The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade. Although the billions of endpoints or connected "things" will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the datacenter will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential. According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), installed service provider datacenter capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.

"Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacenter will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context," said Rick Villars, Vice President, Datacenter and Cloud. "Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacenter itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices."

Without question, IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacenters, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that datacenter capacity ends up residing in service provider datacenters.