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hsmith@firstanalysis.com
dgearhart@firstanalysis.com
- The ability to help manage the inherently complex IoT/M2M networking environment as well as automate related tasks at scale has pushed platform software to the fore, sparking significant investor and M&A interest and making an in-depth look at this market a timely undertaking.
- We estimate the wide-area wireless infrastructure software market, consisting of device and network (subscriber) management as well as application enablement/development platforms, will reach $49B by 2024, up from $8.5B in 2014, and representing 19% CAGR; however, the vast majority of this market is either in-house or bundled as a captive part of a broader offering, leaving only about 15% of the market as standalone third-party software.
- Despite the relatively small percentage of the market that is standalone, there are hundreds of generally very small private players; in addition, hardware, network, and full-solutions vendors are increasingly bundling platform software into their core offerings, making this a dynamic and often confusing ecosystem.
- Because few entities deploying IoT/M2M solutions begin their journey with the selection of a platform supplier, we believe partnering for distribution will be a key success driver for standalone platform companies along with more traditional success drivers such as breadth of offering, customer support capabilities, and vertical market expertise.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Includes profiles of 30 public and private companies
IoT/M2M Platforms: A basic description
The IoT/M2M ecosystem and where platforms reside
Platform types
Benefits - primarily around cost, time savings
Segmenting the market
Pricing
Sizing the platform software market opportunity
Adoption drivers
Competition - highly fragmented market, players still emerging
Success drivers
Trends and observations
Conclusions
Public and private infrastructure software company profiles
IoT/M2M Platforms: A basic description
This report offers a high-level overview of the infrastructure software market beginning with a basic description of a platform and the three general platform types. We then describe the benefits of using a platform, discuss ways to segment the market, size the global opportunity, highlight adoption drivers and trends, and offer some high-level conclusions. After our overview, we profile 30 public and private players.
At a high level, a platform represents the support software IoT/M2M solutions use to help connect (integrate) core ecosystem components (i.e., hardware, network, application software, other infrastructure software, systems), ensuring data can be passed between monitored/controlled assets and end-user applications; this software also handles ongoing management tasks and facilitates data visualization. Platforms essentially play the role of intermediary: Assets and solution components can send data in a broad range of formats using different communication protocols, but an abstraction mechanism, which the platform provides, is required to translate it into common formats so it is usable elsewhere in the value chain. This software has been typically created internally by companies needing to support a proprietary application, often at great cost and requiring much time/effort. However, third-party or outsourced platforms are starting to become more popular. They are able to provide much of the underlying support functions, which tend to be common across verticals, leveraging infrastructure built to be agnostic to devices, networks, and other components.
It’s not uncommon for IoT/M2M platforms to be referred to as middleware solutions, infrastructure software, frameworks, plumbing, and even glue – terms basically describing similar concepts that we use interchangeably in this report.