BRUSSELS – November 7, 2023 – The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source software foundations, today announced results from its 2023 IoT & Edge Developer Survey. Administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the survey provides essential insights into IoT and edge computing industry landscapes, challenges developers face, and the opportunities for enterprise stakeholders in the IoT & edge open source ecosystem. Now in its ninth year, the survey is the IoT & edge industry’s leading technical survey.
“This year’s results yielded some very interesting trends, particularly those related to real-world use cases and technology choices,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “What’s clear is that developers are actively building production solutions leveraging open source technologies to tackle today’s IoT challenges across industrial, agricultural, and municipal settings.”
The online survey was conducted from April 4, 2023, to July 5, 2023, during which 1,037 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers from a broad set of industries and organisations participated. Key findings include:
- Development is increasing across all IoT sectors. Industrial automation is once again the top area of focus (33%, up from 22%), followed by agriculture (29 %, up from 23%), building automation, energy management, and smart cities (all at 24%).
- Developers indicate that Java is the preferred language for IoT gateways and edge nodes, while C, C++, and Java are the most widely used languages for constrained devices.
- MQTT is the top IIoT communication protocol. Nearly half of developers (49%) indicate a preference for MQTT for IIoT communications, with MQTT + Sparkplug checking in at 8%.
- The withdrawal of IoT Middleware providers has created an opportunity for innovators to enter the market. Google Cloud IoT Platform, Bosch IoT Suite, IBM Watson IoT, and SAP Internet of Things all exited the market in 2022 or announced their intent to do so. While nearly half of respondents indicated a relationship with one or more of these providers, only 12% have migrated to a new provider.
- Control logic (40%) surpassed artificial intelligence (37%) as the most common edge computing workload. Does this imply a renewed focus on the practical aspects of delivering real-world solutions? Only time will tell.
- Software Supply Chain Security has become an essential issue for IoT/edge developers, with 70% saying it is vital to their work.
- 5G is enabling accelerated IIoT adoption. Cellular adoption has doubled since 2022 (44% vs. 22% in 2022) largely due to 5G penetration, while WiFi (38% vs. 36% in 2022), Ethernet (38% vs 29% in 2022) and Bluetooth (23% vs 20% in 2022) continue to be viable options.
The survey data contains further insights on developer choices for edge computing workloads, platform connectivity, developer concerns, and use case breakdowns by market. In addition, the report provides breakdowns of use cases by market and detailed recommendations on the next steps for IoT developers. The entire report can be downloaded here.
About Eclipse IoT
Eclipse IoT’s knowledge and expertise span 12+ years of experience in edge computing, IoT and Industrial IoT. Eclipse IoT is home to open source innovation that has delivered implementations of some of the industry’s most popular IoT protocols. CoAP (Eclipse Californium), DDS (Eclipse Cyclone DDS), LwM2M (Eclipse Leshan), MQTT (Eclipse Paho, Eclipse Mosquitto, and Eclipse Amlen), and OPC UA (Eclipse Milo) are all part of the Eclipse IoT ecosystem. The Eclipse IoT toolkit also contains an innovative homegrown protocol built from the ground up for edge computing: Eclipse Zenoh. In addition to other popular Eclipse IoT production-ready platforms that cover various use cases such as digital twins (Eclipse Ditto), contactless payments (Eclipse Keyple), industrial applications (Eclipse Kura), in addition to Eclipse Kapua — a modular IoT cloud platform that manages data and devices. Eclipse IoT is also the home of innovative edge orchestration platforms such as Eclipse ioFog and Eclipse Kanto.
To learn more about how to get involved with Eclipse IoT, Edge Native, Sparkplug, or other working groups at the Eclipse Foundation, visit the Foundation’s membership page. Working group members benefit from a broad range of services, including exclusive access to detailed industry research findings, marketing assistance, and expert open source governance.
For further IoT & edge-related information, please visit iot.eclipse.org.
About the Eclipse Foundation
The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organisations with a business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. We host the Eclipse IDE, Adoptium, Software Defined Vehicle, Jakarta EE, and over 425 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, specifications, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, open processor designs, and many others. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, the Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 350 members. To learn more, follow us on social media @EclipseFdn, LinkedIn, or visit eclipse.org.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
###
Media contacts:
Schwartz Public Relations for the Eclipse Foundation, AISBL (Germany)
Gloria Huppert, Franziska Wenzl
EclipseFoundation@schwartzpr.de
+49 (89) 211 871 - 70 / - 58
Nichols Communications for the Eclipse Foundation, AISBL
Jay Nichols
+1 408-772-1551
514 Media Ltd for the Eclipse Foundation, AISBL (France, Italy, Spain)
Benoit Simoneau
M: +44 (0) 7891 920 370