As it turns out, there’s a good reason why Apple, eBay, Google, and others are all making definite moves on indoor location these days.
For starters, we’re looking at a $4 billion market (or more) by 2018.
The overall market of technology installations is forecast to break the 25,000 mark in 2014, while handsets capable of supporting indoor location will be in the hundreds of millions within two years. As a result, the major companies will start to make their moves.
In fact, they already are.
Today, the indoor location focus is on the retail space, but the potential in enterprise, corporate, and public venues is just as large, albeit with different drivers and inhibitors.
In ABI Research’s latest report, “Indoor Location for Commercial and Business Verticals,” key drivers such as corporate wellness, legislation, employee analytics, low-cost tags, BYOD, and security are all considered across 11 non-retail verticals.
“In the non-retail space, the current RTLS market is largely focused on tracking high-value or important items using high-accuracy and dedicated tags,” writes senior analyst, Patrick Connolly in a report summary. “But the ability to track connected devices and low-cost BLE tags will open up opportunities around staff analytics, visitor management, meeting scheduling, staff enterprise applications, building layout optimization, etc.
There is also huge potential in public-facing buildings like hospital, hotels, airports, schools, etc., resulting in over 40,000 installations of indoor location technologies in non-retail environments by 2019.”
The anticipated growth, not surprisingly, will be driven by new technologies.
ABI practice director, Dominique Bonte, says new technologies will, indeed, “give this market a major jolt in the arm.”
“Quuppa’s BLE technology and advances in Wi-Fi and small cell location will all better enable low-cost and high-accuracy across large buildings. IoE, wearables, and BYOD means there will be many more ways of tracking in the future, while the onset of low-cost BLE tags makes accurate asset tracking cost effective for all verticals, even consumers,” Bonte adds.
