4. IoT Drives Acquisitions And Spending Plans – And Raises Security Questions

Bain forecasts that by 2020 annual revenue for suppliers of Internet of Things hardware, software and comprehensive solutions will exceed $470 billion. In 2016, however, the IoT market was more potential than reality.

IoT, nevertheless, was big news this year because it was a major driver of IT industry activity, from blockbuster acquisitions and partnerships, to big-bucks product development initiatives.

Cisco's $1.4 billion acquisition of cloud-based IoT services provider Jasper Technologies in February was an early example. In October Qualcomm, looking to expand its IoT sales reach, moved to buy NXP Semiconductors for a whopping $47 billion. And Verizon expanded its IoT technology portfolio by acquiring Fleetmatics for $2.4 billion and IoT startup Sensity.

On the development side, Google launched Android Things, an IoT operating system, to accelerate IoT application development. SAP vowed to spend $2.2 billion over the next five years on IoT technology initiatives. And Intel, betting big on IoT, launched an IoT platform for managing network device connectivity and security, and debuted the E3900 Series of Atom processors for IoT applications.

But not all the IoT news was bullish. In October Internet performance management company Dyn was hit by a massive distributed denial-of-service attack launched from thousands of unprotected networked devices. By year's end vendors, security analysts and government security experts were raising the alarm about the potential security risks of IoT.