Turkey
The Internet of Things (IoT) is moving slowly toward maturity in Turkey. But organizations still need to see clear, tangible returns on investment and evidence of how IoT can transform their businesses to commit seriously to a long-term project.
Only 30% or organizations foresee their IoT investment increasing by more than 20% in the coming 12-18 months and over 40% of organizations have no intention to increase their existing investment on IoT
IoT use cases in Turkey have mainly involved fleet tracking and vehicle monitoring. The development of Turkey’s public and network infrastructure, plus Smart City and Industry 4.0 initiatives, will lead to new IoT deployments
No dominant value proposition influences IoT investment or strategy, but the benefits include cost reduction, competitive differentiation, faster and better decision making, and improved customer experience.
A number of innovative companies in Turkey will soon start implementing IIoT by leveraging the intelligent connected devices in their factories. In fact, most multinational manufacturers in Turkey are looking to import smart manufacturing use cases that were previously tested in sites outside the country. In line with this goal, a few multinational manufacturers recently initiated pilot projects that include IIoT and other smart manufacturing enabler technologies (such as predictive maintenance, analytics, robotics, and cloud technologies). These pilot projects are expected to provide multinational organizations with greater efficiency, scalability, and cost savings in 2017. In the past, Turkish geothermal power plants — in partnership with GE — have also used IIoT to eliminate human error, reduce water wastage, and lower carbon dioxide emissions (and thereby improve their operations). This tactic as enabled these plants to save over $0.5 million annually. IDC expects similar use cases to be adopted in the future. With the wider adoption of IIoT, manufacturers in Turkey will break open data silos and connect all of their people, data, and processes from the factory floor to the corporate IT environment in order to enable faster decision making at the executive level. In 2017 and 2018, manufacturers will also focus on the integration of production-line components with internal IT systems. Combined with analytics, manufacturers will be able to optimize operations, diagnose problems, and rack inventory flows more effectively. Since IIoT will enable the faster and more efficient acquisition of greater amounts of data in the long run, business leaders will be able to get a fuller and more accurate view of their enterprises, which will allow them to make better decisions.
In 2016, IoT started to become an enabler of digital transformation across all verticals in Turkey, particularly across the manufacturing, transportation, and government verticals. For example, manufacturing giants reviewed their internal and external processes to optimize their supply chain operations through the use of IoT. Fleet management services and other IoT systems that monitor both vehicle conditions and driver behaviour also presented significant opportunities. However, despite these promising developments in the Turkish market, the local IoT landscape remained fragmented in 2016, with the disparate solutions, devices, and platforms offered by a range of vendors preventing the full value of IoT from being unlocked. Nevertheless, in 2017 and beyond, operators in Turkey will heavily invest in IoT platforms that enable centralized device monitoring, application development, and data management. These investments will allow them to build application services for various verticals such as banking, healthcare, and utilities on top of existing IoT systems and decrease the time to market for such services. In the past, telecom operators such as Turk Telekom also developed Smart City IoT platforms to provide various solutions such as smart home solutions, security systems, intelligent parking solutions, smart lighting solutions, and smart metering solutions. Even though IoT exists in a complex ecosystem and an end-to-end IoT application involves several technologies and entities, adopting platform approach will transform operators into collaborative partners for different types of organizations (such as vendors, platform providers, system integrators, app developers, and industry alliances, as well as niche technology companies and start-ups). This adoption trend will shape operator strategies in coming years and change the competitive dynamics in the whole Turkish IoT ecosystem.
