Manufacturers expect IoT will be second only to cloud in terms of the transformative benefits it brings to the sector, a survey by Cisco shows.

The survey, which encompassed 600 manufacturers in 13 countries including Australia, found one in three respondents are looking to IoT for future business benefit.

Data analytics also ranked highly with respondents.

“The digital capabilities our respondents considered most important to transformation (cloud, M2M/IoT, and data analytics) will enable connected machines to reach their greatest potential,” Cisco said in an accompanying paper.

Those manufacturers looking to go down the IoT path saw the correlation between connected machine technologies and analytics.

“When asked which technologies are most critical in getting value (and creating value for customers) from connected machines, number one was analytics (31 percent),” Cisco said.

“This was significantly higher than the next most important technology, connected machine sensors.