The number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors will reach more than 46bn by the year 2021, a 200% increase from 2016, with the global sensors market generating revenues of US$162.36bn on its own by 2019, two research reports from Juniper Research and Frost and Sullivan reveal.

The rise in the number of IoT devices will be driven in large part by a reduction in the unit costs of hardware, Juniper says, with industrial and public services posting the highest growth over the forecast period, averaging more than 24% annually.

“The platform landscape is flourishing”, says Steffen Sorrell, the author of Juniper’s latest research The Internet of Things: Consumer, Industrial & Public Services 2016-2021. “However, analytics and database systems are, for the most part, not architected to handle the Big Data 2.0 era that the IoT brings.”

‘Woeful’ security

Juniper says disruption is needed in areas such as spatio temporal analytics and intelligent systems able to run on less powerful machines.

However, it warned the “security threat landscape is widening”. While enterprise and industry are investing heavily in IoT security, the consumer market landscape is “woeful”, Juniper adds.

Meanwhile, Frost and Sullivan’s Global Sensor Outlook 2016 report says industrial control, smart cities and e-health will be the top contributors to the US$162.36bn revenue in the sensors market by 2019.

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