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IoT Predictions for 2023 and Beyond: With CCS Insight

Martin Garner, Bola Rotibi

The global community was ready to welcome a period of relative stability as it recovered from the pandemic—but that’s not what it got. Instead, a formidable mix of international tensions, political instability, supply chain disruptions, and rising inflation have made 2022 an especially turbulent year. But despite continuing uncertainty, it’s clear that IoT technology will play a critical role as the world responds to changing economic conditions.

To help ensure you stay ahead of the IoT trends and technologies, this podcast forecasts what’s in store for IoT in 2023 and beyond. Specifically, we take a closeup look at the worldwide expansion of 5G networks, the importance of remote support operations, and the promise of the metaverse. In addition, we spotlight a few key IoT trends to watch—including the continued growth of artificial intelligence and virtual technologies, as well as the increasing demand for sustainable solutions.

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Our Guest: CCS Insight

Our guests this episode are Martin Garner, COO and Lead Analyst of IoT at CCS Insight; and Bola Rotibi, its Chief of Enterprise Research.

Since 2009 Martin has been with CCS Insight, where he focuses on mobile phone usage, internet players and services, connected homes, and IoT.

Bola joined CCS Insight in 2019 and has more than 25 years of experience in engineering, software development, and IT analysis.

Podcast Topics

Martin and Bola answer our questions about:

  • (1:54) What’s driving IoT trends and themes for 2023
  • (6:35) How last year’s predictions played out
  • (9:16) Realizing the full benefits of digital transformations
  • (12:47) IoT trends and technologies for enterprises
  • (18:50) 5G and 6G adoption throughout the next year
  • (22:33) What to expect from the metaverse
  • (26:44) The ongoing role of AI and machine learning

Related Content

To learn more about IoT trends and technologies, read IoT Trends and Technology Predictions to Watch in 2023. For the latest innovations from CCS Insight, follow them on Twitter at @ccsinsight and on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Christina Cardoza: Hello and welcome to the IoT Chat, where we explore the latest development in the Internet of Things. I’m your host, Christina Cardoza, Associate Editorial Director of insight.tech. And today we’re going to be looking at our crystal balls, and talking about IoT and technology trends we can expect over the next year and beyond with Martin Garner and Bola Rotibi from CCS Insight. But before we jump into this conversation, I want to get to know our guests a little bit more. Martin, I’ll start with you. Welcome back to the show. But for anybody who hasn’t listened to our past podcasts or webinars, please tell us more about yourself and the predictions we’re going to be talking about today.

Martin Garner: Sure. Thank you, Christina. So, I’m Martin Garner. I work at CCS Insight, and I do two things. One is I lead the work we do in IoT. And I focus mostly on the industrial and enterprise sides of that. The other is that I’m COO of CCS Insight.

Christina Cardoza: Great. And, Bola, nice to meet you, and welcome to the show. Also from CCS Insight, tell us more about yourself and what you do there.

Bola Rotibi: Hi, Christina. I’m the Chief of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight. I always say my center of gravity is software development and delivery, which is a good thing. But I oversee the analysts who cover workplace transformation, and also cloud and infrastructure.

Christina Cardoza: Great. Well, excited to dig a little bit more into those topics. Martin, I’ll start with you, since we had this conversation about a year ago, really surrounding the trends that CCS insight is seeing throughout the year. And I want to talk about your technology predictions, because I know this is an annual thing that the firm does. And I want to get to know a little bit more about what’s driving the ideas or themes for 2023.

Martin Garner: Sure, of course. And, like many analyst firms, we do predictions, and we do an event actually around them, which we hold each year. I think we’ve now done it 16 years running. So we’ve had a bit of practice. And we try in our work always to take a joined-up view across technology domains, and that’s because we really believe they’re not islands. You need to think about them together rather than separately. And our predictions are one way we do this. It’s a really big piece of work. We typically start in April and then have the event in October.

