Ranking says Taiwan not prepared for IoT innovation

TAIWAN has ranked an unimpressive sixth in a new index ranking of 13 Asia-Pacific countries by how ready they are to continue adopting internet of things (IoT ) technology.

That’s five places behind archrival South Korea, which came in first place followed by Singapore and New Zealand in the report by market intelli- gence provider IDC, which did not include Japan.

“Many countries are fairly advanced in their IoT adoption across select sectors. Taiwan, for instance, is at the forefront of IoT implementation in the manufacturing sector as well as its smart city initiatives,” said IDC’s Shaily Shah, research manager for IoT.

But Shah warned that Tai- wan was lacking a comprehensive approach that would ensure the country had the talent it needed to stay competitive.

“However, for all-round readiness of IoT across the country, there is still scope for reducing the number of startup procedures for new businesses and gathering the relevant talent pool and work- force that can help facilitate these deployments.”

The same failings were identified by IDC’s Hugh Ujhazy, who said that as “IOT solutions driven [are] strongly by the availability of infrastructure, especially cloud, and access to universal connectivity and security, improvements in these IOT fundamentals along with an increased supply in skilled workers who can support strong analytics will see Taiwan rapidly ascend the overall county rankings.”

“The number of secure servers for Taiwan was lower than countries like Australia, Singapore, NZ and South Korea,” he said.

“Similarly, Taiwan ranked in the fourth quartile in terms of cloud spend even though it was top quartile for ease of doing business, global innovation index and second quartile for government effectiveness.”

He also pointed to the fact that Taiwan spent less on information communications technology per capita than neighbours like Hong Kong and Singapore did.