projects including smart cities and industrial facilities face a tougher time in recruiting talent. Complicating matters is that it remains a challenge to find enough workers to secure the Internet of Things. 45 percent of IoT companies struggle to find security professionals, according to a TEKsystems survey. 30 percent report having difficulty finding digital marketers. In 2017, industrial major vendors will invest in IoT training and certifications and make it part of the mainstream training programs in the tech industry.

7) IoT and New Business Models

The bottom line is a big motivation for starting, investing in, and operating any business, without a sound and solid business models for IoT we will have another bubble , this model must satisfy all the requirements for all kinds of e-commerce; vertical markets, horizontal markets, and consumer markets. A new business model including sharing cost of devices with consumers, reducing the cost of ownership and making UX less hassle and more joyful. 2017 will see new categories being added to smart markets. One key element is to bundle service with the product, for example, devices like Amazon’s Alexa will be considered just another wireless speaker without the services provided like voice recognition, music streaming, and booking Uber service to mention few.

The Road Ahead

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of ever-increasing complexity; it is the next level of automation of every object in our life and convergence of new technologies will make IoT implementation much easier and faster, which in turn will improve many aspects of our life at home and at work and in between. From refrigerators to parking spaces to smart houses, IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. One possible outcome in the near future is the introduction of “IoT as a Service” technology. If that service offered and used the same way we use other flavors of “as a service” technologies today the possibilities of applications in real life will be unlimited. But we have a long way to achieving that dream; we need to overcome many obstacles and barriers at many fronts before we can see the benefits of such technology.

This article originally appeared here.

References:

http://www.iotworldnews.com/author.asp?section_id=508&doc_id=727678&

http://www.indianweb2.com/2016/11/08/internet-things-iot-2017-predictions-forrester/

http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/11-iot-predictions-2017

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-standardization-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wake-up-call-iot-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/securing-internet-things-iot-blockchain-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-mile-iot-artificial-intelligence-ai-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card