Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Gartner has issued its Magic Quadrant for industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms. It puts PTC with its Thingworx platform and Software AG’s Cumulocity ahead of the pack in the ‘visionaries’ quadrant, followed by Hitachi’s Lumada platform, but none of offerings assessed made it into the leaders or the challengers quadrants.
Gartner defines an in IIoT platform as “a set of integrated software capabilities to improve asset management decision making and operational visibility and control for plants, infrastructure and equipment within asset-intensive industries and environments.”
It differentiates them from legacy operational technology because of “their ability to cost-effectively collect higher volumes of high-velocity, complex machine data from networked IoT endpoints; to orchestrate historically siloed data sources to enable better accessibility (across the enterprise and with partners) [and] to improve insights and actions across a heterogeneous asset group through specialised analysis of the data.”
Gartner adds: “In some emerging use cases, the IIoT platform may obviate some OT functions, such as industrial control and automation or elements of human-machine interface (HMI) capabilities.”
Cumulocity has the vision
Cumulocity was ranked highest among visionaries, prompting Software AG to announce its achievement and provide access to the Magic Quadrant.
Software AG’s chief product officer, Dr Stefan Sigg, Software AG, said its ranking showed the potential for its breadth of technologies for successful IoT transformation to lead the IIoT market.
“For our customers, the approach of starting small and fast but thinking big and long-term makes it possible to innovate rapidly, while minimising risk and decreasing time to value,” he said.
Gartner said Cumulocity had been built and developed through several acquisitions, mainly of Cumulocity and webMethods products but also through other key capabilities.
Gartner notes Software AG has sharpened its focus on the IIoT marketplace by establishing a separate Digital Business Platform Cloud and IoT reporting segment and an IoT Centre of Excellence as an overlay to the global sales team. Also, this year Software AG introduced a separate business unit dedicated to IoT and analytics.
In Australia Telstra has used Cumulocity to build system to enable water utilities to gather and analyse information from digital water meters and other components of their infrastructure.
Thingworx built from acquisitions
PTC’s Thingworx IIoT platform was built through the acquisitions of Axeda, ThingWorx, ColdLight, Kepware and Vuforia.
Gartner says Thingworx tends to focus on asset monitoring, predictive maintenance and asset utilization solutions and its strength lies in its long experience with the assets across vertical markets.
“PTC has developed a global ecosystem of IIoT-focused technology partners, solution providers and global system integrators,” Garner says, “Thingworx is one of the best-known IoT platforms in the market and continues to invest both in its visibility and in its developer community via its LiveWorx event, its marketplace and its developer portal.”
The Magic Quadrant provides a lengthy description of the criteria for inclusion in each quadrant. Gartner says leaders “have the organisational size and scale to consistently pursue and win substantial multinational opportunities for IIoT. These opportunities are truly global in terms of supporting a referenceable customer base of multinational corporations (MNCs) that build their digital futures on the IIoT platform of the provider in at least four regions. However it makes no comment on the absence of any leaders in its assessment.
Vendors in the niche Quadrant, which Gartner says, “are still very much viable providers of IIoT platforms,” were: Accenture, Altizon, Atos, Davra, Eurotech, Exosite, Flutura, GE Digital, IBM, Litmus Automation, Oracle, QiO, Rootcloud.
Another view on IIoT platforms
In mid 2018 IoTAustralia reported Forrester Research’s ranking of the top 15 IIoT platforms, in a ‘Forrester Wave’ assessment. The Wave diagram can be found here.
A customer perspective
Meanwhile IoT Analytics has just released an assessment of the top 25 IoT platforms — not specifically IIoT — based on customer feedback. Of those ranked by Gartner, Oracle, IBM Watson and Thingworx were ranked as leaders, in that order. Cumulocity was well behind as a challenger, and Lumada only a follower.
