Appendix
A deeper look at selected segment data
Respondents to our 2023 IoT on Arm survey broadly agreed on some of the most pressing issues of IoT development today. Each slice of the data, however, comes with its own interesting insights. For example, smart home respondents – competing in a hyper-competitive market – appear frustrated by delayed access to new technologies.
A lack of standards – usually in emerging applications – can slow development, since it's much easier to design a product around, say, a common networking protocol than have to develop one to accommodate your design. This too looms larger for smart-home developers.
Often technology races ahead of standards or governmental policy. This is the nature of innovation. In the dynamic smart home sector, innovators more than any of the other groups we surveyed see laws and regulations as a challenge.
In comparing the smart-home sector to the industrial sector, there are some subtle differences and some not-so-subtle differences. For example respondents in both sectors agree that the top three technologies most impact IoT development are, in order, 5G technology, the metaverse and machine learning technologies. That's probably not surprising.
But how do they think they can get there fastest, speeding time to market (TTM)? Subtle and not-subtle shows up here. Smart home developers are keen on better software performance as a priority (top right) in the time-to-market race, whereas industrial resopndents prioritize virtual hardware protoyping (bottom right).
Security and trust are now cornerstones of any digital development. In the past five years, the industry, through standards such as PSA Certified has embraced the concept of cradle-to-end-of-life security. More work needs to be done, of course, as cyber criminals never sleep, but the progress has been significant. We found subtle differences in the rationale as seen in various charts on the following pages between the smart home and industrial respondents in how they view the importance of security and security priorities internally. Innovators in both sectors see security as an important intangible business consideration rather than a tangible one.
Industrial respondents see customer trust as a more important aspect than their smart home counterparts, while smart home respondents place higher priorities around minimizing reputational damage and maintaining the integrity of their business models.
The recent PSA Certified 2023 Security Report found that the increased urgency around security is such that investments in every area from development to design to third-party certification and incident response planning is up year on year.
The increase in cyberattacks on IoT devices is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, with more than 2.5 billion global events since 2019.
How does having security and trust in your products positively impact your bottom line?
Smart-home respondents are generally slightly more keen than their Industrial colleagues about how much of a priority security is in certain areas. Since most of their customers are consumers, they're very concerned about product liability (read lawsuits) and how security breaches can damage their brands.
This tracks with findings in the PSA Certified 2023 Security Report in which loss of customers is the biggest concern among companies if a product were to suffer a security failure.
The first two months of 2023 saw a 41% increase in cyberattacks targeting IoT devices, with an average of almost 60 attacks per organization per week targeting IoT devices.
How much of a priority is security? (High or very high)
In electronics, engineers and developers have long embraced the idea of innovating on a single architecture. Building devices and systems on the same processor architecture offers compatibility, performance optimization, ecosystem support, cost efficiency, and improved security and reliability. It provides a standardized and cohesive platform for development and deployment.
Both the industrial and smart-home sectors broadly agree on the importance of building solutions on the same processor architecture and various reasons for choosing to build on Arm. Charts on the following pages delves more deeply into their reasons.
Of note is that industrial respondents are much more interested in software compatibility as a reason for choosing the same architecture. This likely is linked to the long lifetime of in-field industrial software applications. Software re-use is slightly more important for smart home developers, perhaps because of the broad array of devices they're creating.
In Arm's case, its architecture is like an encyclopedia of functions. Each class of processor core brings both basic and specialist functions to the table. Arm certifies partner designs … uphold the Arm engineers' security principles and original design intent.
Why is it important that your products are based on the same architecture?
Innovating on Arm provides flexibility, access to future technology, software innovation opportunities, a supportive ecosystem, potential for revolutionizing computing, and energy efficiency advantages. That's Arm's argument, and you'd expect that from the company. But respondents see immense value from their perspective as well.
Both sectors broadly agree on a number of factors, such as ML capabilities and ability to scale innovations quickly. But industrial respondents see Arm as the best pathway toward meeting industry standards by more than 2:1.
Arm is the most pervasive processor architecture in the world, with more than 250 billion Arm-based chips shipped.
Why are you building on Arm?