Now, for this podcast and report we pulled out all of the predictions that are in some way relevant for IoT, and that’s quite a broad set. So we found, I think, 57 of the 100 or so were relevant, and they encompassed lots of fields and lots of technologies. And that’s because IoT is a stack from the low-level sensors up through connectivity, edge software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. But it also affects many different types of people, from management, operations, engineers, developers, users, consumers, regulators, financiers—really quite a long list of people. Also, both consumer and industrial sides are relevant. So that’s how we put it all together. The report is available as a download from insight.tech off the back of this podcast.

Now, for this year, for 2023 and beyond, what we were hoping for after COVID was a period of stability so that we could all recover socially, economically, etc., from the pandemic. That didn’t happen. Instead, we got the war in Ukraine, we got political instability in lots of places. We had the energy price and supply shorts. We had rising inflation. It’s been a turbulent year. And so, for our predictions normally we try to take a big, long-term view of where everything’s going. Some of that is in our predictions this time round: developments in 6G, AI, and so on.

But actually to focus more what is on the shorter term, coping with the current economic conditions, just looking briefly at IoT there—so, IoT got a big boost during the pandemic, because really it was part of how we coped with COVID. That has kept going, in fact, at an accelerated rate. It’s because people want more resilience, and are still finishing off some of the projects they started. So we think that IoT should still face good market conditions because you can get economic gains, and so on—lots of savings you can make. But we know that a lot of customers may be kind of worried about their CapEx, and so on. So IoT, we think, should be all right, with a few caveats. But I know Bola has a rather wider view across enterprise tech.

Bola Rotibi: Yes. Well, I actually think, despite the uncertainty for everyone, I think there’s a moment of opportunity. And I think when there’s opportunity, there’s gain. And one of the things that we did look into—and in fact was one of our predictions, one of our top predictions—was, are people still going to invest? And one of the things we thought was that, postpandemic, there will be a re-collaboration of enterprise strategies. But, however, this will drive something like 15% growth in IT investment in 2023 and 2024.

So I think, despite all the uncertainty, and maybe people thinking about, “Oh, there’s going to be a cap on things,” I think actually what will happen and what will shift people to think is to be a bit more nuanced in their spend and targeted in their spend. And I think as we go forward IoT will play a very big part in that—as people look to efficiency savings, connectivity, how they expect people who are working from home, hybrid environments, and all of these great things. I could mention loads of things. But I think we’re going to talk about this throughout the whole podcast conversation. So let’s get onto the next things. So, it’s a good sign.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, absolutely. And excited to learn more all about that. I want to go back to something Martin said. I love this idea of looking at the short-term benefits rather than all the long terms. Because if these past couple of years have taught us anything, it’s you can’t necessarily predict or plan for everything. But I know last year, when we did talk, we had a lot of conversations about the evolving role of cloud providers, 5G use cases, hybrid work environments—like Bola just mentioned. And then there was this big focus on intelligence with the Internet of Things. And I’m wondering how you saw those predictions play out over the last year, especially with all of these new events that we weren’t expecting. And do you think any of those are going to still continue throughout 2023?

Martin Garner: Yeah, sure. And we do try to look back and see how our predictions—how did they do. And I think, in those areas, they basically did play out as we thought. So we knew from the pandemic that the cloud providers had become indispensable. And they’ve always done a lot with IoT, and they did even more over the last year or so. They’ve also become very involved in the telecom sector with 5G. But it’s not them on their own. IoT, as we all know, is a team sport. And so the cloud providers need help with system development, application development, supply and support and systems integration—all those good things. And now, although various parts of the cloud providers are under stress and they’re in some cases letting people go, actually we think the IoT area seems to be continuing to go okay for them. Not just for them, for others too. And part of that is 5G.

And, as you say, we talked about the use cases; we have seen these grow. I think in the industrial world, in particular, private 5G networks have become real; and they’re one of the hot areas at the moment. I think we’re going to talk a bit more about those. And the intelligence side is also very interesting. So there is much more worry about the intelligence—how we use machine learning, and so on, in a prepackaged way—just how we make it easier to use for people in the IoT world.

