When it comes to internet of things, open systems rule for Australian decision makers.

That's the verdict of new IDC research, which shows IoT decision makers are putting a high priority on open standards for data and connectivity – deemed extremely or very important by 81% of organisations – and on open source software standards (63%).

Jamie Horrell, IDC research manager, says the results are ‘unsurprising'.

“IoT will be an open ecosystem of horizontally specialised players, bringing their own best of breed technology to the table,” Horrell says.

“Open standards are critical to interoperability and it would be a bold move to rely on proprietary standards or vertically integrated players to deliver operational transformation.

IDC is forecasting the total Australian IoT market to be worth more than $18 billion by 2020, with that money being spread across traditional vendors and vendors who traditionally are associated with operational and industrial technologies.

The company says freight monitoring, manufacturing operations and connected vehicles will be the top three applications of enterprise IoT spending by 2020.

“This is the crux of IoT,” Horrell says. “IoT is not about driving IT efficiency but rather operational efficiency.

“Applications like supply chain are obvious targets for this.

IDC is forecasting 2.7 million connected commercial vehicles in Australia come 2020, with a further 1.7 million pets and 1.8 million healthcare appliances connected, something the analyst firm says reinforces that IoT is about connecting things that weren't originally intended to be connected to the internet.

However, the move to IoT is still raising some concerns for enterprises, with security and privacy the biggest perceived inhibitors for local deployments.

IDC says the Australian public remains nervous about how data is treated following recent well publicised security breaches and attacks.