The Internet of Things explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade.

This is the word from global analyst firm International Data Corporation, who says that although the billions of endpoints or connected ‘things' will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the datacenter will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential.

According to new IDC research, installed service provider datacenter capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.

"Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacenter will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context," says Rick Villars, vice president, data center and cloud for IDC.

 "Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacenter itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices."

Without question, IDC says IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacenters, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. “The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that datacenter capacity ends up residing in service provider datacenters,” the company says.

Additional findings from IDC's research include the following: •    IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge •    The growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that hyperscale datacenters are a major component of most IoT service offerings by 2019 •    IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks •    Service providers will adopt IoT technologies (Smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own datacenter assets (Smart Datacenters)