All God’s children are doing surveys. They want to know what you think. This report, “Building Industrial IoT Systems in 2024,” presents data from a survey by HiveMQ, an MQTT solution provider, and my friends at IIoT World.
IIoT no longer generates the buzz it did in the mid-10s of the century. Regardless, the use cases still abound for the technology.
350 professionals were surveyed across Automotive Manufacturing, Power and Utilities, Renewable Energy, Transportation and Logistics, Smart Cities, and more to share feedback on building IIoT systems. The results demonstrate that industries are embracing IIoT technologies and moving towards full implementation and deployment of IIoT solutions. Implementations are up from 67% in 2022 to 75% in 2023.
Getting funding is a never-ending problem for engineers seeking new projects.
With 6 out of ten executives saying it is difficult to quantify investment in technology, more and more professionals are stuck in proof-of-concept purgatory. Industrial automation is no different — over a third of survey respondents said a key challenge for implementing IIoT systems is a lack of budget and uncertain ROI.
Additional insights from the survey include:
- Increased productivity (29%) and improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) (23%) are the top benefits companies expect to gain from implementing IIoT systems.
- Leadership support (38%) and cybersecurity (35%) are the key challenges companies cite in implementing a new IIoT system.
- A quarter of survey respondents believed that executive leadership (25%) should own the project while nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) believe that a project team combining both OT and IT expertise should spearhead the IIoT strategy.
- MQTT (57%) and HTTP (58%) are considered to be essential data movement tools for fulfilling IIoT strategies.
- Sparkplug is still in its infancy but 25% of companies say they have deployed or are looking at using Sparkplug, while 35% say they need to learn more about it.
- Microsoft Azure (18%) is the leading cloud provider for IIoT systems, followed by Amazon Web Services (17%), and multi-cloud (14%).