In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Matt Hatton, Founding Partner at Transforma Insights, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss trends and predictions for IoT in 2024. Matt provides insights into the emergence of regulations and security standards for IoT, the role of AI in IoT deployments, the increasing demand for IoT solutions, and the key contributors to IoT adoption in 2024. The episode also covers technological fragmentation across IoT and the significance of market segmentation.

About Matt Hatton

Matt is a Founding Partner at Transforma Insights. He is a well-respected commentator and technology industry expert with 25 years of experience at the cutting edge of technology research and consulting. Previously, he was Founder and CEO of Machina Research, which was acquired by Gartner in 2016. Prior to Machina Research, Matt was a technology industry analyst, working at firms such as Analysys Mason and Yankee Group. Matt holds an MSc in Telecoms from University College London.

Interested in connecting with Matt? Reach out on LinkedIn!

About Transforma Insights

Transforma Insights is a leading research firm focused on the world of IoT, AI, and Digital Transformation. Led by seasoned technology industry analysts, they provide advice, recommendations, and decision support tools for organizations seeking to understand how new technologies will change the markets in which they operate.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(00:36) Introduction to Matt Hatton and Transforma Insights

(01:22) Reflections on IoT in 2023

(04:04) The increasing demand for IoT services

(07:09) Predictions for IoT in 2024

(10:22) Impact of regulations on IoT

(14:48) Convergence of IoT, AI, and edge computing

(21:11) Technology fragmentation in IoT

(28:57) Importance of security in IoT

(31:44) Driving user demand and adoption growth in IoT

(38:08) Role of vertical solutions in IoT

(40:42) Learn more and follow up

Transcript:

- [Ryan] Welcome Matt to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week. 

- [Matt] Yeah, my pleasure. 

- [Ryan] Yeah. It's great to have you back. People who are, have been listeners for quite some time have probably seen your face many times on our podcast. We love having you and we're excited to talk about predictions and thoughts about 2024 in the IoT space, and we thought you'd be the perfect person to jump in here and educate our audience on what you're seeing and what they can start to think about and what they can potentially expect in 2024. Before we get into that, for the audience who might not be as familiar, could you just give a quick introduction about yourself to the audience?

- [Matt] Yeah, happy to. Matt Hatton. I'm one of the founding partners at Transforma Insights. I've been a technology industry analyst for, ooh, a little bit more than 25 years, which is pretty scary, but I've been focused mostly on IoT for probably the last half of that. My former company, Machina Research and then now with Transforma Insights. So pretty much entirely as an analyst. I've come to the conclusion now that's pretty much all I can do, right? I don't see myself ever doing anything else. So I think I'm in this for the long haul now. 

- [Ryan] The work you all do is fantastic. We've always been big fans of everything you have going on. So let's dive right in and talk about, before we get into 2024, I just wanted to see if you had some high level thoughts on, looking back at 2023, what did you all see or notice, what were the big trends that you all took away after reflecting on 2023 as a year in the IoT industry?

- [Matt] I think it's been a pretty exciting year, to be honest. I always expect that maybe we'll get a year when nothing much that's particularly exciting happens, but we've yet to see that. Certainly the last year has been all go so there's been a whole bunch of stuff around, we've seen AI come up and the overlap between it AI and IoT has started to get interesting. We've seen a whole lot of intriguing technology trends coming along. Things to do with satellite, things to do with platforms with some of the big players, maybe reevaluating what their approach is to the market. We've seen a lot of different ups and downs in terms of the commercials and plenty of M&A going on. It's been a pretty dramatic year. 

- [Ryan] Yeah, I know. For many years, I feel like people have talked a lot about getting to the point where we are now, whether we're going to start to see more consolidation in the industry, whether it was companies failing or companies being acquired, you'd see the maturation of the technologies and just the fact that people are starting to understand what solutions are and how solutions are kind of the fastest way to see value for a company that's looking to adopt IoT as opposed to really viewing it from a component standpoint. So I think we saw a lot of progress there from our perspective. So it aligns with what you're saying as well. 