But, also, I think there’s a bit less focus on IoT for the sake of IoT. And it’s because the only point of IoT is to give you the data. And, really, the value is in what you do with the data; that is digital transformation. So we sense that the term “IoT” is starting to fade a bit. And we’ve seen Google and IBM close down their IoT platforms just recently. Intel® has absorbed its IoT group into the Networks and Edge Group. We don’t expect IoT to disappear as a term, but we think it’s just sort of fading. And people are worrying more about what you do with all the intelligence side.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, I love that. And I could certainly see how the term “IoT” may be moving to a different meaning. We have all of these terms in the industry, “digital transformation,” that we use over and over again. And we lose, really, what’s behind that, and focus too much on the industry terms around that.

But one thing I did find really interesting from the report—and I think maybe this has to do with why you’re looking more towards short-term benefits rather than the long-term benefits—is that organizations are still struggling to realize the full benefits of these IoT, big, digital transformations. And so I’m curious—because we’ve been talking about this for a long time—what the struggle is there, why they continue to struggle. And how, with this new focus on short-term goals, it’ll be easier in 2023. Martin, I’ll start with you.

Martin Garner: Yeah, sure. So, I think sometimes the benefits of digital transformation can be hard to measure. Actually, they’re often quite easy to measure. And a lot of IoT projects—you can see where we’re saving X percent of materials by monitoring this machine. So that is really good. And what we’ve found in the research over the last year or two, in fact, is that as you increase the scope and the role of your IoT system those savings typically get bigger. If you’re monitoring one machine, that’s good; you can get significant—. If you’re doing a whole factory, that’s just better; if you’re doing a whole supply chain, it’s even better. And, similarly, if you’re just monitoring it, that’s good. But if you are also controlling and optimizing these things, it’s even better.

So, one of the things we find is that if you’ve started on this, people should take the time and investment to keep going and realize these further benefits. Because, normally, there are more benefits available if you just keep going. Now, against that, I think a lot of digital transformation is all about changing work practices and processes—things that people are involved in. I think that’s perhaps where it gets a bit harder. And, Bola, I wonder if you want to pick up on that.

Bola Rotibi: Yes, actually. Because I think the challenge with digital transformation, as we hear about it—I mean, I think everyone’s bought into its possibilities and what it can deliver. I think if we actually have to think about it, it’s then how we go about that. What does it really mean when we actually think about the organizations? And what do we need to do?

And I think one of the things that comes out of this is that when we start thinking about reimagining—because actually the whole point about digital transformation is greater sense of connectivity, digitization, all of these important things, and personalization, and, in fact, actually, as we think about those we start to think about, “Well, what’s that mean for our existing processes? Do we reimagine new processes?” Which is what it’s all about. How do we use connected products?

And connectivity is a big feature inside of digital transformation. So, we start to think about how do we—like Martin talked about efficiency savings—what does that actually mean? How can we connect things so that we can start to see how we can measure those efficiency savers? How more people—whether they’re clients, customers, or employees—are part of the process. And they’re actually interactive, real time, all of these capabilities. So I think that’s one of the things about digital transformation—we’re looking about, how does this mean to the organization, and how do we execute it? And I think that’s one of the things that we are seeing as sometimes the challenge: it’s not the promise; it’s actually execution. And I think that’s really key.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, I love that. And you mentioned a couple of things in passing earlier in the conversation—when we were talking about the opportunities and gains, and what enterprises should be looking at—so, I’m curious if you can expand a little bit more on what really are the trends or technologies that enterprises should focus on in 2023 and beyond.

Bola Rotibi: Well, I mean, I can expand upon that. Because one of the things that I did talk about was the hybrid. We’ve come out the pandemic, so people are now going back into the office; people are out onsite. But, at the same time, people are still also wanting to work remotely. And what we’ve learned as recourse is that that is possible.

So, one of the things that we were really big on in our predictions is what kind of things are going to really come out of this? What needs to come out of this? And I think one of the things that we’re going to start seeing is a lot more remote support operations—allowing people to feel that they can work remotely or they can work in the office, but the experience is similar. Because that is really key. And that means both the connectivity experience—whether they’re at home or in the office—as well as the fact that if they’re working with their colleagues that they are actually collaborating in a way as if they were actually in the office.

