To gather insights for DZone's 2016 Internet of Things (IoT) Research Guide, scheduled for release in June, 2016, we spoke to 10 executives, from 9 companies, who develop IoT devices or help clients do so.

Here's who we talked to:

Craig McNeil, Managing Director of IoT, Accenture |Prathap Dendi, General Manager, AppDynamics | Aaron Lint, Vice President of Research, Arxan | Rod McLane and Justin Ruiz, Marketing, Ayla Networks | Mikko Jarva, CTO, Comptel | Mathieu Baissac, Vice President Product Manager, Flexera | Tony Paine, CEO, Kepware | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Tom Hunt, CEO, Windspring |

Here’s what they told us when we asked, “How do you define the ‘Internet of Things?’“

• As hardware is becoming software, anything that connects to the Internet.
• Seamlessly connecting anything allowing appropriate information to flow. Enterprises benefit by remote access monitoring, servicing, and aggregating data from multiple sites.
• A physical connection to the internet. Revolutionizing many industries with data. Connectivity anywhere with distributed computing.
• Transferring data from one location to another.
• Connected devices sharing data.
• We can model anything with an IP address and a way to talk to it through an API interface. Put the network around it and interact with it in a sandbox.
• Ability of things that contain embedded technology to sense, communicate, and collaborate with other things thus creating a network of physical objects.
• Where ever application logic is monitoring core business by watching all the lines of code to improve performance for customers to help monitor and plan business around capacity (i.e., scale-up). The edge computing layer is core to the promise of IoT. Sensors and actuators perform application logic.

Does your definition of IoT different from those above?