The Eclipse Foundation has carried out its 6th annual IoT Developer Survey for 2020. Eclipse is the world’s largest open-source foundation focused on the Internet of Things. The survey was conducted by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, and it provides useful insights into the IoT industry.
It highlights the challenges faced by developers and possible opportunities for stakeholders in the IoT open source ecosystem. For the first time, the survey contained questions on edge computing, and the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group will base its roadmap on the findings.
“As the Internet of Things continues to grow, so do the opportunities and challenges faced by IoT developers,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “This survey provides everyone, from hardware and software vendors to service providers and enterprises, with insights into how the choices made by developers are impacting the latest IoT strategies and businesses.”
The survey was conducted online over three months (May-July 2020), and had 1652 participants from a broad set of industries and organizations.
These are the survey’s key findings:
- In 2020, Smart Agriculture has emerged as the leading industry focus
- Security (39%), Connectivity (27%) and Data Collection & Analytics (26%) remain the top three concerns for IoT developers in 2020
- Artificial Intelligence (30%) and Control Logic (29%) were the most frequently selected edge computing workloads
- Privacy is a growing concern for 23% of respondents, as awareness of the issues increases among organizations and consumers alike
- Communication Security (43%) and Data Encryption At Rest (41%) are the most widely used techniques for securing IoT solutions again this year
- Distributed Ledgers have gained momentum as a way to secure IoT solutions
- Java is the most widely used programming language at the Edge (20%) and in the Cloud (24%)
- The top Communication Protocols used were HTTP/HTTPS (51%), MQTT (41%)
- In 2020, the IoT Middleware market is dominated by AWS IoT (35%), Microsoft Azure IoT (31%), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (30%)
- Amazon AWS with 40% (+6% in 2020), Microsoft Azure with 31% (+8% in 2020), and Google Cloud Platform with 26% (+6% in 2020) keep dominating the public IoT and Cloud Platforms in 2020
The survey also includes details on edge computing workloads, top concerns by IoT developers, and breakdowns by market. The entire report can be downloaded here.
Supported by over 300 members globally, with 70 new members added in 2020 alone, the Eclipse Foundation has a well-established international reach and a proven 16+ year track record of enabling co-innovation. The Foundation currently hosts and enables more than 375 open source projects: a shared investment exceeding €13 billion.
Organization members include industry leaders who value the Foundation’s open innovation processes and its unique Working Group governance model that makes it possible to share intellectual property without the threat of antitrust and regulatory challenges.
The Foundation’s IoT community represents one of the largest open-source collaborations in the world, spanning 45 projects and more than 43 members, such as SimpleMatter, with over 8 million lines of code produced. Eclipse IoT projects have been adopted by many of the world’s leading companies to deliver commercial IoT solutions and services.
