This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the largest ever, an extravaganza spanning eight halls and featuring over 2,100 exhibitors from 204 countries. MWC 16 provided attendees and the industry-at-large with both a high level picture of the current state of deployment issues, trends and use cases in the mobile and Internet of Things industries as well as a barometer of what to expect throughout 2016. The venue, the vendors and the sheer panoply of events and announcements highlight the emerging technology trends and challenges that will shape the mobile and IoT industries over the next several years.
Among the key IoT and mobility trends at this year’s MWC conference:
- Telecommunications was hot again, owing to the surging popularity of 5G and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) Networks.
- Security was among the most pervasive themes at the conference. Every aspect of security was covered at MWC from embedded sensors and devices to securing telecommunications/carrier transmissions to IoT secure messaging and applications, security at the edge/perimeter of the network and security in the cloud. At MWC 16, there was an acknowledgement that IoT security is a necessity at every layer of the stack and across every vertical market segment.
- Partnerships/Mergers and Acquisitions have a pivotal role to play in the burgeoning IoT market since no one vendor can address all aspects of interconnected ecosystems. Partnerships and alliances among the various players took center stage; among them were AT&T and Cisco; Intel and Microsoft; AT&T; Red Hat and AmDocs; Ericsson and ZTE and TeliaSonera to name just a few.
- Standards or the lack thereof in the IoT sector was another dominant theme at this year’s show. In response, MWC 16 saw several new IoT and connectivity standards groups emerge.
- Consumer IoT e.g. Wearables, Automotive/Connected Car and Smart Connected Home, were also extremely popular.
Big Data Analytics came into its own at MWC 16, as all of the major carrier and data players emphasized how they were transforming their products and solution offerings with the addition of embedded analytics capabilities, to enable customers to derive greater value via the ability to sort and analyze the vast amount of data they generate and ingest daily.oT was everywhere at MWC 16. Attendees literally could not walk 10 feet without seeing an IoT banner or witnessing a product or prototype demonstration. There were also numerous IoT announcements, partnerships and M&A activity talk at the MWC 16 conference. All of this activity is validation that IoT market development is accelerating – particularly among the hot consumer-based segments like Automotive, Smart Home and Wearables. However, widespread mainstream IoT enterprise deployments may still be 18 to 24 months away. This Report summarizes some of the most crucial announcements and provides context and analysis of their potential impact on both the vendor and enterprise landscape.