From Internet of Things to System of Systems

Market analysis, achievements, positioning and future vision of the ECS community on IoT and SoS

An Artemis-IA whitepaper coordinated by Eurotech.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the center of the digital revolution, opening the road to the more general concept of “System of Systems” (SoS)

“Digital transformation is shaping our world in unprecedented ways, at a rate of change never seen before, potentially improving our daily life and our society, disrupting the traditional businesses and representing a must to secure companies’ competitive edge. Digitalization creates a link between the physical and the digital worlds and the dynamic interaction between these two worlds constitutes one of the strongest driving forces that will shape the evolution of future markets, potentially in every vertical domain.”

What is characterizing the IoT market today?

The IoT market has gone through several phases: initially IoT technologies were conceived as monolithic and strongly linked to the cloud while, in the last 4-5 years, the market evolved thanks to the integration and convergence between IoT, hyper-connectivity and cloud computing. Today, embedded intelligence represents the last evolutionary step of IoT and is allowing organizations to transform collected data into insightful knowledge, deriving a real commercial benefit.

Why adopt and/or invest in IoT today?

Today, some market enablers are unleashing the real potential of IoT and they are allowing its practical viability, leading the market uptake: decrease of sensors and electronic components costs, increase of computing power, global and low-cost hyper-connectivity, availability of “everything” as a service, value chain partnerships, new digital business models and specific European research programs.

What are the dimensions of the IoT phenomenon?

The global internet of things (IoT) market was estimated at USD 190.0 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 1,102.6 billion by 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 24.7% in the forecast period 5.

What is driving the market revolution?

This huge market, full of opportunities, will be driven in the next 3-5 years by the shift of computing to the edge, by hyper-connectivity, artificial intelligence, security awareness and sustainability, which represent the short-term linked trends influencing the IoT evolution.

What is the role of the value chain in IoT market revolution?

The IoT value chain is fundamental to identify the involved stakeholders, the business model and the technologies adopted to build end-to end solutions. A single company is not capable to offer an all-inclusive solution, covering the entire value chain, while an ecosystem of companies, with complementary competences and businesses is the appropriate solution.

The evolution of the IoT value chain

IoT generates a radical change in the structure of the current and future economic system, transforming the linear value chain in a nonlinear value network. Any business combination in the network could potentially generates new revenue streams.

The Artemis and ECSEL community have made significant investments focused on research and innovation in the areas of IoT and SoS. Eurotech has been involved in these initiatives since the very beginning, more than ten years ago, actively participating to several research projects that significantly influenced the evolution of IoT and SoS.

In line with this strong involvement, Eurotech coordinated a study on the IoT market, trying to identify the market expectations for the next 3-5 years, the enabling factors that will allow the market uptake, the trends that will influence it, the achievements of the last decade of Artemis and ECSEL research projects and the potential evolution of IoT technologies towards SoS.

From Internet of Things to System of Systems: the White Paper

The whitepaper “From IoT to SoS” illustrates the results of this study:

• The introduction illustrates the history of IoT until today
• The market study explains what are the market enablers that make IoT a reality today, describes the dimensions and the potential opportunities of the IoT market in the next 3-5 years and identifies the trends that will drive it
• The study of the IoT value chain tries to capture the dynamics of the IoT market, describing the role of the stakeholders, highlighting the importance of the value chain integration and how it could potentially evolve
• The central part of the study describes the research streams that characterized the last decade of Artemis and ECSEL research projects, providing detailed analysis of the achievements in the areas of:
  • Enabling technologies for IoT and SoS
  • IoT/SoS architectures
  • IoT/SoS platforms
  • Engineering support for IoT and SoS
  • Interoperability and
  • Trust
• A specific chapter is devoted to the analysis of vertical domains
• Eventually, the study provides a panorama of the investments in IoT and SoS in the last decade of research projects