So one of the things, one of our—one big side of it, we thought by 2024 enterprise-collaboration tools add immersive spaces to help replicate the in-office experience. And I think that’s going to be quite a big thing actually. Because there’s nothing more like being stuck at home and not feeling that you’re part of the group while your colleagues are in the office talking. So I think that’s one of the things.

And we start to see headsets also change to bring that immersive experience. In fact, one of the announcements of—a lot of the HoloLenses, or the ones from Meta and their Quest Pro, is actually connecting with a lot of the collaboration tools and the video-streaming tools so that we can actually have that more immersive experience.

The other thing, I would say, is that people recognize that employee experience is really important. And it’s actually really equally as important to driving customer experience. And I think that’s one of the things that we will see a lot more of, is the connectivity between employee experience and customer experience. And that’s one of our predictions for next year, which is demand for software that measures and tracks the link between employee experience and customer experience. We’ll start to see more of that. And I think that will also have a connectivity story and an IoT capability, because they drive both in many respects. So that’s one of the things.

And, from a development point of view, I think one of the things that is really key is that we’ve actually tried to bring people together—whether we talk about operational to OT guys and IT guys. And it’s the same within the development environment. So, whether it’s developing applications, operating applications, connecting to applications.

Martin talked about edge. That’s really important. So, we’re starting to see—we talked about DevOps, bringing in of development and operations, but even that has its challenges. Because sometimes, are we communicating in the same way? Same with IoT, OT—are we communicating? So we see—one of my predictions I said was the role of software delivery orchestration rises in prominence by 2024. And we’ll start to see specific roles. Now, they may already exist, but their functionality will be as mediators, moderators, to be able to help the communication between those building applications and those operating or implementing them. So I think that’s actually going to be really important.

And then I think those roles which will have to take on new technologies or old technologies, like connectivity, and have a much better knowledge so that they can help everybody build the application together.

Martin Garner: I was just going to add one very specific trend to watch out for on the IoT side, which is it’s very easy to think about IoT as just worrying about the things. And I think more and more we’re going to see things happen where the IoT system needs properly to integrate with the way that people behave in the workplace and in society.

And we have one prediction which highlighted that, which is that an external system to communicate autonomous vehicles’ intentions undergoes road testing by 2026. And this is all about the fact that there’s a real diversity of road users, not just autonomous vehicles. And there are lots of subtle signals between them about how they give way, how they acknowledge each other’s presence, and so on. And autonomous vehicles just don’t have those at the moment. There are some early tests: I think Nissan, Volvo, and Mercedes are all having a go at some of these things. But we can already see that it shouldn’t be proprietary to a manufacturer, because society needs it. It’s more about national road use. But it’s a start. And I think that sort of integration of IoT with people and the way they do things, that’s going to be a trend to watch.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, I agree. And I think a lot of people will be happy to hear this idea of the hybrid work environment is here to stay, but I can definitely see how working from home you sort of feel like you’re on your own island, or your own silos. So I think, like Bola said, software is going to be particularly important to bridging that gap, and also the connectivity piece about that.

Martin, we’ve had lots of conversations over the last year about connectivity—5G being the big network technology out there. And I invite our listeners to also listen to a webinar me and Martin did about 5G in industrial factories. And a lot of the conversation we’ve had is that it’s still early stages—that 5G in certain industries—throughout the whole last year. And so I’m wondering, you talked about it a little bit before, but where do you think 5G adoption still has to go in 2023? And people are already talking about 6G. So, how will these two merge together? Or what do we need to be thinking about in the next year?

Martin Garner: Well, thank you, Christina. And I won’t recap the whole of our previous webcast. But I would just say, “6G, whoa, hang on a minute. It doesn’t quite exist yet.” If you’re thinking about this and you’re thinking about 4G or 5G, don’t wait for 6G, because that’s some years away, really. But one thing we have seen since we did that webinar is that 5G is one of the main, strong interest areas in connectivity, especially private 5G networks. And the reason is that 5G is the first G that’s been designed with industrial usage in mind. And we are seeing that come through: recent software releases are bringing low latency, location, and system. All the things that make it now an industrial system are coming through and being realized.

