Microsoft leads overall IoT platform landscape, AWS 2nd: Report

Amazon Web Services (AWS) led in 10 out of 35 capabilities in the overall IoT evaluation while Huawei ranked third offering edge to cloud capabilities, according to Counterpoint Research which used its proprietary CORE (Competitive Rankings & Evaluation) framework that evaluated leading 20 IoT platform players to reach this conclusion.

"The IoT market is largely still a blue ocean and in the nascent stages, with enough room for every IoT platform to grow and be successful as we see millions of enterprises and governments kickstart their digital transformation initiatives," said Neil Shah, VP Research at Counterpoint.

"Moving into the new decade, we also expect healthy mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity to address several capability gaps between incumbents and startups identified by our research," Shah added.

Coming from a strong enterprise cloud business, Microsoft Azure IoT is the only end-to-end platform that has successfully built its Edge IoT capabilities and offers greater interoperability with other value chain players.

"Amazon AWS IoT has also done well in terms of completeness benefiting from a robust Cloud IoT and Application Enablement capabilities. Further, AWS has been building its edge capabilities via AWS Greengrass," said the report.

However, the report said, AWS Greengrass still lags Microsoft and other edge-first vendors to offer an advanced and scalable edge data analytics engine. Amazon was the leader in 10 out of 35 capabilities in our evaluation.

Huawei Ocean Connect offers several edge components offering edge chipsets, to devices, to software, complementing its Cloud IoT capabilities.

"Huawei has a growing customer base within China and Europe, however, current US sanctions could slow its enterprise IoT business outside China," the report added.

IBM leads in Cloud IoT components, benefitting from its industry leading position in Cloud and ML/AI space. RedHat acquisition also strengthens the edge software, security and virtualization offering.

"However, IBM needs to advance its edge analytics capabilities and expand its partnership roster to capitalize on the Edge IoT opportunity," the report mentioned.

IoT is becoming more pervasive as more and more devices are being connected to the cloud via the internet to monitor, analyze, and take action.

"The next wave of digital transformation will be driven by these intelligent edge devices and corresponding highly scalable and secure IoT software," said Peter Richardson, VP Research.