Digital Transformation at the Industrial IoT Edge

Entry of Leading Industrial Automation Suppliers Boosts Credibility of Edge Implementations

Industrial IT organizations are pushing enterprise architectures to the edge, moving processing intelligence closer to the target devices, assets, and processes.  The data sought by edge and cloud-based solutions resides in the logic, process, and motion controllers marketed by the traditional industrial automation (IA) suppliers, who as a group were late to edge compute relative to IT players, hyperscalers, and ISVs.  Introduction of industrial IoT edge solutions by IA providers, typically large players with deep domain knowledge, lends credibility to edge computing among customers who wish to remain with known suppliers who have supported their applications and know their business. 

Early industrial IoT edge implementations tended to emphasize an infrastructure orientation focused on orchestration, virtualization, and similar cloud-native characteristics. The real value at the edge, however, lies in applications and typically domain-specific use cases, as these are the means of achieving desired business outcomes.  

Industrial Automation Providers Partnering, Investing in Edge Infrastructure 

The supply side of the industrial IoT edge is populated with numerous alliances between different categories of providers. Complementary ecosystem partners may provide cloud compute, store, and other horizontal infrastructure services, connectivity, protocol conversion, security, compatible or alternative device platforms, and/or solutions that are complementary to specific use cases. 

Most prominent among these emerging alliances at the edge are relationships between IoT infrastructure suppliers, such as ZEDEDA and Red Hat, and automation suppliers focused on specific use cases that reflect both their legacy domain expertise and an emphasis on adding incremental value, typically via analytics. These relationships often involve equity positions through participation in early funding rounds.