The global industrial IoT platform delivers multiple integrations to industrial OT assets and other asset-intensive enterprises’ industrial data sources to aggregate, curate and deliver contextualized insights that enable intelligent applications and dashboards through an edge-to-cloud architecture. The global industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform market exists because of the core capabilities of integrated middleware software that support a multivendor marketplace of intelligent applications to facilitate and automate asset management decision making. IIoT platforms also provide operational visibility and control for plants, infrastructure and equipment. Common use cases are augmentation of industrial automation, remote operations, sustainability and energy management, global scalability, IT/operational technology (OT) convergence, and product servitization of industrial products. The IIoT platform monitors IoT endpoints and event streams, supports and/or translates a variety of manufacturer and industry proprietary protocols, analyzes data in the platform, at the edge and in the cloud, integrates and engages IT and OT systems in data sharing and consumption, enables application development and deployment and can enrich and supplement OT functions for improved asset management life cycle strategies and processes. In some emerging use cases, the IIoT platform may obviate some OT functions.
Gartner defines manufacturing execution systems (MES) as a specialist class of production-oriented software that manages, monitors and synchronizes the execution of real-time physical processes involved in transforming raw materials into intermediate and/or finished goods. These systems coordinate this execution of work orders with production scheduling and enterprise-level systems like ERP and product life cycle management (PLM). MES applications also provide feedback on process performance, and support component and material-level traceability, genealogy and integration with process history, where required.