The worldwide internet of things (IoT) market is expected to grow 19% this year alone, according to a new report from IDC.

The analyst firm's second annual forecast shows manufacturing and digital signage will be the big winners.

Digital signage use in retail outlets is expected to grow from US$6.0 billion in  2013 to US$27.5 billion in 2018 – a 37.5% five-year compound annual growth rate.

The IoT market in manufacturing operations will grow from $42.2 billion in 2013 to $98.8 billion in 2018, a five-year CAGR of 18.6%, with growth driven by ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and link islands of automation.

The forecast focuses on growing IoT use in 11 vertical industries, including consumer, retail, healthcare, government, manufacturing and transportation.

Last month, IDC noted that old data centers could hinder IoT expansion.

IDC says although the billions of endpoints or connected ‘things' will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the data center will be critical for IoT services to reach full potential.

The company says its research shows installed service provider data center capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.

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

“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 data center itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices,” Villars says.

IDC says ‘without question' IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger data centers, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure.

The study shows IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge.