Discrete manufacturing to drive US$12.4B IIoT platforms market – Technologist

Market researcher IoT Analytics says the Industrial IoT Platforms market is accelerating in 2019 as more and more industrial manufacturers prioritize their transformation into IoT data-driven companies. Spending on Industrial IoT Platforms-related software and services for connected manufacturing solutions is forecast to grow at a rate of 40% per year until 2024.

IoT Analytics says IoT platforms are increasingly being used for optimizing discrete manufacturing products and environments.

Discrete manufacturers (e.g., in automotive, industrial machinery) are faced with unprecedented pressures (e.g., mass customization, decreasing product lifecycle span) to transform what they design, build, sell and service while remaining competitive in today’s increasingly connected world.

As part of this digital transformation, discrete manufacturers are investing in new technologies that leverage the capabilities of IoT, cloud, and big data analytics to enhance their ability to innovate and maximize return on their assets.

Industrial IoT Platforms are being implemented as the central backbone of these discrete manufacturing environments enabling remote command, continuous sensing capabilities from equipment on the factory floor, giving access to new streams of data, and supporting new capabilities such as predictive maintenance.

The aim is to drive greater efficiencies and productivity throughout operations in the plant, deliver higher-quality outputs and increase profitability. For example, Jabil (a manufacturing solutions provider for a range of industries such as automotive, energy and aerospace) is using Microsoft Azure’s IoT Suite to integrate predictive analytics in real-time manufacturing environments to help create the ‘Factory of the Future’ by increasing the throughput of products while simultaneously decreasing the chance of waste and the need for human touch.

Commenting on the report findings, IoT Analytics Managing Director Knud Lasse Lueth noted that over the last 2-3 years many manufacturers have woken up and realized that IoT and digital will be impacting their business tremendously.

These companies are at an important inflection point, performing lots of industrial IoT Proof-of-Concept projects, getting an understanding of what works for them and what doesn’t. As part of these PoCs, IoT Platforms have increasingly become a central part of the overall technology solution.

“Using IoT Platforms as the unifying backbone, selected OEMs have started to monetize software alongside the actual physical product that they have been selling for years. Some OEMs even started their journey to sell equipment-as-a-service (EaaS) with the help of an IoT Platform. I expect this to become a major trend in the coming years but it will still take a while until EaaS is a dominant theme in the industry,” he concluded.