My colleague Michele Pelino and I just released The Forrester Wave™: Industrial Internet-Of-Things Software Platforms, Q3 2021, and we’ll be discussing our findings in a webinar on October 6.

I’ve written about the need “to return to basics and to emphasize some of the practical considerations around making all of these connected [IoT] processes work reliably, dependably, securely, and at scale,” and that’s exactly what we’ve done with this year’s Forrester Wave. As the digital industrial platform takes on a bigger role helping internet-of-things (IoT) data play its part in delivering customer and employee outcomes, it becomes more important to ensure that the IoT platform gets the basics right: connecting to industrial things at scale and managing those things at scale.

For the purposes of this research, we whittled a large and intriguing field of prospects down to eight: Bosch, Cisco, GE Digital, Hitachi, PTC, Samsung SDS, Siemens, and Software AG. Clear — demonstrable — support for the industrial domains and their protocols was important, as was a strong international presence: Great companies that only really sell in the United States (or Europe or China) didn’t make the grade for this international analysis. Our Chinese colleagues are working to finish a related analysis for that market, which should be available soon.

Industrial IoT use cases are a perfect example of the need to excel both in the cloud and at the edge, and this report discusses some of the ways that industrial vendors, like those evaluated in the Forrester Wave, are working with the hyperscale public cloud providers. While none of the public cloud vendors appear in this year’s Forrester Wave in their own right, they play a key role in powering the solutions we do evaluate.

Thank You

A Forrester Wave is a lot of work — not just for the analysts who get their names on the cover but also for the army of people behind the scenes who edit our text and schedule (and reschedule and reschedule again!) executive briefings, technical demos, customer reference calls, and more. It’s also a huge amount of work for the vendors that participate and even quite a lot of work for the larger set of vendors that don’t make it past our initial screening phase. To all of these companies and individuals, named and unnamed, thank you!

Join Our Webinar On October 6 To Learn More

Michele and I will be discussing our findings in a webinar on October 6. Please register to join us then, or set up an inquiry call to discuss this space in more detail. Do you agree with our findings? What did we get right, and where do you disagree with what we found? We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss your perspectives, whether you’re a vendor of these solutions, a customer for them, or a prospect trying to work out where they might fit in your business.

(Image source: Library of Congress)