Report: Eclipse Foundation's 2022 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption

The Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of its 2022 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption Survey report, based on an online survey of more than 260 IoT and edge professionals. The survey’s objective is to gain a better understanding of the IoT and edge computing ecosystems by identifying the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations that deploy and use commercial solutions, including those based on open source technologies.

“IoT and edge computing continued to accelerate in 2022 and into 2023 with no signs of slowing down, despite the current macroeconomic climate, ” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “These trends suggest that IoT and Edge are thought to be strategic investments that deliver true ROI. The open source model will only augment these benefits.”

Conclusions drawn from the survey data include:

●      IoT technologies are being adopted at an accelerated rate. 53% of respondents currently deploy IoT solutions and an additional 24% plan to deploy within the next 12 to 24 months, while 18% are currently evaluating deployments.

●      Edge-computing adoption is also on the rise. 53% of organizations are either utilizing or planning to utilize edge computing technologies within 12 months. Another 20% are currently evaluating the use of edge deployments.

●      There is a shift toward higher investments into IoT & edge. 23% of respondents project spending between $100K-$1M in 2022, growing to 33% in 2023. 10% anticipate spending over $10M and growing to 12% in 2023.

●      There is a trend toward a larger number of IoT & edge assets managed per deployment. Deployments of fewer than 1K managed assets will remain steady or decline, while larger deployments are on the rise. In terms of asset implementation, 52% are a  mix of both greenfield and brownfield.

●      More organizations now see IoT and edge as strategic, with spending decisions being driven at the executive level 38% of the time. This increased by 3% compared to the year 2021.

●      73% of organizations factor open source into their deployment plans. This clearly demonstrates that the dominant IoT & edge platforms will either be open source or based on open source. Only 27% of organizations using IoT and edge technologies state they do not use open source technologies.

●      The primary benefits of using open source according to respondents include: the ability to customize or influence code in projects (30%); flexibility (22%); as well as cost advantages (16%).

●      The top three IoT and edge operational challenges are: 1) connectivity 2) security 3) data collection & analytics.

●      There is a trend toward a hybrid cloud strategy. 42% of respondents suggest that IoT deployments are using, or will use a hybrid cloud (i.e. composed of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures such as private and public).