No one doubts that the future belongs to the Internet of Things. From drones to refrigerators, from massive industrial robots to tiny, implanted medical devices, machines already are communicating with other machines, sharing data and, without human guidance, accomplishing ever more sophisticated tasks. Gartner predicts that there will be more than 6.4 billion connected “things” in use this year, and forecasts that the IoT will encompass 21 billion things by 2020 – almost three devices for every human being on the planet. In the manufacturing sector alone, market intelligence firm IDC expects the IoT market to grow to about $100 billion by 2018, a five-year combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%.