We have a slightly unique view on that. As it happens, just over a year ago we became the research partner for the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, which is all the equipment suppliers: Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, Celona—the equipment and software who serve the private networks market. And so they report their data into us. And we have probably the best data in the world on private-network adoption and where it’s being used. And so we track it very carefully, and we’re just releasing a big report on that. So we have a couple of predictions in this area, if I may.

So, one is that by 2025—so just 2 and a half years away or so—private 5G network systems will be repositioned as a platform. And the reason for this is that you can use 5G for various different things: tracking worker safety, autonomous robots, workflow—lots of different use cases. But 5G is a complicated network, and not many people have got all the skills needed to set it up and do that. Also, if the narrative is shifting from connectivity to the intelligence, users don’t want to spend their time setting the network up; they just want to get on with it.

So we expect to see private-network app stores, so that you can download packaged applications, connectivity options, preconfigured connectors to IoT platforms—all these various things—so that you can just set it up much more easily and quickly, and get on with what you need to do. Also, it’s not only about 5G; there are other dynamics moving.

And one more prediction, if we have time, is that major telecom operators will spin off successful IoT businesses to create shareholder value and further the growth in IoT. Now, we have seen Deutsche Telekom has done it; Vodafone is looking into it. And we think others are going to follow. And the reason is that it brings independence from the parent company—more freedom.

And I said earlier that the focus should be on using the data, not on the connectivity. So why shouldn’t they use whatever connectivity fits best? Not just whatever their parent owns, if it’s 4G or 5G. You’ve seen recently, I think Semtech just acquired Sierra Wireless—that’s the LoRa and the cellular worlds coming together for the first time ever. And so we’re expecting lots more spinoffs of IoT companies from telecom operators. So there’s some quite exciting dynamics going on at the moment.

Christina Cardoza: I’m excited to see where else 5G is going to go in the next year. And it’s good to hear all the progress that they’ve been making. And then, also, we don’t have to worry about 6G yet. I think sometimes when you hear a new term or a new technology coming out, you want to jump on that right away. But these conversations are still early, and the focus is still on 5G.

But one thing that I’m wondering that if it will come about in 2023 is this idea of the metaverse. We’ve been talking about this a little bit more. And especially, Bola, when you mentioned HoloLens and using this type of technology in the workplace—is that all going to be part of this new idea of the metaverse?

Bola Rotibi: The metaverse. Well, it’s a very nice word anyway. Well, to be honest with you, look, I think the metaverse is going to create a lot of opportunities. I think we are in its infancy at this moment in time. So I think a lot of our predictions around the metaverse are certainly towards the end of the decade. But what I do think it is—and there’s still a lot of looking at what’s possible: the definition, we’ve got different companies—Meta is putting a lot of investment in this. And I think where it will end up might be different to where we are actually looking at it at this moment in time.

But what I do think: there is a relationship between the metaverse and digital twins. And I think that’s actually quite important. Because I think what the metaverse—if we think of digital twins as conflating, or converging, actually I would say—is this environment where you can actually have a digitized representation. And I think this is one of the things—and if we go back to the digital transformation, what is it what we’re really seeing here? Apart from modernization, we’re having modern infrastructure. But it’s the digitization of all data assets, all of this, in order to give a representation.

And, in fact, one of the things that we have in our predictions, which I think is quite exciting, so it does actually open up, is that we think by 2028 there would be a blockchain of view which lets developers build viable digital twins of people to support personalized services. Now that’s quite exciting. Because there we’ve talked about three different technologies: blockchain, digital twins, metaverse. But it’s the opportunity that we think about. And this is what I was starting to think, is that once we start digitizing everything it’s the capabilities of what does that mean? It means that people could actually have a representation of their health data, of the way that they—their personal likes, dislikes. And that blockchain bits mean that they have a certain level of ownership: it can’t be changed. And then they can actually start trading that with other organizations who may want to actually use that information in order to do testing against drugs or liabilities or things. The possibilities are endless.

