IoT Platforms End User Satisfaction Report 2019

The IoT Platforms End User Satisfaction Report 2019 is part of IoT Analytics’ ongoing coverage of IoT Platforms (IoT Platforms Research Workstream). The information presented in this report is based on an extensive survey with IoT Platform end-users conducted between January 2019 and March 2019.

The purpose of this report is to inform other market participants, most notably other current or future platform end-users as well as vendors, about the needs and processes of end-users, identify which platforms are best-in-class, and profile the leading companies based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Survey participants were randomly selected and their knowledge independently verified. To ensure complete objectivity, IoT Analytics did not alter or supplement any survey results and also did NOT accept any participation from platform end-users that were suggested from third-parties (e.g., customers from specific vendors).

IoT Platforms continue to be a hot topic for the Internet of Things (IoT). The global IoT platform market is growing quickly and hundreds of IoT Platform providers are looking to address this market opportunity, resulting in a diverse and complex competitive landscape.

For end users it can be difficult to select the right platform for their needs with some mentioning “There are so many platforms, we don’t even know where to start”, “What categories should we evaluate these platforms on?”, and “Every platform says the same thing and they all claim they can do everything – but who is really good and at what?”.

The aim of this study is to enhance transparency of the overall IoT Platforms market and put a valid ranking in place that shows which are the “leading” platforms with highest user satisfaction and why. The study ranks the best IoT Platforms based on 800+ data points from actual users of various IoT Platforms.

The study shows that Amazon AWS IoT is the best IoT Platform globally by end-user satisfaction. Users praise their various IoT services, particularly Analytics and Device Management and mention other stand-out aspects such as “usability”. Microsoft Azure IoT also scored “best-in-class” on several aspects, including “security features”.

In addition to the overall ranking, the study aims to show how the picture changes when just looking at industrial end-users, telecoms end-users and examines how startups & SMEs stack up against the “big guys”. Detailed IoT Platform profiles are included for each provider showing overall customer satisfaction, hosting options, main platform usage types, top use cases, and more.

Strengths and weaknesses of the leading platforms across different 7 purchasing criteria (e.g., Completeness of offering, Usability, Support, etc.) and 5 technical layers (e.g., Application Enablement, Cloud Storage & Services, Device Management, etc.) are analysed.

End-users provided comments on what they like most and least about each platform and the comments were compiled to give a better understanding of the customer satisfaction rating of the platform.

In addition, the study takes an in-depth look at how end-users go about choosing a platform and shows what end-users do with the platforms, how they host them, which use cases they implement and how happy they are with the results. All platform results are presented in a range of tables to make them easily comparable.

Methodology:

Objectivity. This survey has been designed to be as objective as possible. All respondents were randomly chosen from locations across the world and no responses were routed through any particular IoT Platform Vendors.

Sample size n>=10. The initial survey was designed so that respondents could chose from any of 50 major IoT Platforms. After having collected answers for 2 months the survey was closed and those platforms with n<10 answers were not included in the final ranking. 25 out of the 50 platforms made the cut. While there is data for all of the other 25 platforms, only those that qualify as SME&startups were ranked in a separate “SME&Startup” ranking (12 companies).

Survey participants had 50 IoT Platforms to choose from. The respondents in the IoT Platforms end-user satisfaction study were not provided with a definition of what an IoT Platform is. Rather, survey participants were presented with a list of vendors that market an “IoT Platform” that falls into the definition below. If they were knowledgeable about this platform, they were asked to give their feedback on the IoT offering.

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