Meeting the short term and long term requirements for IoT connectivity

As the concepts of the internet of things (IoT) starts to gather supporters within organisations, the numbers behind Gartner’s forecast that the IoT will comprise 50billion devices by 2020 starts to take shape. The challenge facing many organisations is so crucial to their future viability that no one can ignore it.
Take the case of industrial robots for example. If you are a manufacturer of robots used today for a variety of industrial manufacturing processes you will have traditionally created your profits from selling and servicing the industrial robots. But what about a transformative affect that would allow you to provide industrial robots to your customers as a managed service, based on usage, for a monthly fee. This is what the IoT is all about. Unleashing new business models based on being able to access and interpret collected data on an on-going basis in real-time. According to the 2015 market survey prepared by the International Federation of Robotics, there were 1.48million industrial robots in use worldwide at the end of 2014. This number is forecast to increase to 2.33m by the end of 2018. With a conservative estimate of 20 IoT connected sensors in each robot that means there could be approximately 50m devices connecting to IoT applications alone.