Platforms Differentiate with Three Types of Strategies

With smart manufacturing vendors figuring out exactly how to integrate Operational Technology (OT) with Information Technology (IT), a need has arisen for assessing, comparing, and ranking their platforms to provide benchmarks for best practices and most successful approaches. Most, if not all, of the top vendors have expanded their capabilities but also recognize their limitations and have started to fill the gaps with strategic partners. This has led to early adoption in the form of millions of connected assets and to strategic positions that should spur further adoption.

For instance, Siemens has announced a partnership with Telit deviceWISE for Telit’s data extraction and edge intelligence capabilities. In 4Q 2018, Siemens will make MindSphere generally available on Microsoft Azure, in addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), on which it rolled out in January 2018. Additionally, PTC acquired Kepware in 2016, and in June 2018, Rockwell Automation announced a US$1 billion equity investment and strategic partnership with PTC. Both of these moves fill gaps in PTC’s domain knowledge and provide new routes to market.

These sorts of partnerships and investments target and tackle some of the biggest pain points in connecting assets on the factory floor and in implementing transformative technologies in the manufacturing sector. Companies such as Telit and PTC’s Kepware extract data from OT assets and deliver the data to enterprise and Internet of Things (IoT) apps on premises or in the cloud. More data and more connected assets will drive other technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), blockchain, and digital twins.

Also, more and more of the industrial platform providers have opened their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that third parties can plug in innovative software solutions and exchange data and insights between platforms. For instance, ABB Ability’s open APIs mean that it has full interoperability with Siemens’ MindSphere, Hitachi’s Lumada, Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure, and General Electric’s (GE’s) Predix. It can also provide integration with PTC’s ThingWorx, as ThingWorx can use Ability’s APIs. At this point, the platform providers appear to have found a balance between competing for market share and implementing these open best practices to drive innovation. This does not mean that all of these platforms will survive; it will ultimately benefit the customers by making it easier to deploy the best solutions. ABI Research’s Smart Manufacturing Platforms, however, assesses which vendors have best positioned their platforms to last not only for today but also for the next five to ten years.

ABI Research finds the following three major differentiation strategies to be important:

• Integrated technologies: Some of the criteria that ABI used to rank the platforms in its innovation category include support for AR/Mixed Reality (MR), digital twins, and protocol adaptability and connectivity.PTC scored high in AR with Vuforia, and protocol adaptability and connectivity with Kepware and digital twins, with its combination of technologies on ThingWorx. PTC’s AR experiences still operate under the Vuforia brand. PTC has seen more interest in AR as the market matures, with over 500,000 developers using the Vuforia SDK. Kepware supports over 130 drivers for industrial protocols including all but the rarest and most unique protocols. PTC’s digital twins contextualize and structure data, analysis, and results on the ThingWorx platform to help build applications for decision making. PTC brings together ThingWorx with its Creo Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling and Coldlight Machine Learning (ML) to build exact 3D high-performance digital twins.
• Partner ecosystems: The partner ecosystems constitute one important criterion in the implementation category of the ranking. GE and Siemens scored the highest for this criterion. GE partners with PTC’s Kepware to resell the KEPServerEX for the support of 130 plus protocols. GE also partnered with FogHorn Systems, in which GE Ventures invested early. FogHorn customized its complex event processing engine for Predix Edge to provide high-performance stream processing on legacy equipment, edge-based apps, and edge-to-cloud closed loop ML. GE has made Predix available on Azure in North America and AWS in four regions worldwide. At the Hannover Messe 2018 trade show, Siemens announced a partnership with Telit to connect devices and equipment to MindSphere via deviceWISE. Once this partnership ultimately rolls out, Siemens will have the ability to leverage and drive connectivity regardless of the equipment manufacturer and onboard customers in a broader range of scenarios. Siemens has also announced that it will make MindSphere generally available on Azure in Q4 2018. It rolled out on AWS in January 2018.
• Business models: ABB differentiates Ability by not charging for the platform as a separate item. Despite its relatively high score in innovation, ABB provides the platform for free to its customers and instead charges for apps and solutions; and those often come for free during the warranty period for ABB equipment.

These strategies have set up PTC, GE, ABB, and Siemens to not only survive but also grow over the next five to ten years. The high scores for these criteria have led ABI Research to name each of these companies, along with SAP and Telit, as leaders among the Smart Manufacturing platform providers. ABI Research’s Smart Manufacturing Platforms compares the following 11 major vendors in the sector: ABB Ability, Bosch IoT Suite, Emerson Plantweb, Fujitsu Colmina, GE Predix, Hitachi Lumada, PTC ThingWorx, SAP Leonardo, Schneider Electric EcoStruxure, Siemens MindSphere, and Telit deviceWISE.

For more insights and perspectives on Smart Manufacturing, please check out ABI Research’s Smart Manufacturing service.