The Internet of Things Ecosystem: The Value is Greater than the Sum of its “THINGS”

The Internet of Things is more than just Glasses, smartphones and smartwatches. It’s more 

than just smart cars and cities and other “things” that are connected or understood by 

today’s usage models.

By 2020, it is predicted that the entire Internet of Things will have a market value of $8.89 

trillion. There are many factors that enable this value to be reached. There is revenue from 

the sale of Wearables and “things”, there is software licensing, hardware, and the reduction 

of operating costs in manufacturing, information technology, research and development, 

marketing and corporate operations.

Research firm, IDC, expects a globally installed base of IoT will reach around 212 billion 

things by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion installed connected autonomous things. Intel 

predicts there will be 31 billion connected devices. Cisco, a notable leader in IoT research 

and awareness, predicts 50 billion objects will be connected to the Internet. Gartner predicts 

these billions of connected “things” add economic value will be $1.9 trillion dollars in 2020.

With this many zeros and connected things being predicted by smart people and forward-

thinking companies, it’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone to think that many 

computing devices and trillions of dollars of market value will be generated in the next six 

years. Given the advances in smartphones and tablets and Big Data, could the expected 

market value be underestimated?

It would be easy, maybe even lazy, for us to think the smartphone will be at the heart of the 

Internet of Things. With 30.1 billion autonomous things sending and receiving information, 

and initiating pre-defined manufacturing, marketing or even personal preferences, the 

smartphone or any other modern device will not be apart of the equation.

In a way, the smartphone is to the Internet of Things,  as the beeper is the mobility 

revolution. The challenge for marketers, communicators and stewards of brands is to 

understand getting mobile right today is important to establishing best practices and 

foundational expertise needed to manage an automated future.

It’s important to understand the different segments that will makeup the Internet of Things 

ecosystem. After reviewing industry research, corporate press releases and blogs and news 

reports, the following IoT ecosystem framework was built to reconcile the many IoT 

announcements.

Hopefully, with this ecosystem framework combined with the IoT use-case framework we 

can start to rationalize what each new development in the emerging technology trend.