'Everything Can Have IoT Eventually'

Last week, Ericsson released its new forecast for Internet of Things connectivity, predicting there will be 3.5 billion IoT cellular connections for 2023, nearly double its forecast from last fall.

To executives at vendors and solution providers, reports like this help underline their belief that the impact IoT will have on the world will be far and wide. At last month's IoT World 2018 conference in Santa, Clara, Calif., CRN caught up with executives and product leaders at Google, Cisco, Juniper, AT&T, Avnet, Cambium Networks and Comtech Telecommunications Corp. to ask them where they see the next biggest opportunities in IoT.

In their answers, some focused on the big picture: "As the price of the device falls, as the compute power goes up, as these incredible networks come out with extremely low costs and low latency and low power, everything can have IoT eventually," Lou Lutostanski, Avnet's vice president of IoT, said.

While others focused on specific applications: " The general category that we see having huge potential is asset tracking," Brian Salisbury, vice president of product management at Comtech, said.

What follows are the answers from seven tech executives on where they see IoT's biggest opportunities.