- [Matt] It does. And I think, you can look at it from the adopter standpoint and the thing that we've noted or a couple of things we've noted in the last 12 months, it's difficult to talk about just the last 12 months, but certainly the last couple of years is that there's more critical use cases being deployed, right? It's gone from being maybe a little bit more on the non critical, nice to have kind of use cases to being much more about core business requirements that are being, having IoT basically integrated into those and that's very positive, but it comes with a few interesting other dynamics. And one of the things that we particularly noticed with the work that we do with the technology adopters, so we work a lot with adopters as well as with the vendor community, but with the adopters, it's increasingly clear that they need their hand held as they walk through this process of deploying IoT and working their way through the process. And it's really, I was going to say it's not a products market, it's kind of a products market, but it's much more of a services market. Everybody wants some form of customization. Everybody needs a bit of TLC when it comes to how does this impact on their business operations? How does this, how do these technologies work because this is non core stuff, well okay, it's core in terms of whatever process it might be that they want to optimize with remote monitoring and so on, but it's non core in terms of understanding the technology and really getting to grips with the connectivity with the middleware, with all of the various different constituent parts. And you can, you can't really expect these, the adopters to be completely au fait with all that, it does happen in some cases, you've got some verticals which are big enough and ugly enough to need to get to grips with absolutely everything about the technology. So the car industry and utilities and so on, they'll tend to have little teams who really get a good idea of how everything works. But that's not the majority of the market. Most of the market is people who don't really understand or, and don't generally need to understand. So there's a lot more demand for services, for of actually kind of professional services, might be all the way up to systems integration, but it's often it's just help me out here. Help me as I navigate my way through working out what the implications are of this technology and this thing that I'm doing in IoT. 

- [Ryan] Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's just so many different pieces to it that companies are looking to understand, but the more the companies are able to, the companies in the IoT space are able to help and guide and provide resources, to offer something that's more of a tangible solution to people's problems, I think it's just led to more, like you said at the beginning of this, the critical solutions being adopted and really starting to see the value. So if we, now move into 2024, at a very high level, what are some of the trends or elements you're expecting to see or hoping to see, just to kick things off, then I want to dive into some kind of more specific areas of it, but just generally speaking, is there anything that you can summarize what you feel like 2024 is going to bring?

- [Matt] Yeah. And having said in my previous comment that it's difficult to talk about individual years, generally in when we're talking about IoT, you've got these trends that sort of maybe bubble up a bit more to the surface and others that are less important and they tend to have a multiple year horizon if you like. But in thinking about what's going to happen next year, there are a few things that are very definitely going to spike in terms of being important ones that everybody's got to be thinking about specifically in 2024. One of those is around regulation. I think we'll probably have a little dive into regulation, but things to do with national autonomy and resilience, things to do with security. There's a whole lot of stuff going on with the, within the EU around data and how data gets managed. So that's very interesting and really, like I say, starts to or becomes specifically important in 2024, I think. Technologies as well, there's a stack of interesting techs that are likely to come to the fore in the in the year. We've got, it's, I don't want to get too techie on you, but mind you, there's a lot of people out there who do want to get plenty techie. So SGP.32, the new remote SIM provisioning technology that's just been standardized by 3GPP or GSM Association. And that looks pretty interesting for how cellular based connectivity supported, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening around satellite as well and satellite cellular hybrid. There's a bunch of things set to specifically spike in '24. And then we'll also see a continuation of some of the commercial trends that we've seen. You mentioned briefly about price erosion or tangentially about price erosion, right? So there's a lot of focus around, okay, I'm in a competitive market here. How do I cope with the fact that actually there's quite a bit of price erosion happening in a lot of spaces around IoT, whether it's around platforms or connectivity or hardware or all of these various areas and lots of people looking at ways to keep the cost down, looking at ways to find defensible life spaces, shall we say. But I'm sure we'll get on to all of those. What do you want to tackle first? 

- [Ryan] So I think what's interesting, and some of the audience may not pay as much close attention to this, but on the regulation side, so just talking about what you're seeing with regulations going into next year. I think it's been an interesting topic. I think as we've gotten, IoT has gotten closer to the AI space as well, I think regulations have started to come up a bit more in conversations, but what are your thoughts when it comes to the impact of like data sovereignty, security regulations, things like that, it's effects on IoT next year. 

