While the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has many investors and innovators enamored with hardware development so they can churn out millions of their own IoT-connected devices, wise industry insiders are uncovering the true IoT goldmine: data exchange services. Data sharing, exchanging and selling is rapidly coming to define the IoT market more than anything else, and investors are quickly hopping on board to cash in on this new phenomenon.

So how exactly are the industry leaders of tomorrow tapping into data exchange services to fuel their success? How will recent developments in data exchange services impact IoT development, and what steps should sensible IoT developers take now to capitalize on them?

Mining digital gold

Recent advances in computing have made data mining a lucrative field in and of itself, but when it’s combined with the IoT, which produces dizzying amounts of data each day thanks to its billions of devices, it becomes a virtual gold mine. As more companies and individuals alike come to realize the immense value in the data their devices are hoarding, they’ll realize how they can exploit that information for profit, exchanging it with and selling it to others in the market.

The IoT-related companies which will be successful in tomorrow’s market will be those which best create monetization platforms for their data, using innovative thinking to generate platforms and programs capable of rifling through immense mountains of information and selling the best, most valuable bits to eager customers. While many of today’s familiar industries like accounting or marketing fear being radically disrupted by automating robots, the real change will come from the data that propels the hardware, not the machines themselves.

Plenty of research has already been accrued about data being a vital business asset; when combined with innovative changes to the market like the recent big-data explosion, however, this research becomes much more valuable. Most of today’s IoT spending takes place within a few key industries such as manufacturing, mining, or transportation, but due to a forthcoming deluge of new products, data-intensive business is about to become commonplace in every field.

As this data becomes significantly more valuable to corporations large and small alike, they’ll likely take steps to clamp down access to it to preserve their competitive edge. Tomorrow’s IoT development may be stifled by a lack of access to data in such a case, meaning it will be the job of innovative startups to provide new and effective methods of not only collecting and analyzing data, but dispersing it to the customers who will need it as an economic good.

The future of the IoT

As literally billions of low-tech gadgets proliferate across the globe, the real money in the IoT industry will then come from data management and services, rather than gadget development. It will always be critical for new hardware to come to the market so as to revolutionize how data specifically is collected, but the true business opportunity will be in hoarding and selling that crucial information which will come to drive the economy more so than ever before.

Massive corporations like telecommunications firms, which possess the anonymized data of millions of their individual customers, will be able to dedicate entire branches of their operations to collecting and selling that customer data to third party sources who may find it invaluable in their own fields. This in turn will undoubtedly spur further privacy concerns when it comes to the IoT, a phenomenon which is gaining the attention of consumers and developers alike.

ABI Research has already covered many of the would-be trendsetters of tomorrow, such as Gemalto, which aims to pioneer the data exchange services industry in hopes of gaining an early stranglehold on the market. Their report covers the forthcoming data exchange service industry in detail, and highlights many of the opportunities current IoT developers are exploiting in hopes of shaking up the industry.

We’ll come to see some interesting developments in the IoT field when it comes to data in only a few years; massive companies will come to understand there’s real value in sharing and exchanging data with their competitors under certain circumstances, and further developments in machine learning will only increase computer’s abilities to sort through treasure troves of data for the valuable bits.

As data exchange services come to not only join, but really supplant many existing facets of the IoT, keen industry insiders eager to bet on the right horse are ponying up the funds needed to own tomorrow’s data service leaders. Whether their gamble on the value of data will pay off remains to be seen, but undoubtedly the future of IoT development will largely be driven by new insights into data and the opportunities surrounding it.