The hyperscale cloud providers are looking at Internet of Things (IoT) offerings and connectivity amid a swath of emerging technologies – and according to a new note from ABI Research, cloud suppliers will grow their share of IoT data and analytics management revenues from $6 billion (£4.6bn) to $56bn (£43bn) in the next six years.

The way to do this, the analyst firm notes, is through partnerships. As ABI sees it, public cloud vendor revenues, while impressive, still come primarily through streaming, storage, and data orchestration. Analytics services across cloud vendors, however, are less differentiated – and therefore the need for collaboration is key for now.

One area in which public clouds are doing it for themselves is through streaming. ABI said this was the one analytics technology that all cloud vendors were building into their solution portfolios; Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle all touting proprietary offerings while Cloudera, Teradata et al were building solutions leveraging open source technology.

Ultimately, a lot of strategy right now is focused on co-opetition in the IoT space. AWS and Azure, for instance, have partnered with Seeq for its advanced analytics capabilities, while Oracle, Cisco, and Huawei are expanding their edge portfolio.

“The overall approach shown by cloud suppliers in their analytics services reflects the dilemma they face in the complex IoT partnership ecosystem,” said Kateryna Dubrova, ABI research analyst. “Effectively, do they rely on partners for analytics services, or do they build analytics services that compete with them?

“Ultimately, businesses are moving to an analytics-driven business model which will require both infrastructure and services for continuous intelligence,” Dubrova added. “Cloud vendor strategies need to align with this reality to take advantage of analytics value and revenues that will transition to predictive and prescriptive solutions.”

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