[SatNews] The International M2M Council (IMC) announces the organization has grown to more than 10,000 members in just 18 months of operations, almost entirely comprised of individual OEMs, enterprise users, and applications developers that purchase IoT solutions.

The IMC has used the new breadth of its membership rolls to complete the first in a series of surveys, called the Quarterly IoT Buyers’ Index, which will track the buying patterns of its members over time to provide trending data for the nascent technology sector known as the Internet of Things or machine-to-machine communications. Some of the highlights of the IMC’s first Quarterly IoT Buyers’ Index include…

• Enterprise users are lagging behind OEMs and developers in both the immediacy and size of their plans for IoT deployments
• Applications developers heavily favour cellular and short-range connectivity for IoT rollouts
• The industry sectors most interested in deploying IoT solutions over the next six months are healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing
• The energy sector turns to systems integrators, while manufacturing firms use device makers, and the retail sector goes to software providers when considering IoT

IMC Adopter Members are individual associates that come from eight vertical markets, with just under 30 percent coming from Europe, just under 30 percent from North America, and the remainder spread out around the globe. In addition to research, the IMC publishes case studies, white papers, vertical-market newsletters, an interactive membership directory, and blogs for its Adopter Members, as well as providing promotional platforms and thought leadership opportunities for its Sustaining Member companies.

Executive Comment

“The 10,000-member threshold is a major achievement. It will provide a statistically significant base for the quantitative research that we provide, which includes not just data about buying patterns, but also crucial demographic information about the members and ad hoc queries into important subjects like security and low-power IoT,” said Alex Brisbourne, Chairman of the IMC and CEO of KORE Telematics, a provider of cellular connectivity for IoT applications. "We’re gaining close to 300 new Adopter Members every week, entirely through inbound programs—they’re coming to us—so it’s clear that there is a hunger for the kind of information we’re providing.”