We are back for another fresh start, wondering where IoT will take us over the next year. In 2024, AI was at the top of the hype cycle, and while it’s not going anywhere, I predict the top trends in IoT, Edge, and connected digital twins will be rooted in performance improvements and increased standardization.  That said, here are my top four prognostications for the future of IoT in 2025. 

1. Power and Efficiency Gains

Like most innovations, the first versions are cool but often clumsy and inefficient behind the scenes. In 2025, we will see innovative offerings from the last few years update themselves with less exciting features but more bang for the buck. Often this means internal components will be replaced with more energy-efficient computers reducing power while responding faster. We will see recent battery technologies inserted into these models adding tremendous value to IoT solutions as they last longer in the field with less maintenance. Finally, it’s startling to look at the source code running on many of these devices and the opportunity to improve that performance. Whether it’s rewriting bad code, switching the underlying computer language, and compiling with different flags there has been a huge amount of waste in initial software best efforts. Many businesses will see awesome gains just by diving back into the firmware and doing a few sprints on performance.

1. Software Sovereignty

For many years there has been a push to enforce computer chip hardware production in certain countries and data storage sovereignty. It has driven massive investment in both regional data centers and chip fabrication. Interestingly, we rarely see laws requiring software development within certain borders. In 2025, expect to see this change, with RFPs specifically asking where product development is done. This will directly impact IoT whether it’s open source contributions or IoT platform companies with national ties.  It will indirectly impact many others with their outsourcing and support strategies.    

3. Macro Patterns 

IoT has been plagued with too many standards and patterns. Developers’ heads have been spinning trying to decide between OPC-UA, MQTT, RCP, REST or COAP only to bump into vendors like Amazon and Microsoft that have forced sub-patterns for authentication, topic usage and downstream targets. Then you dig into the mess that is data formatting patterns that exist between hardware vendors that use Modbus, LoRaWAN, or BACnet and the struggle of innovation and maintenance darkens further. In 2025, meta-patterns will emerge that include all of these standards with a common interface. The hyperscalers will be slow to join as it reduces their lock-in but things can’t continue on the current path – it’s bad for everyone. Look to see macro patterns that bring all of these standards and patterns into a general architecture that can be used anywhere.  

4. Enterprise IoT over Cloud Service IoT 

I don’t have privy to anything internal at the big clouds, but from what I see in our offerings, pure cloud IoT offerings can never be truly sticky. Any customer who sufficiently grows their device count, message count, or data volume inexorably evaluates if they should stay on the public cloud service or go to a private offering. Cost, data ownership and the need for new innovations all drive this. Unlike many cloud services where it works to stay on basic or standard offerings no matter how big you grow, that model seems to break for IoT. While new start-ups and tire kickers will continue to onboard with Cloud service IoT, there will be a steady stream of mature migrators to private enterprise offerings.