Perspectives on Industrial IoT: Gartner and PTC
In the last two weeks, two articles have been published that provide some interesting perspective into the state of Industrial IoT: 1) Gartner published their first magic quadrant on Industrial IoT Platforms[1], and 2) PTC published a new white paper, called ‘The State of Industrial IoT 2017’.
This is the first time Gartner has published a magic quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms and it provides for some very interesting reading. Thanks to PTC, you can download a free copy so it is accessible to non-Gartner customers.
The report is a very detailed study of the IIoT industry; some interesting observations:
- Some vendors were included that I have never heard of before, including Altizon, Flutura, and QiO. I definitely need to check out these vendors.
- Interestingly, some very big Industrial IoT vendors were left out, including Siemens, Bosch, GE and Microsoft. An inclusion criteria for vendors to be added was that the solution needed to be available for on premise deployment. Gartner is assuming 60% of IIoT analytics will be on-premise so this appears to drive the on-premise requirement. On-premise is certainly going to be important but 60% seems very high. It will be interesting to see if this continues to be a criteria since Gartner has left out some of the key leaders in the industry.
- No vendors were put into the ‘leader’ category. PTC, SAP and Hitachi were identified as Visionaries and the rest were Niche Players. Overall, Gartner views the industry as being fractured with no clear leader. This definitely makes sense but I do think the investment from some of the big vendors will start to pay off in the next 1–2 years.
- Gartner continues to be bullish about the potential for digital twins but doesn’t see overly impressed with the current offerings.
- Similarly, device management seems to be a capability that all customers will require but the platform providers don’t seem to be investing in the capabilities.
If you are interested in the Industrial IoT industry, you should definitely take the time to download and read the Gartner report.
PTC The State of Industrial IoT 2017
The PTC white paper ‘The State of the Industrial Internet of Things 2017’ is interesting set of data points based mainly on PTC customer data. Given the source of data, there will be some obvious bias but PTC is a well established vendor with plenty of customers so it is a valid data set.
Some interesting observations from this white paper:
- PTC breaks out the top 10 use cases that represent 70% of the total data. Operational intelligence (22%) and monitoring (21%) are the top 2 use cases. Lots of the vision for IoT is about predictive maintenance (3%) and analytics (4%) but these are way down the list.
- PTC does touch on the topic of on-premise vs cloud. According to their numbers 62% is on-premise vs 38% in the cloud. The interesting difference between the Gartner prediction and the PTC data is which direction is the trend for deployments, cloud or on-premise. My guess is that as customers begin to scale up their deployments, the cloud will be more attractive.
- The top industries adopting IoT are not a big surprise, the top 3 being: Industrial Products, Electronics and High Tech, Automotive.
Kudos to PTC for making this data available.
[1] PTC has made available a free download of the Gartner document. You do need to provide you contact info.