In this lesson, you will receive an overview of the key market trends and where to find the sources, so that you can leverage them for your own strategy development and communication. You will be able to explain the monetary and competitive opportunity of the Internet of Things. To give you some perspective on IOT being the next big thing, here's what analysts are predicting for the IOT market itself. IHS forecasts that the IOT market will grow from an installed base of 15.4 billion devices in 2015, to over 30.7 billion devices in 2020. And going out from there to 2025, up to 75.4 billion devices. Gartner forecast, that the total spending on endpoints and services in the IOT space, will reach almost two trillion dollars in 2017 alone. And it's a global growth. Regionally though, Greater China, North America, Western Europe are driving the use of connected things. When those three regions together represent 67 percent of all the over the of things installed base in 2017, that means other areas still have a lot of growth opportunity as well. Based on Gartner's numbers we will see the strongest increase in the consumer sector, but a lot of the revenue is coming in the industrial Internet of Things applications for the IOT vendors. So, how does this break down? Well, based on the IDC IOT's spending forecast from 2017, they are thinking that the largest sector investing into the Internet of Things, is actually the manufacturing industry. In 2016, that sector alone invested 178 billion dollars into the IOT space. Manufacturing is followed by transportation, and then by the utilities industries. Think about energy supply of water. And then, last but not least, the consumer industry itself is the fourth largest market for IOT spending. Remember, most IOT investments will go into the industrial Internet of Things first. But again, consumers are spending and we will see, not only the market opportunity, but also the data opportunity from the consumer sector. IOT is really a big business. Bay predicts that by 2020 the annual revenue could exceed 470 billion dollars for the IOT vendors selling the hardware, software and the comprehensive solutions. McKinsey consulting, estimates the total IOT market size in 2015 was up to 900 million dollars grow to 3.7 billion in 2020, and has a potential economic impact of 2.7 to 6.2 trillion dollars until 2025. General Electric, predicts investment in the industrial Internet of Things to expect to be over 60 trillion dollars in the next 15 years or so. We will really see this as a global phenomenon, where the Internet units installed base is growing tremendously, the business opportunities for the vendors are there, and of course the optimization potential for the organization using the technology is tremendous as well. So, who are the key technology providers for the Internet of Things? The IDC study from 2017 really outlines it quite nicely. Our team has created a detailed summary of the IDC report by vendors, as a resource for you. In short, in IDC's view, and IOT platform is a commercial software product, that offers some combination of the following capabilities, it connects to IOT at once, it manages IOT endpoints and identities, it ingests and process the IOT data, and then visualize and analyze the IOT data. The platform allows building IOT application, and it integrates the Internet of Things data into existing applications. Looking at that sector of combinations, IDC thinks that companies like Amazon, IBM, G.E, Microsoft, are really key drivers of the Internet of Things for industrial and as well as for the consumer side, as a platform vendor. It is clear the industrial Internet of Things is where the IT investments are going today. But we're seeing more and more consumer focused IOT implementations. As marketers, it's important to understand the opportunities in the industrial process and we will look at some examples. Ultimately, the areas where IOT provides the most immediate impact of our customer engagement, will be our focus for most of this course.