This article is more than 1 year old

PwC says US biz lagging in Internet of Things

Grass is greener in Asia, say the sensors

PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons the business end of the Internet of Things is going to hit its straps in 2015, reporting that 20 per cent of US businesses polled in its most recent Digital IQ Snapshot are putting money into sensors of some kind.

Unsurprisingly, the industries most keen on sensors are industries already famous for automation, like utilities and heavy industry, along with mining (where monitoring has been a concern since canaries first went down the mines) and the automotive sector.

The research polled 1,500 C-levels to reach its conclusions, and found that the level of interest in sensors was three per cent higher than in 2013.

Making sure that there's a new hair to split, PwC has differentiated the Internet of Things from the Internet of Business Things. The former, it seems, is about letting consumers “achieve goals by greatly improving their decision-making capacity via the augmented intelligence” (don't blame El Reg, this is a quote), while the latter “helps companies achieve enhanced process optimisation and efficiencies by collecting and reporting on data collected from the business environment.”

The industries least likely to have IoT on their radar, PwC says, are the tech sector (17 per cent of respondents, mostly hardware vendors adding sensors to products), and financial services (13 per cent, and only because it's got the tailwind of sensors in vehicles reporting back to insurers).

Asia is the front line in business IoT adoption, the outfit claims, with 24 per cent of respondents already in the game and 26 per cent expecting to spend more; the US (says PwC) is the laggard, with 18 per cent of respondents reporting current investment and only 7 per cent planning to “boost their investments” to “close the global gap”.

The PDF of the full report is here. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like