Growing at a CAGR of 32 per cent, yearly sales of IoT device management and application enablement services are forecasted by market watcher Berg to reach $7.9bn in 2024.

According to the research report, the global market for IoT device management and application enablement platforms was worth $2.0bn in 2019.

IoT platforms provide middleware to connect and manage devices and integrate collected data into various applications and services. These platforms are intended to reduce the cost and development time for the IoT by providing standard components that enterprises can build upon.

The market for IoT device management and application enablement platforms is in a stage of transformation, where major cloud service providers such as Microsoft, AWS and Alibaba invest heavily to move up the stack. In many cases, vendors that have built IoT platforms on public cloud infrastructure are transitioning to providing higher-level building blocks that can be used as a starting point when building general services and even end-to-end designs for specific use cases.

The increased concentration of the IoT platforms market is an overall healthy development for the IoT ecosystem and a sign of maturation, says Berg.

Even though these hyperscalers are becoming increasingly dominant in the IoT platforms space, there are segments of this market where specialised vendors play an important role.

“Device connectivity and management services for low-power constrained devices comprise a key focus area for cellular IoT module providers such as Sierra Wireless and Telit, but also vendors like Pelion that was launched as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Arm in November 2020,” said Fredrik Stalbrand, senior analyst at Berg Insight.

He mentioned AVSystem and IoTerop as other examples.

A common theme for these players is that their device management offerings are compliant with LwM2M, a device management standard that has gained traction in the telecommunications industry with the emergence of LPWA technologies LTE-M and NB-IoT.

“Efficient and secure device management is crucial to meet the requirements of massive IoT deployments in the 5G era,” said Stalbrand.

• The global installed base of active remote tank monitoring reached 3.6 million units at the end of 2019, according to research from Berg. Growing at a CAGR of 35.1 per cent, the active installed base is estimated to reach 16.3 million units worldwide by 2024.