Over the last 12 months BLE beacons/iBeacons have caught the zeitgeist and emerged as a key anchor technology in combining disparate elements of the retail technology market into a cohesive ecosystem that is expected to bring huge benefits in terms of analytics, customer experience and loyalty, operational efficiencies, increased based sizes and a whole new advertising medium. Certainly this is a huge green field opportunity that represents a much bigger and better one than the first generation of LBS services enabled by consumer-grade GPS.
As big as this opportunity is, there are many other markets that will generate even bigger volumes of BLE beacon shipments over the next 5 years, with new, unique opportunities for start-ups in this space. Already, BLE beacons are being deployed for applications and verticals that many had not considered. To attempt to quantify the total market at this early stage would risk significantly underestimating the total opportunity. This report aims to quantify the size of four key verticals, where BLE beacons will have a huge impact, namely:
• Retail
• Commercial/Enterprise
• Personal Location and Asset Tracking
• Connected Home