Some of the most frequently asked questions LNS Research receives when clients are planning to scale in Industrial Transformation (IX) are concerned with DataOps and data contextualization.

Follow the money to see the real story

Google the phrase “Pilot Purgatory” and you will see a raft of press articles about the state of Digital Transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). McKinsey and Company, Deloitte, and a series of other firms have published several articles on “pilot purgatory” in IIoT, Digital Manufacturing, and Digital Transformation. IIoT and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) vendors often exasperatingly discuss the successful implementations they have done at the company’s home office that have not translated into wide-scale rollouts. These vendors curse “pilot purgatory.”

Given all the brouhaha, one would expect that companies deploying these pilots would feel “stuck in” pilot and that getting to a wide-scale rollout was a key challenge in front of their Industrial Transformation (IX) Program. But when we surveyed industrials, we found just the opposite. Few companies felt “stuck in” pilot mode and only a fraction of companies identified “moving out of pilot phase” to be a key challenge. So clearly, pilot purgatory is fake news! Let’s look at the facts and see how we can reconcile these different perspectives.

As the year 2020 ended, LNS Research published a set of three Research Spotlights highlighting the three alternative architectural paths available for manufacturers around Industrial Transformation (IX). In the 3^rd Spotlight we introduced the concept of Industrial Transformation Strategic Partners. As part of the run-up to the release of the LNS Research IX Strategic Partners Solution Selection Matrix™ let’s revisit our definition of IX Strategic Partners, highlight the criteria we use to evaluate these vendors, list the vendors, and conclude with advice to manufacturers.

Last April, we wrote about the market twists and turns in the dynamic cybersecurity software market and the challenges and barriers to progress. More recently, we published an M&A update that noted the acquisition of PAS Global by Hexagon AB. Recent conversations with end-users, cyber-software, and automation vendors have highlighted the importance of not just the software but of the associated set of services so vital to implementing and maintaining cyber protection. This raised the question of the best way for most end-users to approach this, get the right help, and bridge the cyber gap between IT and OT. The answer is less a technical discussion than it is about strategy, standards, policies and procedures, and partnering services.

In the world of enterprise business software, a billion-dollar-plus investment is not unusual and perhaps even ordinary. But in the Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) and Sustainability software space, a deal of that size is a watershed event. The recently announced acquisition of Sphera by Blackstone constitutes such an event. It also speeds the transition of the EHS and Sustainability (EHSS) software category to being subsumed under the nascent Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) banner.

In a recent blog post, our fearless leader, President and Principal Analyst Matthew Littlefield, noted that, “Although no one can argue with the technological innovation and productivity gains that lighthouse plants demonstrate, our data shows that including lighthouse plants as part of your Industrial Transformation (IX) program does not correlate to success.”  This post builds on that earlier post and drills into when lighthouse strategies can be effective and what is an alternative strategy more correlated to success.

Four recent M&A announcements have prompted us to catch up on our view of where the industry is heading and follow up on our earlier predictions for 2021. They are:

The way most industrial organizations manage risks in their operations is akin to driving a car forward while looking in the rearview mirror. This approach is useful for understanding what’s already happened but is of limited value in seeing what’s ahead and taking preventive action accordingly. The essential solution is to shift from a posture of risk hindsight to one of foresight and the ability to predict and prevent adverse events rather than respond after the fact.

We all know the reality of discrete and batch manufacturers. If you walk into virtually any manufacturing plant, you will find literally hundreds of manufacturing computing applications being utilized. A few of those applications, ERP most prominently, are generally supported by the corporate IT staff. A wider number of those applications, automation and MES, are typically supported by operations itself via the OT team or the “shadow IT” team (the manufacturing engineers, etc., that are providing day-to-day support to these systems). The vast majority of applications are custom – often built in Excel, Access, or Java – and are not well-supported and virtually impossible to deploy across sites. And, the picture gets worse: despite all these applications, operational personnel are still looking for more technology to help reduce manufacturing costs and improve quality.

In our December 2020 blog on AWS℠ Industrial, we noted that AWS and the other hyperscalers have always had the ambition to move up the value proposition and delivery stack. The hyperscaler’s objective is simple: to maximize the volume of dollars and services running through their platform. And, they incent their partners and their own salespeople to do so. They aim to win no matter which route one takes, directly through them or via their partners. We said that all roads lead to Rome.