Forrester has issued a Forrester Wave report examining and ranking what it sees as the top 15 industrial IoT platforms, pronouncing C3IoT, Microsoft, IBM, PTC and SAP as leaders.
Forrester listed its 15 chosen vendors as being Amazon Web Services, Atos (Atos Codex IoT), Bosch (Bosch IoT Suite), C3 IoT (C3 IoT Platform and Applications), Cisco (Cisco Kinetic and Cisco Jasper), GE Digital (Predix), Hitachi (Lumada), IBM (Watson IoT Platform), Microsoft (Azure IoT), Oracle (Oracle IoT Cloud and Oracle IoT Applications), PTC (ThingWorx), SAP (SAP Leonardo IoT), Schneider Electric (EcoStruxure), Siemens (MindSphere), and Software AG (Cumulocity IoT).
Forrester says these were chosen based on the following criteria: a generally available industrial IoT software platform; a significant focus on the industrial domain and its use cases; native support for key industrial protocols; a robust international presence; strong Forrester client interest.
It then ranked these 15 vendors against 24 criteria that, it says were developed after “examining existing relevant research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews.”
These were grouped under three high-level categories: strength of Current offering; strength of the vendor’s strategic initiatives; market presence.
Forrester says its focus on industrial IoT platforms is in response to significant growth in the sector since its first look at the broader range of IoT platforms in 2016.
“Since then, much has changed in how industrial companies are transforming their businesses and how technology vendors have shaped their solutions to help” it says.
“In comparing our 2016 evaluation with today’s, we see that: industrial IoT is big, significant, and compelling enough to study alone, … The public cloud is the place to be, … user interfaces are modern, seamless, and API-backed, … Analytics are a core component of the platform solution, … The IoT silo is going away, … The digital twin has arrived, and augmented reality is on the way [and] … platform vendors are shifting from building blocks to finished results.
Both IBM and C3 celebrated their inclusion in the leader’s category with press releases showing the Forrester Wave diagram and the offer of a complimentary copy of the Forrester Wave report.
