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CRN talks to executives at Intel, Microsoft, GE Digital, PTC and FogHorn Systems about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the IoT market.
COVID 19 IoT- Some Verticals Take A Hit While New Opportunities Emerge
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a bit of a curveball for the IoT market, which has seen a slowdown in areas like retail and manufacturing while new initiatives to reduce human contact and improve automation have come to the forefront.
“The last three and a half months have been us — as a company and my team and division from an IoT perspective — really focused on helping companies apply the right technologies to solve some real immediate needs that have emerged [due to] COVID,” Rodney Clark, vice president of IoT and mixed reality sales at Microsoft, told CRN in a recent interview. “And so where I’d like to say, it’s been business as usual from an IoT front, It’s been anything but.”
The pandemic-induced slowdown in demand for IoT solutions was demonstrated in the most recently earnings for Intel, which reported a 3 percent year-over-year decline in first-quarter sales for the company’s division that produces computer chips for IoT devices.
But Clark and other IoT executives who recently spoke to CRN as part of IoT Week said they believe the new requirements and realities brought upon by the coronavirus has underlined the importance of IoT technologies as governments and businesses seek to adjust to a “new normal.”
What follows are remarks made by IoT executives at Microsoft, Intel, GE Digital, PTC and FogHorn Systems in interviews with CRN on how the pandemic has impacted the IoT market, including what areas have seen a slowdown and where they have identified new opportunities.
Rodney Clark, Vice President Of IoT And Mixed Reality Sales, Microsoft
The last three and a half months have been us — as a company and my team and division from an IoT perspective — really focused on helping companies apply the right technologies to solve some real immediate needs that have emerged [due to] COVID. And so where I’d like to say, it’s been business as usual from an IoT front, It’s been anything but.
The time that I spend right now is in implementations for COVID-initiated things like monitoring and detection, things like business automation, social and workplace engagement interaction projects that probably would have taken 18 months to do formal [proof of concepts], test and deploy — we’ve deployed in a matter of two or three weeks. That’s new for us.
