We’ve been researching the industrial internet of things (IoT) at Forrester for a long time. During that time, the set of capabilities we and our clients expect in an industrial IoT software platform has grown dramatically. It’s no longer enough to simply be excellent at connecting and managing things!

Newer capabilities in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence are important and valuable, and they help IoT play its part in the future-fit enterprise. But the term “industrial internet-of-things software platform” is being stretched toward the breaking point. It’s used to describe solutions that only connect things, it’s used to describe solutions that only run machine-learning models on data that originated on a connected thing, and it’s used to describe everything in between. Buyers and sellers of these solutions are either left confused or talking past one another.

We’re kicking off a piece of research to clarify this space, ahead of at least one Now Tech and at least one Forrester Wave™ in 2021. We have our own ideas at Forrester about how the industrial IoT landscape might usefully be redrawn, but we’d also like to hear from you. We’re running a survey and would be very grateful if you could use it to share your perspectives. Please share the link within your organization and with your contacts in the industry: The more responses we get, the better a picture we can build.

Thank you.