The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of a handful of technology areas that are set to drive IT growth and innovation over the coming decade. However, it is also an area that can be woefully underestimated, with most people’s understanding of IoT stretching little beyond the number of steps they’ve taken today or the location of that Uber driver they’ve been waiting for.

But the Internet of Things is much more than just a gimmicky consumer tool, and it is rapidly finding new use cases in even the most traditional of industries. Organisations in the MEA will invest more than $7.8 billion in IoT-related hardware, software, services, and connectivity in 2017, reflecting 19.6 per cent growth from the prior year and outstripping all other major technology markets.

This stellar performance can be attributed to the fact that digital transformation initiatives are proliferating across the region as businesses and government entities strive to boost productivity and improve efficiency. Indeed, IoT both enables and is fuelled by the rise of digital transformation.

As a consequence of this burgeoning demand, the MEA IoT market is becoming increasingly competitive, enabling organisations to source a range of innovative digital solutions aimed at transforming business operations, improving the customer experience, and enhancing employee engagement.

This unprecedented burst of innovation means that the Internet of Things now plays host to a myriad of industry-specific solutions that can be easily deployed by organisations in a bid to stay ahead of the competition.

While IoT tends to be discussed as a single concept, the market for IoT is better described as a combination of many very different industry use cases, each with their own separate decision makers, stakeholders, market structures, drivers, and inhibitors.

This is not a one-size-fits-all technology; what works in one industry won’t necessarily work in another. But the inherent flexibility of IoT means that with a tweak here and a flash of innovation there, IoT use cases are inevitably going to flourish in industries stretching right across the vertical spectrum.

To this end, we are seeing a newfound commitment from service providers, application developers, and OEMs to developing purpose-built, end-to-end IoT solutions; and this commitment is serving as a major driver of the growing adoption we are seeing across the region.

For now, manufacturing, transportation, and utilities are the primary movers and shakers in this space, with IDC expecting organisations from these three industries to account for almost 50% of all IoT-related spending across MEA in 2017 as they look to digitalise their operations and improve their value proposition across different lines of business.

But where exactly is this money going to be spent? Well, in the MEA manufacturing space, just over 50 per cent of IOT-related investment will centre on the need to improve manufacturing operations by laying the foundations for digitally-executed manufacturing.

Key to this will be the way in which manufacturers use intelligent and interconnected I/O (input output) tools such as sensors, actuators, drives, and vision/video equipment to enable different components in the manufacturing field — machine tools, robots, conveyor belts — to autonomously exchange information, trigger actions, and control each other independently.

Over in the transportation industry, there is growing pressure to boost productivity through improvements in the monitoring of goods as they are being transported. Around 65 per cent of IoT investment in this space will be focused on freight-monitoring technologies in 2017.

The use of IoT for freight management purposes — whether by air, rail, land, or sea — is based on RFID, GPS, GPRS, and GIS technology, with the aim of creating intelligent, internet-connected transportation systems. These systems perform intelligent recognition, location, tracking, and monitoring of freight and cargo by exchanging information and real-time communications via wireless, satellite, and other channels.

In the MEA utilities space, the focus is on so-called ‘smart grid’ technologies, where smart field devices owned by the electric utility are used to control and optimise power flow to assure efficient, safe, and reliable service.

Smart grids are rapidly gaining traction across the region as municipalities increasingly see the value in deploying intelligent solutions to efficiently distribute resources to their respective end customers. As such, IDC expects more than 80 per cent of IoT-related investments by MEA utilities in 2017 to be geared towards smart grid technologies.

While IoT adoption and use cases vary strongly across industry sectors (and even within them), blossoming opportunities exist on both the business and consumer sides. It is for this reason that IoT will undoubtedly become an increasing priority for MEA organisations over the coming year as they learn more about the technology and witness first-hand the payback it can provide.

As such, we can expect to see a greater number of innovative IoT deployments taking place across the region in 2017 as a growing band of organisations look to replicate proven success stories in the consumer space by utilising IoT as a key enabler of their own digital transformation.

— The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC