The global market for IoT device management and application enablement platforms reached USD 1.1 billion in 2017, according to analysts Berg Insight. With growth at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.2 percent, the total market value is expected to reach USD 4.9 billion in 2022, it said.

Berg Insight said the IoT platform market is crowded with companies ranging from small start-ups to major ones in the technology and industrial sectors. GE and PTC spearheaded the effort of promoting IoT in the industrial sector on a broad scale, it said. While GE has shifted focus to providing services rather than its Predix platform alone, PTC has emerged as the leader in that sector.

Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT business and the wireless IoT module vendor Telit have built strong positions in the industrial sector. Software AG’s platform has been selected by Siemens to complement its MindSphere OS for IoT. Telit has a partnership with Wind River that uses Telit’s technology in its Helix Device Cloud. Other providers with strong involvement in the industrial sector include Bosch, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Exosite, Device Insight and Altair Engineering.

In 2017–2018, the major cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google continued to invest heavily in their IoT services to expand their cloud businesses. Berg Insight’s IoT analyst Fredrik Stalbrand said the involvement of the cloud infrastructure providers will eventually lead to commoditisation of some services currently offered by vendors in the IoT platform market and result in further specialisation of IoT platform providers.

Merger and acquisition activity has risen sharply in recent time and the market has now entered a consolidation phase. Some level of fragmentation in the market is expected to remain, for lack of standards, said Stalbrand, but also because of specific requirements in industries characterised by mission-critical applications such as automotive, medicine and manufacturing, as well as in the critical infrastructure industries.