- [Matt] The security one is probably the one that cropped up first, right? It's a few years now that we've had some guidelines around basically don't do really dumb stuff. You know, don't have hard coded passwords and make sure you have some kind of ability to do firmware updates and all that kind of thing. But that's really got tightened up in the last year probably. We've seen NIST 2 with greater obligations on ensuring that the companies are really doing their homework on whether they're secure. So that is in itself quite interesting and positive in terms of well it has been a little bit wild west in IoT up until now, but having some rather firmer rules about what you should be doing about security is interesting but and potentially moves the needle a little bit maybe in terms of who people are looking at as their vendors. You've got an obligation to consider issues to do with compliance when you're doing your vendor selections. That possibly has some ramifications for the market in terms of the kind of vendor selection and possibly more interestingly, I'd say some of the stuff around data sovereignty and adjacent to that, things to do with national autonomy and resilience and what we're seeing in quite a few countries is rules about your IoT solution still needs to work in a closed border situation or restrictions on or obligations to deliver data, make data available to government in the case of the U.S. Cloud Act. And then you've got the EU you pushing back against that with their own equivalence of that to say, actually, you shouldn't be delivering data in that way. And maybe hammering down a little bit on some of the hyperscalers and limiting their ability to do a bunch of stuff in IoT. So you've almost got a bit of a polarization I guess of the IoT space. Even down to, we do a lot of work with connectivity management platform vendors who support network operators on how they on their, well, sync management and so on. But there's obligations even in some countries to have that localized. Have an architecture which again will survive a closed border situation or be, will be resilient, should we say. And there's question marks over whether some of the vendors in that space can do it. So there's a lot of players in that space, both enterprises and vendors looking at their own architecture and thinking am I compliant? What do I need to do to get compliant? How do I cope with this rather more maybe I'll say parochial in a way but certainly polarized space where market's becoming a little bit more national, whereas historically everything was global. Ten years ago, you could stick any connectivity in any device and stick it anywhere in the world, and you can deliver your data wherever you like and there aren't many obligations on you. And that has radically changed or is set to radically change, so we're seeing, yeah, a lot of interesting things happening in that space for sure.

- [Ryan] What about kind of the merging of technologies with IoT, AI, edge computing, how's that ramping up and potentially playing a role in 2024 in positive or negative ways? 

- [Matt] I think we described that as potentially transformational, can I put it that way? And the reason why I'm being a bit cautious is it's probably going to take a little longer to materialize than maybe some might expect. But don't get me wrong, obviously AI is front and center in terms of the technology landscape. It's making its way onto front pages of newspapers and so on. So it's entered the consciousness. And we see it as being effectively a natural extension on IoT. You've got, you know, within IoT, you've got start off with remote monitoring, then you go to remote management, and then after that you go to automation, is the natural thing and for automation, you probably want some kind of AI to handle that automation. So it's a natural evolution. And we've done some analysis back a couple of years ago that says most AI will be deployed on IoT because you've got autonomous driving, and you've got smart agents on TVs and various other things. So there's a lot of adjacency. Where it gets to be quite interesting is in terms of the management of instances and payloads and so on between the various levels of the network. Because you're probably not going to run most AI in the cloud. You're going to put a lot of it down at the edge, either edge of the network or the edge device or campus edge or some level of subsidiarity to put that processing so that it's close to the device, you take advantage of low latency connection to the actual application itself, and you don't need to send everything back to the cloud to be processed, which would be slow and cumbersome and probably quite expensive. So that naturally steers in the direction of there being a role for orchestration, we could describe it as, of the various different pieces of the processing storage and so on that's involved in AI. But I suspect it's going to be a little bit of a slow burn. It takes a while for people to work their way around, okay, how do I use this stuff? What's the optimal way of architecting it? How do I take advantage of this ability to push the processing and so on out to the edge. It will start bubbling up in 2024, but maybe it's a few years before it becomes really fundamental to what we look at in IoT. 

