MWC A new study from Aruba argues businesses who adopt the Internet of Things (IoT) could experience better than expected results.

The wide-ranging survey, which polled more than 3,000 IT and business decision makers across 20 countries, found almost half of respondents (46%) found business efficiency increases in their implementations, compared with only 29% who were expecting it. Profit gains, with 32% realisation and only 16% expectation, saw the same pattern.

Derek Howard, worldwide IoT marketing manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the parent company of Aruba, describes it as an ‘expectations dividend’. “There were a lot of benefits gained [which were] far greater than originally expected, and so there was a big disparity,” he tells IoT News.

“I think one of the things we’re seeing is that as enterprises in this industry are deploying IoT, they really are seeing greater than expected evidence, and I think this is really going to accelerate adoption over the next two years,” he adds.

The research focused on the sectors HPE feels are the horses to bet on going forward – enterprise, industrial, healthcare, retail, and government – and as such the results brought back some impressive numbers. 62% of respondents in the industrial sector and 60% in healthcare say they are already implementing some form of IoT, while four in five (81%) of retailers say IoT has helped improve their customer experience.

In many of these cases, education is an important factor. “I think a lot of people know the term IoT, but they don’t understand what it really means or the business impact and what that means to them,” says Howard. “Where it hits the ground is in a lot of very specific use cases that are being deployed within the industry; to the extent that education is high in terms of understanding that, I think the adoption rate corresponds.”

This ties in with one of the more interesting parts of the report around how IoT technologies can influence employees as well as wider industries. More than seven in 10 (72%) respondents said they have introduced smart devices into their workplace, with remote monitoring and indoor location-based services the key use cases, and operation of building lighting and temperature the main benefit yet to come. Another example is enabling meeting spaces to be more efficiently used. While there have already been inroads into this, it’s an interesting implementation; Howard sums this up as ‘guiding people where they need to be effectively’.

It’s worth noting as well that as one industry moves, another could join it soon after. Take smart cities, for instance, where in order for the whole utopian vision to work all sorts of technologies, from smart traffic lights to connected cars, will have to interact.

HPE sees the opportunity in three main buckets of enterprise, wide-area, and industrial, as Howard explains – “IoT is very much an ecosystem play right now” – and predicts ‘mass adoption’ by 2019 as a result of these better-than-expected results today. Alongside the research, Aruba has commissioned a short book from Kevin Ashton, the man who originally coined the term IoT; and it is this opportunity for businesses, almost two decades on, which shines through in the project.

“Since its inception in 1999, the Internet of Things has been ridiculed, criticised, and misunderstood,” Ashton wrote, “and yet here we are, less than two decades later, in a world where tens of thousands of organisations are saving and making hundreds of millions of dollars from the Internet of Things, using cars that drive themselves, subway stations that sense passengers, algorithms that diagnose deadly diseases using phones, and many other once apparently impossible technologies.

“The future promises far more amazing things; the most important decision you can make now is how to be a part of it.”

You can find out more about the research here.

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