H2020 Work Programme 2014-2015 ict-30-2015: Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects
Market reflections on leading platforms
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Market reflections on leading platformsIn this sub-section, we briefly relate the platforms that we selected determined as leading ones to the overall global platform landscape examined in section 4. Our goal is to understand whether the successful platforms resemble similar geographies, company types, sector focus and complementary technologies or whether a different pattern is more prevalent. For this analysis, we adopt the similar pathway used for analysing the global and the European platforms market: first, we look at the type of companies that develop the platforms; second, we describe which segments of the industries the IoT platforms cover; finally, we examine which technologies companies are developing in addition to the IoT platforms. The overall picture of geographical distribution of the IoT platforms leading companies broadly mirrors the tendencies of overall global trend analysed in the previous section, however with some striking characteristics. US based IoT platform providers account for the majority of leading platforms in our selection; however, its proportion increases from 60 to 75%. Proportionally European platform are still in second place but a lower percentage of platforms is considered leading, with only 22% percent coming from Europe as opposed to 28%. The other remaining leading platform providers are from Canada. This means that the Asian and South African market are not yet in a position to compete globally. The geographical distribution of the companies that develop the most relevant platforms for the IoT market are fairly similar to the one pictured by Figure 12. Compared to Figure 20 we can observe that the distribution of the different kind of companies is mirroring the broad worldwide condition for what concern the most influencing countries. A strong difference can be observed in the much larger ratio of MNCs compared to Start-ups in the USA. While in US larger businesses take a more prominent role, the situation is less biased in the US where landscape of leading platform providers corresponds roughly with the overall distribution. Here start-up based platforms play a more prominent role. 
Figure 20 – Geographical distribution and type of the companies producing the most influent and relevant platforms of the IoT market In line with the overall IoT platform landscape, the influence of the European market is maintained also by the leading roles of France, Germany, Spain, and UK for the IoT market. Moreover, distributed projects among European countries foster and encourage a sort of contemporary example of Marshallian districts. Open IoT and Fiware are characterized by partners’ participation and actions distributed of across Europe. The two projects are active across countries from Greece to Ireland, and from Latvia to Spain. In fact, even though the partners are officially defined, the community of developers is expanding independently by the formal bounders and simply spread by following the evolution of the platforms. Some differences between the analysis of the bulk of relevant IoT platforms and the general observations provided earlier in this document concern the segment of the industries covered. As immediately evident from Figure 21, the companies that produce the current most relevant platforms in the IoT market are not focused on Health and Mobility. However, by taking a closer look at the activities of the companies that cover Generally all segments we can identify an increasing interest for B2C Health and Mobility segments as well. The trend of the core of the IoT market is roughly resembling the worldwide trend: the Smart City segment is currently the most relevant sector, followed by Manufacturing, B2B Health, and Smart home. In contrast, lack of sector coverage of the leading platforms is also evident for B2C Lifestyle segment and Public sector and services. 
Figure 21 - Industrial segments covered by the most relevants IoT platforms A third group of information useful for describing IoT landscape characteristics is related to the technologies that gravitate around the IoT platforms. As can be understood among the descriptions of the selected platforms we can consider technologies that are developed for complementing an existing IoT platform and of technologies that stimulate the design of an IoT platform. As we can notice from Figure 22 the interest of the selected IoT companies on developing technologies in addition to the platforms is quite diversified and is not strictly following the global trend described in Figure 17. The first evident information is related to the lack of companies interested in enriching IoT platforms with Communication protocols. However, little interest is shown also for Processors/Semiconductors, Sensors, Hardware in general, and Complete device. 
Figure 22 – Additional technologies that are completing and enhancing the IoT platform In contrast, established IoT platforms market focus more on technologies such as analytics technology, development tools, and broadly speaking complementary technologies that are not specifically related to the IoT. Comparing Figure 22 with Figure 17 and Figure 18 is helping us to understand how the market is shaped, how it is growing and where it might move in the future. For instance, various EU IoT platform companies focus on providing communication solutions. However, the global trend is rather different and Communication protocols seems not to relevant for making IOT platforms globally succeed. A slightly different situation is related to the segments covered by the IoT market. In fact, the curves of interests among the different analysis are almost overlapping. For instance, little interest is reserved for B2C segments with the exception for the segment of the Smart Home. Given the current technology trend, it seems that International companies are better positioned than European companies, as they are focusing on key areas of differentiation such as analytics and data bases instead of communications and hardware ecosystems. Download 9.57 Mb. Share with your friends:
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