The global market for wide-area RTA trackers, comprising low-power IoT trackers attached to returnable transport assets (RTAs) like multi-usage crates and containers, will reach 117.3 million connections by 2027, according to analyst house ABI Research. The projected rise is spurred mostly by the increasing availability of IoT-focused cellular wide-area network (WAN) technologies like NB-IoT and LTE-M, plus related LTE-based cat-1 and cat 4, it said.
This is the second headline stat from ABI Research to promote a new report by ABI analyst Tancred Talyor on the state of the broader RTA market; at the end of last year, Taylor said the market for condition-based monitoring sensors will reach 277 million connections by 2026, as the tech-mix to connect them multiplies and flexes, and solution vendors and enterprise users put focus on business outcomes rather than just technologies.
In both cases, the analyst firm has failed to supply a start figure or comparison for the forecast. But both times its argument is that notable growth is coming as the IoT market continues to mature. The broad IoT market – covering short- and long-range IoT solutions – has started to collaborate better, as technology has improved and moved into the background, it has said. It said wide-area RTA trackers have seen “significant shipments in the past two years”.
Taylor said: “Increasingly, solution providers have moved away from taking a technology-first approach and are letting hardware and implementation architecture choices be dictated by the desired outcomes. This has led to greater flexibility in how RTA solutions are implemented and in how adopters can think of returns on their technology investments based on present-day needs and their longer-term digitization strategy.”
Cellular WAN serves only a “small proportion” of RTA connectivity, but works well also in gateways and parent devices to get signals from short-range wireless (SRW) devices back to the cloud. As such, cellular low-power WAN (LPWAN) tech has been welcomed as an important addition to the industry’s broad IoT solution portfolio, featuring in both open-loop and closed-loop supply chains, especially where goods flow out of private network setups
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Taylor commented: “The most important reasons for growth come from an enhanced understanding of the multiplicity of use-cases subsets of RTA tracking, a diverse ecosystem of solution providers, and the role of software in helping enterprises achieve those outcomes… Increasingly, solution providers are looking to aggregate data from numerous edge and enterprise sources to feed an RTA tracking solution.
“IoT RTA tracking tools are crucial not only… to optimise RTA pool sizes and speeds but also to upgrade visibility into more supply chain metrics. As companies expand their understanding of what is possible from RTA tracking, IoT solutions become more complicated and valuable. This creates great market dynamics in which IoT and software innovators can operate.”
Taylor features prominently in a new editorial report and webinar episode from Enterprise IoT Insights about the state of IoT tracking in the supply-chain sector, which presents a classic tale of industrial IoT on steroids, in the mega-sized and mega-varied supply-chain sector. The report says the IoT sector has grown up, finally; that its technology has advanced and its vendor community is more pragmatic.
Indeed, it finds asset tracking is a boom business, but also that this new tech maturity comes with a stark reality, and a brand new challenge: that IoT is just another siloed niche data-capture tool, which must be integrated across individual enterprises and entire supply chains. Click on the image below to access the new Enterprise IoT Insights report on IoT in the logistics industry.
