Expanding Industrial IoT in 2025: Survey Reveals Growth
A new survey report by HiveMQ and IIoT World uncovers key trends shaping the Industrial IoT (IIoT) landscape in 2025. With 70% of organizations actively developing or deploying IIoT strategies, the data highlights the transformative potential of IIoT in industries like manufacturing, automotive, and energy. However, challenges like uncertain ROI and integration complexities still hinder widespread success.
This year’s findings emphasize the growing role of technologies like MQTT, Artificial Intelligence, and Unified Namespace (UNS) in bridging the OT/IT divide and driving scalability. For example, predictive maintenance—powered by AI—is now the top use case for 61% of organizations, reflecting an industry-wide push toward operational efficiency.
Download the report to explore how IIoT leaders are overcoming obstacles, leveraging cutting-edge protocols, and building scalable architectures for sustainable business impact.
Key Findings for IIoT Implementations
Here are a few highlights from the survey results:
Common Challenges: The top challenges are leadership/vision/management support, cybersecurity concerns, lack of skillset/training for existing staff, and Uncertain ROI.
Business Impact: IIoT is acknowledged for its significant positive impact on manufacturing KPIs like OEE, MTTR, MTBF, and other KPIs including asset utilization, energy efficiency, and cost reduction.
Top Protocols: MQTT and HTTP continue to be the preferred IIoT protocols while OPC UA and Modbus are the preferred Machine communication protocols. MQTT Sparkplug saw a marginal growth in adoption.
IIoT Adoption: 70% of surveyed companies have deployed or are developing an IIoT strategy.
AI on the Rise: 61% of the respondents identified predictive maintenance as the top AI use case, while 45% cited process optimization.
Unified Namespace Gaining Momentum: UNS is gaining steam as a foundational data framework for industrial systems, with adoption steadily growing.
Lack of Leadership Support for the IIoT Strategy
When it comes to who owns the IIoT strategy, the responses were varied. A quarter of survey respondents believed that executive leadership (25%) should own the project while another quarter of respondents (25%) believe that a project team combining both OT and IT expertise should spearhead the IIoT strategy.
The report offers some suggestions on how to achieve alignment by basing who owns IIoT strategy on business goals and objectives, while focusing on collaboration between both OT and IT teams to make it happen successfully. It also went over some of the challenges with adopting AI use cases. The biggest are data quality, integration with legacy systems, and ensuring data privacy.
At HiveMQ, we see customers aiming to improve ROI from their IIoT projects to share the value of these systems with the wider organization. We dive into this topic and other topics in detail in an upcoming webinar on January 28th, “Industrial Data Management Trends for 2025.” Join us to learn how building a data management platform will help save costs or increase revenue this year. Register now.
Technology Innovations Propel IIoT Success
Technology choices continue to play a crucial role in IIoT success, with MQTT emerging as a preferred edge to enterprise data protocol. Some of the reasons behind this adoption is that it's lightweight, bidirectional, and pub/sub based which makes it very efficient in moving data across the systems.
Looking ahead to trends in 2025, we’re seeing the resurgence of AI and Generative AI (GenAI), the continued implementation of digital twins, and the importance of Unified Namespace shaping the IIoT market. Scalability, reliability, and security continue to be the key tenets for long-term IIoT success.
Specifically on UNS, it is gaining traction because it is able to work with MQTT to enable use cases like real-time access to data, integration to legacy systems, scalability, and others which form the foundation for AI use cases to thrive.
To download this comprehensive overview of the current state of IIoT systems with valuable insights and recommendations, click the button below.
Ravi Subramanyan
Ravi Subramanyan, Director of Industry Solutions, Manufacturing at HiveMQ, has extensive experience delivering high-quality products and services that have generated revenues and cost savings of over $10B for companies such as Motorola, GE, Bosch, and Weir. Ravi has successfully launched products, established branding, and created product advertisements and marketing campaigns for global and regional business teams.