But I think the reality is that we do see that convergence happening. Now, what that looks like by the end of the decade I think is still out there. But I think we have a pathway between the metaverse and digital twins to have that digital representation. Not just of products of physical things, but actually of people. And then that’s really when we start to get, as they say, cooking with gas. It’s going to be exciting. Innovation.

Christina Cardoza: Absolutely. And, of course, digital twins is another conversation me and Martin had on the IoT Chat. So I just invite listeners who want to learn more about that, especially in an industrial setting, to go check out that podcast.

But what I’m thinking is a lot of these things—digital twins, hybrid work environments, digitizing things—these aren’t necessarily new concepts. But I think what is new and what’s driving this more and advancing this more is the rise of some of these other technologies like machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence. And I know, Bola, you mentioned some of these earlier in the conversations. But, Martin, I’m wondering if you can talk more about how organizations and industries continue to adopt these intelligent features. And, especially in the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how the focus is more on intelligence than data. So how is AI and machine learning, for instance, going to continue to play a role throughout the next year?

Martin Garner: Well that’s right. And, Christina, and especially I think in IoT. As soon as you start on IoT you generate so much data that the only way to make really good sense and get the maximum out of it is to use machine learning. And I think the direction and the main use cases of that are now fairly clear. I think the main strands of development we expect over the coming few years are, first of all, the tools are becoming much more user friendly. We need to abstract away all of the coding that you have to do—the complex. There are so many different machine learning frameworks. It’s a really hard space to navigate. And also, the hardware differences. Intel with OpenVINO™ and things have done quite a good job of making that easier.

There’s also, I think, prepackaging, so that you can buy systems that have it just built in. And you open the box and it’s ready there, working. And it’s a bit like Intel’s Market Ready Solutions; it’s the same concept applied to machine learning. We’re seeing more and more good examples of that.

And the other bit that needs an awful lot of attention, and we’re just, I think, starting on this is the data. So, the research we do with end users, they tell us this is just the hardest bit. And I think, historically, there hasn’t been a strong imperative to try to harmonize all the data so that it’s easy to use. And we’ve heard stories of manufacturers having different generations of sensors that just are all different in the way they present data. When you say it now, it makes no sense. But I think 20 years ago, maybe it did. Anyway, lots of focus on semantics, on data harmonization—both within a supplier, because they need it for their own internal analytics, but also across suppliers for digital twins, supply chains, all sorts of various areas that we are now getting into. But an awful lot of effort to get that right. Those are the main trends: tools, pre-packaging, and data, I think, that we expect to see. But that’s very much from an IoT point of view. And I know Bola has lots of other thoughts around how it looks from developers and various people.

Bola Rotibi: Yes, developers. Well, AI and ML actually. I mean, I think it’s going to really—we’re starting to see it actually have everyday viability. So, whereas before it was very much the big things, like the big calculations, the big modeling to do amazing things—whether that’s looking at imaging in cancer and all this kind of stuff—I think now what we’re actually now starting to see is accessible AI, accessible ML. And actually it means that developers are now—the tools are there, the tools have gone a long way.

And, in fact, you can have tools at multiple levels. You have tools still for the data scientists—those who understand the modeling concepts and things like that. But now we’ve come a level up. We’ve caught abstraction. And now people have incorporating low-code/no-code capabilities. So that, actually, we’re getting a much broader range of developers. And, actually, it’s not just professional developers, but those who have got domain experience, who want to have a level of programmability to their applications. And they’re being brought into the fold.

And I think that’s actually really important. Because now we’re starting to see what AI and ML actually mean to everyday tasks. But also, what’s also important is that we’re starting to see small data sets. So, people are actually using their domain experience to make these small changes, correct changes, so that it isn’t requiring vast compute resources to come up with, “Oh, is this going to do everything?” I think it’s actually, and I say—I can’t stress the word “accessible” enough, because I think that is what is making it much more of a broader cohort of people who can engage.

