Microsoft, C3.ai, PTC, and Siemens are leading the industrial IoT (IIoT) market with analytic services to enhance connectivity that enterprises can use with actionable intent, according to new research from Forrester.

The firm evaluated industrial IoT software platform providers based on 24 criteria and concluded those four companies offer pre-packaged applications that support comprehensive integration capabilities with services that extend greater value to enterprises. Forrester ranked IBM, Software AG, Hitachi, SAP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, and GE Digital as “strong performers,” followed by Samsung, ABB, and Bosch as “contenders.”

“While the physical products certainly endure, the companies that built them must change to survive, investing in digital and baking it deeply into everything they do,” the report notes. “IoT is core to industrial companies’ efforts to bridge the divide between the physical and virtual.”

Forrester advises enterprises to be deliberate when considering IoT software providers, and encourages organizations to seek out companies that support deployment models from edge to cloud, comprehensive business integration levers, and analytics with actionable intelligence.

“The ability to identify, manage, secure, extract data from, and send commands to large fleets of connected devices is table stakes,” the report states. “On their own, these capabilities are insufficient to support the needs of the modern industrial enterprise.”

On the analytics front, Forrester warns that “many business analysts lack the expertise and tools to evaluation industrial IoT data and translate it into actionable insight. Diverse arrays of data in the cloud, at the edge, and captured from digital twin models require data filtering and streaming analytics to effectively assess and monitor data.”

The industrial IoT space is a massive market and Forrester admits that its latest assessment doesn’t represent the entire vendor landscape. Nonetheless, the Microsoft Azure IoT platform earned Forrester’s highest marks for its strategy and offering.

“Microsoft’s Azure public cloud infrastructure underpins many of the industrial IoT software platforms we considered,” the report explains. “Prospective customers see a broad range of increasingly capable solutions but are sometimes bewildered when faced with choosing between assembling Microsoft’s building blocks on their own or paying a third party for a solution that has already done that work and added domain-specific value.”

The firm also lauded Microsoft for adding features to its IoT platform at an “impressive rate” with richer edge capabilities in Azure IoT Edge and simplified application and device onboarding offered by Azure IoT Central. Microsoft does, however, continue to favor products and services from its own portfolio and, as such, “offers a powerful proposition for those with existing investments in the Azure cloud,” according to Forrester.

C3.ai earned high marks for tightly integrating its platform with all major public cloud providers with what it describes as some of the largest IoT deployments in oil and gas, utilities, and defense. PTC was commended for combining IoT with augmented reality and designing its ThingWorx platform to work equally well in the cloud or deployed at the edge. Finally, Siemens earned its spot among the leaders for positioning its MindSphere platform as an open offering for industrial applications with a growing catalog of third-party applications.

Forrester based its evaluation on each vendor’s current offering, strategy, and market presence. Criteria included connectivity, deployment and security, management console, application enablement functions, analytics, data, partner strategy, innovation roadmaps, platform differentiation, and delivery model.