With the enterprise IoT market reported to have grown 13% year-on-year in 2025 and 14% growth expected this year, it’s clear that significant momentum lies behind the US$324 billion market, according to IoT Analytics. A significant part of this expansion is because of the rise of intelligence at the edge, which is empowering automated and autonomous devices to not only collect and transmit data but to process it at the edge and enable action to be taken. However, today the firm says that only 1% of IoT devices have a true intelligent computing component, although that share is accelerating rapidly.

This means developers and engineers are under increasing pressure to design and bring to market devices that have greater intelligent edge capabilities than ever before. The goal of enabling intelligent decision making at the edge has moved from being a long-term aim to an urgent and mission critical need. If your competitor brings intelligent edge devices to market while you’re still assessing strategy, they may take a lead that cannot be caught up. Customers now expect devices that are responsive, scalable and adaptable across a wide range of deployment situations.

This presents a radical shift away from designing compact, cheap devices with limited functionality. The current generation continues to demand this but with added edge intelligence capabilities. That creates significant development challenges as designers and engineers assess how to add intelligent edge capabilities, supporting memory, power supply optimization and scalability. Hardware teams need to accelerate traditional device design processes to meet the time pressures they are under.

Platforms for edge intelligence

One approach being widely adopted today is to develop platforms that are easy-to-deploy and flexible, and which use open source technologies. These platforms can address all the fundamental hardware needs from form factor to processing power, to energy consumption and intelligent edge hardware and provide the basis for enterprises’ IoT devices. With a solid, reliable, secure and flexible platform in place, enterprises can layer on their core product ideas in the form of software, rather than focusing on developing the foundational hardware base.

Smart development platforms, such as those available from Quectel, play a key role here by combining the fundamental ingredients of powerful processing and rich connectivity with open ecosystems and single, accessible development board. Smart development boards enable rapid prototype testing and simplified iteration of new ideas. The goal is to save time and money as robotics and intelligent edge devices are developed.

This topic was explored in a recent Quectel Masterclass titled ‘Edge intelligence with Quectel smart development boards: A new approach to IoT development’. The Masterclass, which can be viewed here, details current trends in edge intelligence, open source adoption and robotics.

Chavis Chen, Section Manager in the IoT Application Development Department at Quectel, and Jay Nagdeo, PDM for Smart Modules and Smart Solutions EMEA at Quectel, share how to ensure an optimal developer experience in this new era and introduce new Quectel smart development boards and demos. These include Quectel’s latest smart development board, the Pi H1 SBC (SG565D), which is based on Qualcomm’s QCS6490 octa-core 64-bit processor, with 12 TOPS of computing power, and Qualcomm’s Adreno 643L GPU. The Masterclass also assesses use cases for intelligent edge, including robotics, industrial controls, multimedia terminals, digital signage, intelligent security and industrial PDAs.