So I think one of the things that Martin rightly said is development is really expanding. So, it’s not just the professional developers. It’s actually bringing in a broader church of people capable of building those AI and ML applications, and they’re more task oriented. And I think that is really key, because that’s actually going to really spearhead adoption. And then we start seeing opportunities for connected solutions being part of that capability—from adding intelligence to delivering personalization, efficiency saving—the whole caboodle. So it’s amazing in terms of what is possible. But I think that’s certainly going to happen over the next—we’ve got an exciting next few years for AI and ML.

Martin Garner: It’s very clear, isn’t it, that more and more of the kind of people who need to use it are not data scientists. But they are engineers or operations specialists or process managers or all sorts of people who run things in companies. They need to use it, and it has to be easy for them.

Bola Rotibi: Yeah, it has to be understandable—“explainable,” as we say.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, I love all of those ideas. There’s accessible AI—because we’ve seen how important the technology is across all industries, automating all sorts of different tasks and making lives easier. And so by broadening that adoption we’re going to get more opportunities, more benefits, more innovative solutions that developers themselves may not have thought about. But when you bring domain user or business user in there, you really start solving some of these real-world challenges. And I think it’s going to be very exciting to see over the next couple of years.

Unfortunately, we are running out of time. I know we’ve covered a lot so far. IoT and technology—they just span across everything, and they’re just such big topics. Of course, for our listeners who want to dig a little deeper into these topics and learn more, I invite you to look at the CCS white paper on insight.tech. And that’ll have even more predictions and opportunities for the next coming years. But before we go, Bola and Martin, I just want to throw it back to you guys one last time for any final key thoughts or takeaways you want to leave our listeners with today. So, Martin, I’ll start with you.

Martin Garner: Yeah, so, I do have one. We haven’t talked a whole lot about cybersecurity. And it is still the single biggest concern of people implementing IoT. And what I find interesting is that as systems are now scaling up to supply chain level, the idea that your whole supply chain might be hacked is honestly terrifying. It’s becoming even more important.

One interesting outcome, I think, of the war in Ukraine has been that there’s been a very large collective response around the world to cybersecurity issues—helping Ukraine not to be hacked to bits. Now, I think that’s really interesting. And there’s a question about how can we as industries maximize the benefit that we get from that collective response. I don’t know just the answer yet, but we’re going to have a think about that. And I think that’s maybe a prediction for next year.

Bola Rotibi: Well, I was going to add, Martin, we do have a prediction that we did quote, which was, by 2027 at least three governments mandate cybersecurity standards for businesses deemed of strategic economic importers. So I think that talks to a lot of the focus around cybersecurity. And, as Martin rightly pointed out, is that it is becoming much more of a broader topic, which will actually bring in a lot more people—whether it’s at an international level, whether it’s at a national level, or whether it’s organizational.

One of the things I would say, because we didn’t have a quick time to talk about it, is sustainability, which is another big feature for what, I think, is 2023. And I think IoT will play a big part in that. Because it will allow edge solutions to be part of the sustainability story; it’ll bring together AI and ML capabilities. And so it actually raises an incredible environment for developers, the broader church of developers, opportunities for those who are delivering connected solutions.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s a great callout about the sustainability. We see that as a huge trend across all industries. And being more sustainable—not only with the energy and the environmental concerns that we give off, but also within our own operations, how to be more sustainable and more efficient. And so I think this conversation just scratched the surface of what the audience can find in that big report from CCS Insight. And there’s plenty more to dig into and to expect and to jump on for 2023 and beyond. So I just want to thank you both again for such an insightful conversation and joining the podcast today.

Martin Garner: Thank you, Christina. Thank you very much.

Bola Rotibi: Thank you very much, Christina. Thank you for inviting us.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, of course. And thank you for our listeners for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, rate, review, all of the above on your favorite streaming platform. Until next time, this has been the IoT Chat.

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This transcript was edited by Erin Noble, copy editor.

About the Author

Christina Cardoza is an Editorial Director for insight.tech. Previously, she was the News Editor of the software development magazine SD Times and IT operations online publication ITOps Times. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Stony Brook University, and has been writing about software development and technology throughout her entire career.

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