Remote monitoring, preventive maintenance, and asset tracking are the top three uses for IoT (Internet of Things) technology, according to a survey from Particle, which describes itself as the world's largest IoT platform.

The findings came as part of a survey of 800 IoT professionals that asked questions about the challenges and opportunities of IoT technology, which is expected to have a total economic impact of up to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025.

Companies in industries such as technology, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and agriculture were most bullish about IoT. Respondents in those industries expected their compay to reap at least $1 million in revenue from their IoT products.

The top use cases for the technology were remote monitoring (33.3%), preventive maintenance (23.2%), asset tracking (14%), consumer product (12.3%), consumer fulfillment (7.6%), other (6.6%), and compliance (2.9%).

Preventive maintenance systems can produce up to 545% return on investment for businesses, while asset tracking systems can improve workforce utilization by 40%, according to the survey.

Tasks that can be easily done with IoT technology include collecting and storing data generated by devices (20%), visualizing data (23%), and vendor election (23%). Taskes that are hard to accomplish include debugging devices (55%), delivering software updates to edge devices (40%), and reducing bandwidth consumption (36%).

"Over-the-air firmware updates and remote diagnostic functionality are a vital component of any IoT platform," said Jeff Eiden, senior product manager at Particle. "Companies should test these features out before investing in any IoT platform."

IoT technology is becoming much more global. The number of devices has increased more around urban areas, but can also be found in rural territory. More than 170,000 developers have deployed Particle devices around the globe.