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Nearly 75 percent of IoT projects are failing

Though forecasts indicate Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints will grow from 14.9 billion at the end of 2016 to more than 82 billion in 2025, a new study reveals that close to 75 percent of IoT projects are unsuccessful.

Despite the forward momentum predicted by global marketing firm IDC, a new Cisco study [1] shows that 60 percent of IoT initiatives stall at the Proof of Concept stage and only 26 percent of companies have had an IoT initiative that they considered a complete success. Even worse: a third of all completed projects were not considered a success.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager, IoT and Applications, Cisco. “But there are plenty of things we can do to get more projects out of pilot and to complete success, and that’s what we’re here in London to do.”

Cisco surveyed 1,845 IT and business decision-makers in the United States, UK, and India across a range of industries in order to gain insight into both the successes as well as the challenges that are impacting progress.

(Next page: 4 key findings around Internet of Things initiatives)

Key Findings:

1. The “human factor” matters. Human factors like culture, organization, and leadership are critical. In fact, three of the four top factors behind successful IoT projects had to do with people and relationships:

Organizations with the most successful IoT initiatives leveraged ecosystem partnerships most widely. They used partners at every phase, from strategic planning to data analytics after rollout.

Despite the strong agreement on the importance of collaboration among IT and business decision-makers, some interesting differences emerged:

2. Don’t Go It Alone. Sixty percent of respondents stressed that initiatives often look good on paper but prove much more difficult than anyone expected. The top five challenges across all stages of implementation: time to completion, limited internal expertise, quality of data, integration across teams, and budget overruns. The study found that the most successful organizations engage the IoT partner ecosystem at every stage, implying that strong partnerships throughout the process can smooth out the learning curve.

“We are seeing new IoT innovations almost every day,” said Inbar Lasser-Raab, VP of Cisco Enterprise Solutions Marketing. “We are connecting things that we never thought would be connected, creating incredible new value to industries. But where we see most of the opportunity, is where we partner with other vendors and create solutions that are not only connected but also share data. That shared data is the basis of a network of industries – sharing of insights to make tremendous gains for business and society, because no one company can solve this alone.”

3. Reap the Benefits. When critical success factors come together, organizations are in position to reap a windfall in smart-data insights.

Seventy-three percent of all participants are using data from completed projects to improve their business. Globally the top 3 benefits of IoT include improved customer satisfaction (70 percent), operational efficiencies (67 percent) and improved product/service quality (66 percent). In addition, improved profitability was the top unexpected benefit (39 percent).

4. Learn from the failures. Taking on these IoT projects has led to another unexpected benefit: 64 percent agreed that learning from stalled or failed initiatives have helped accelerate their organization’s investment in IoT.

Despite the challenges, many in the survey said they are optimistic for the future of IoT — a trend that, for all its forward momentum, is still in its nascent stages of evolution.

Sixty-one percent believe that the industry has barely begun to scratch the surface of what IoT technologies can do for their businesses.

Material from a press release was used in this report.