The impact of Covid-19 on the Internet of Things – now and beyond the Great Lockdown: Part 1



Covid-19 is having an unprecedented impact on our society and our economy. There are also strong indications that many technologies will see accelerated adoption in the coming years because people become more digitally minded as they embrace technology while working from home.
But how does Covid-19 impact the Internet of Things, its technology, and its applications specifically? In the last weeks, we did our own research and talked to various IoT decision-makers to understand what the Covid-19 IoT impact in their organizations is and where they see things going from here.
The results are 25 different Covid-19 IoT effects, published as part of a 2-part blog series. This is part 1 of 2 .

IoT Analytics also, today, published the new 105-page State of the IoT Q1/2020 report . The Covid-19 IoT impact presented in this blog post is discussed in even greater detail in that report – together with the IoT Analytics view on 70 overarching current trends in the fields of IoT software, connectivity, hardware, and security as well as an update on the number of globally connected IoT devices and a drill-down into regions, verticals, and technology segments.
 
The impact of Covid-19 on enterprise needs
In order to understand the Covid-19 IoT impact on specific applications, one first needs to understand the enterprise needs that drive some of these applications.
1.      Cost (CAPEX) has to be reduced
As demand for products and services dries up throughout the crisis, one of the most important needs is to cut costs accordingly.

Oil companies are particularly hard-hit by the Covid-19 crisis due to a combination of a decline in demand and a subsequent fall in prices. Major companies such as Exxon have reduced their CAPEX plan for 2020 by 30% or more already. Although most of the CAPEX will be related to technology-low investments such as new oil rigs, it can be expected that non-necessary tech will also see a cut.
 
2.      Better business transparency is needed
The quickly changing dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic and the inability to visit some physical sites has led to the realization that transparency about employee whereabouts and wellbeing, about goods in transit and about manufacturing has become crucial.

Firms that operate in the business of data visualization are seeing a spike in tool usage. Widely popular Tableau, for example, saw its app climb 600 spots in the ios “Business” category in one week.
 
3.      Processes become more automated
It can be expected that in the coming months, businesses will need to automate their processes more. Before the crisis, automation was in many cases seen as the enemy of our jobs as robots, autonomous vehicles and other technologies were threatening to replace them.
Now the question has become: “How can automation accelerate our recovery and protect us from...

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