Research by Telsyte found Australian enterprises are looking to 5G networks to help drive business development and expect the number of connected devices within their organisations to increase five-times by 2024.

The 5G enterprise market is forecast to generate an estimated AUD45 billion ($31.1 billion) in value per year by the mid-2020s. The economic gains will come from next-generation application development, IT services, platforms and connectivity.

A survey by the research company found 68 per cent of IT and business leaders see 5G as crucial for their business strategy going forward. Half of these respondents indicated it will be important for future development as well as supporting existing services.

Future services are expected to make use of the large data transfer capabilities, more reliable connectivity and lower latency 5G will offer, providing an opportunity to change software architectures to account for real-time services and cloud-based AI architectures, the company stated.

The top three barriers to 5G investment cited were integration with current systems (34 per cent); a lack of business cases (23 per cent); and security concerns (17 per cent). A lack of skills is also an issue with more than 25 per cent indicating they will be looking for an outsourcing partner for developing services.

Nearly half of businesses surveyed expect the number of connected devices running on internal systems to jump at least five-fold within five years. Telsyte said the surge is fuelling innovation and experimentation in the IoT segment. It found one in four companies have IoT-capable devices, but no formal strategy around them.