New Delhi: The emerging 'Internet of Things' (IoT), or devices which can communicate with one another without human intervention, offer huge business opportunities over the long term, technology research firm Gartner has said.

However, diversity of current 'Internet of Things' applications fails to make a compelling business case to explore or commit resources to this emergent area now, a report by Gartner has said.

The Internet of Things extends the role of Internet to encompass an increasingly diverse range of devices and communications streams, many of which will be essentially machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, Gartner said.

M2M technology allows a device to capture, process and send information via a network that can then act on the data.

"The volume of opportunities arising from the Internet of Things over the long term is generally agreed to be in the realm of very large to huge," said Stephen Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

Business leaders find the diversity of current Internet of Things applications fails to make a compelling business case to explore or commit resources to this emergent area, it said.

"Manufacturing opportunities, deployment, activation and ongoing management of millions of devices, and the analytical opportunities arising from massive streams of potentially real-time information all represent huge untapped business opportunities," the report said.

Business and IT leaders should explore these developments, and focus not on what is new and different, but look more closely at what is essentially the same as existing business processes, it said.

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