TT Poll: Connected Car & Smart Cities Big Drivers for IoT

"Connected car" took home the most votes in this week's Telco Transformation poll, which asked which IoT market segment would have the biggest immediate impact for service providers.

"Connected car" earned 27% of the votes cast in the poll while "smart cities" came across the finish line in second with 24%. "industrial automaton" was third (22%) while "retail" and "consumer" finished in a tie for fourth place at 12% each. Last place went to "health" with 3%.

A similar poll was used in last month's IoT webinar, but "industrial," "smart cities" and "smart building/smart home," respectively, earned the most votes. (Smart building/smart home wasn't in the recent TT poll.)

"With industrial automation, I think what that points to in the market place is how well those business segments have done in developing well-defined business cases to really drive the deployment," said Verizon's Mark Bartolomeo, vice president of connected solutions and Internet of Things, when he saw the webinar poll results. "We're seeing the industrial companies, whether it's large construction machinery that's being monitored or whether it is equipment out in the oil fields, using monitoring because they know they have very large capital investments. They know that by providing the remote monitoring they can really improve the life and efficiency of where they're investing capital."

During the webinar, Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Steve Bell remarked that the "smart building/smart home" segment was interesting because "it brings together a number of different areas," including energy efficiency and home automation. (Watch the archived webinar here: Verizon Gears Up for IoT.)

While even the most casual observer would agree that the Internet of Things will be big, there's still debate about how big it will be. (See Measuring the IoT Market: Why It Shouldn't Matter.)

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation