DevOps and cloud-native shape the future

Market analysis and consulting firm PAC has published the PAC Innovation Radar "Open Digital Platforms for the Industrial World in Europe 2020," a comprehensive analysis of the vendor landscape for emerging digital platform topics.

PAC looked at 120 platforms and evaluated 61 of them in seven different segments with specific focus areas: Industrial Cloud, Industrial Edge, Industrial Edge Cloud, 3D Printing Services, Connected Workers, Open Source-based Enterprise IoT Platforms, and IoT Data Exchange and Monetization. Depending on the focus areas, vendors were positioned in one or more analyses.

The goal of open digital platforms is to increasingly manage the very heterogeneous world of industrial data and applications as an integrated, agile digital system. They go beyond industrial IoT data and orchestrate DevOps-style container-based applications across connected devices, industrial edge and cloud.

As the new term "edge computing" makes clear, companies are currently rethinking their IT architectures in factories and other operating environments. While the future of the industrial world is certainly hybrid (edge and cloud combined), PAC observes several concepts competing in the market: The industrial cloud concept (bringing data from industry in the edge to applications in the cloud for central processing); the industrial edge concept (bringing applications to data generated in the edge for the purpose of local processing); and the industrial edge cloud concept (the basic aspects are similar to the industrial edge concept, but with an extension: thanks to Kubernetes, edge applications are becoming more scalable, even into the cloud).

In addition to the aforementioned core concepts of open digital platforms for industry, PAC also sees other types of platforms on the market that address specific niches. They help reduce the complexity of certain processes and workflows while making them more open, making users much more agile and efficient.

These include open digital platforms for 3D printing services, Connected Workers (AR) for Enterprise IoT and for the exchange and monetization of IoT data. With these platform concepts, companies are well equipped for the increasingly digital future and can respond flexibly to fast-moving market changes.