The Industrial IoT: An Analysis of its Competitive Space

The Industrial IoT (IIoT) represents one of the biggest business opportunities in the industrial space, where it is expected to provide the means for a better decision-making and make industrial operations more efficient, safe and reliable, transforming the way products and services are designed, developed, and delivered to the customers. While the hype and expectations around the IIoT keep growing, its market is still in its infancy, characterized by the proliferation of test cases and proof of concept projects but a limited number of serious deployments in business operations.

In order to gain a widespread acceptance and develop into a consolidated market, the IIoT still has a long way to go and some major technical barriers to overcome, with interoperability and network security being the most critical. As the market slowly builds up and the IIoT ecosystem starts taking shape, a number of big players such as GE, Intel and ABB are being particularly active by strengthening their capabilities and trying to establish a solid position in the market through acquisitions, partnerships and the foundation of new IoT divisions, business units and research labs, while actively participating to industry consortia and standard associations to promote and accelerate IIoT adoption and technological convergence.

In this report ABI Research provides an overview of the IIoT market, analyzing the competitive space and pointing out some trends and dynamics.

The first chapter clarifies what distinguishes the Industrial IoT from the more generic IoT, and discusses its major benefits and opportunities as well as the main barriers to a widespread adoption.

Chapter 2 reviews the current state of the IIoT market, providing a number of observations on its main trends and how the market could evolve. Also, an analysis of the IIoT value chain is provided.

Last, chapter 3 analyzes the movements on the market of a few large vendors considered among the major promoters of the IIoT.