- [Ryan] When AI really started to make, become more mainstream this past year with ChatGPT, it seemed like a lot of companies were changing their marketing language to make sure they included that they do AI in some capacity. And I want to see how, which companies come out of that as truly doing AI versus just saying they are an AI powered platform of some capacity. But the interesting thing that's always been exciting for us is just with the more IoT solutions that are out there, companies are having access to more data than they ever have had before from the physical world. And AI requires that data. Those models require data. So what ends up happening, or I'm most excited to see what ends up happening with more solutions being adopted, which means more companies have data, which means AI can, you can really see the power of AI if done correctly. So very interested to see how those start to tie together because we've been talking about it for about six or eight months now of how well or how intertwined AI and IoT are because of what AI requires and what IoT is doing with pulling that data. And so as these companies that are buyers looking to bring in IoT solutions, I think it's important for them to understand not just the value of having access to new data, but what they're able to then do with the data with these AI models and tools, is I think where the real power between the technologies is going to be seen by these organizations looking to bring in IoT or already have IoT and have access that data. 

- [Matt] Let me give you an example One of the things that we're working through at the moment in, there's a report that will be out early next year, is around video analytics is effectively a substitute for IoT. Historically things you might have done with sensors, instead you just stick a camera in the corner of the factory or retail outlet or whatever it might be, on a gantry over the road or whatever, and apply some analytics to the video feed that you're getting and use that as a sensor, and a sensor that probably doesn't involve quite as much digging up of roads or pushing sensors into factory processes where it might cause some disruption or whatever. It's an interesting dynamic there that we may well see video cameras with the analytics function as a core part of it actually replacing the need for quite a lot of the what we might have termed the core IoT, which is sensors. 

- [Ryan] So what about, this has always been something we've talked about I think in many of our past conversations than just general conversations I've had, just the fragmentation across IoT when it comes to the different technologies. There's definitely interesting new tech out there. We've already mentioned the growth we're expecting to see with satellite IoT solutions, how satellite is also working with cellular, it's working with other technologies to provide better coverage which then enables more solutions to exist that can solve real problems, but how do you see the technology fragmentation across IoT changing or being affected next year? 

- [Matt] I would say it's going to get worse before it gets better, but I'm not sure it gets better. But let me take a step back and say there is good reason for fragmentation in many cases because the demands and requirements of the various IoT applications are all going to be different. And so there's never going to be a one size fits all for technology, regardless of what format that technology takes. Now, you mentioned about satellite, and I'm a telecoms guy, so I tend to look at the networking stuff, and there's certainly a lot of fragmentation in that space. Although actually a little bit being removed with a lot of 2G and 3G switch offs. So maybe that's, maybe there's some defragmentation going on in the space a little bit, but at the same time, you've got, for instance, you've got NB-IoT, you've got LTE M, you've got LT Cat1.bis, you've got, you mentioned the satellite there, we've got 5G really coming to the fore. There's a bunch of other technologies that are out there and available. And there's an irony in this, which is there are, I'm thinking about the cellular connectivity technologies here, if what you want to do is the really high end stuff, video streaming, really it's 4G or it's 5G. 4G and then evolving to 5G. If what you want to do is some low cost sensors, you've got a plethora of different choices. You've got your NB-IoT's, you've got your LT Cat1s, your Cat1.bis, you've got LoRaWAN, you've got Sigfox, you've got a whole bunch of technologies. And those are the use cases that really will benefit from low cost and therefore would benefit from massive scale. And ironically, they don't have that scale because there's so many options to choose for them. Now that's partly that's a function of the fact that these are all constrained use cases, and they might be constrained in slightly different ways. And so there's different technologies that apply to each, but it's an irony that's not lost on me.

- [Ryan] That's always been a confusing part for people adopting IoT, is just the different types of technology and elements and components of a solution and how it all fits together. I am interested to keep an eye on and see how that changes. And do you think there's anything that because you mentioned at the beginning of this it's going to get worse. Is there anything that you think can really be done to make it better? Or because it doesn't sound like it's completely a negative thing obviously. 

- [Matt] I think there's one thing which is really to not push technologies before they're really mature enough to be anything other than exciting things that are happening on the horizon. And it seems like we get a new network technology every year. This year has been really red cap, I guess we could say, which isn't a spectacularly useful technology for most IoT use cases, but it's kind of flavor of the month. And so if you're a buyer, and you're looking around at this technology landscape, you're thinking well should I go with this technology? Should I hang around and wait for this other thing that seems to be the new shiny object that everybody loves. What's the, what's the answer? And I think that kind of confusion inhibits adoption. And it's down to the technology vendors really to maybe put a lid on it a bit and focus on what's mature and ready to go and the technologies that will be perfectly capable of supporting whatever the client's use case is rather than shoving the the next technology down everyone's, throats. Now that sounds a little bit pejorative, but pushing the new technology, the new trend. 

- [Ryan] For the longest time, it's always been like if you go to any conference or trade show, it's always been focused on technology in IoT, but I think last year when we went to some events, especially starting at CES, really started to see companies focus more on solutions. So baking in all the different components into one thing and focus on what the problem that their solution is built to solve. So a lot of these companies were bringing customers in to have space to showcase how companies in other industries are utilizing their technologies, and their offerings to solve problems as opposed to trying to say, hey, we have this great piece of hardware, we have this great kind of connectivity, here's what it can enable. It's no, let's show you how when we put this all together, what it can do so that you can see the, hey, we can put this together for you and build a real solution that solves problems. And I think we're starting, that's one of the big things I started to see last year, and I'm most excited for things coming in 2024 because I think it will help a lot of companies who are not super tech savvy, who don't want to have to go through and understand all the technologies and just want to say, hey, what is a a solution that exists that can solve my problems and who can do, can implement it for me and to meet whatever ROI I need to meet. And I think what's very interesting to us. And I'm curious to see how more things just get baked into solutions and most of that kind of conversation is happening, you know, between the companies and the partnerships behind the scenes but not so much for an adopter needing to have to worry about all those pieces.

- [Matt] It's very interesting to see that a lot of the vendors in the space are focusing rather more attention on this kind of service layer, and I don't mean that as a technology element, I mean working out what the customer requirements are and resolving them, that kind of enhanced pre sales, post sales type support.

So it's not just about here's a new technology that I'm going to throw over the fence at you. I'm actually going to take the time to help you with the deployment. And we've seen even some acquisitions in that space, some of the tech vendors buying up companies that are basically solutions developers and the view there is that it's great for them to use those resources to solve the problems of the customer rather than to just develop another piece of hardware, roll out another network, do all of those kinds of more product oriented things or more horizontal things should we say. 

- [Ryan] What about, I know we talked about this earlier with regulations. We talked a little bit about security regulations, but just generally speaking, security is obviously a very critical component of any solution in IoT. It's always been a topic. Ever since I got involved, it's always been a hot topic. Where are we with security and kind of where do we still need to go? 

- [Matt] The funny thing is that every time I've ever done a survey of enterprise users of what their key priorities are when it comes to deploying IoT, security's always been number one or number two, I'd say. So it's always featured there, but more or less as a sort of default answer. Yeah, I want it to be secure, but has it influenced a lot of buying behavior? Haven't seen it up until now. And it, but it does seem to become, be becoming much more of a critical thing and a relevant thing, and we are hearing from enterprises that actually they're making buying decisions based on that. And compliance as well, actually, we mentioned about regulations, so there's questions around compliance, some of which is security related and some of which isn't and that also is featuring and those twin things of security and compliance seem to be coming to the fore. And we sometimes, we would think about it as more the question of counterparty risk, I guess. When you're, picking your vendors, you're looking around and saying, okay, who do I trust to be secure and compliant and ultimately trustworthy? Who's an all round good egg that's likely to be able to or is unlikely to cut corners and is likely to be a company that I'm comfortable working with for a decade, maybe? I don't know because the relationships, it's yeah, completely. So you've got to be a little bit careful about who you're picking. And that does come through. We did a survey, actually it was last year, we did a survey and the thing that came out, security came out number two, but the thing that came out number one was brand reputation, which we thought was pretty interesting. Actually, security is kind