Market saturation forces industrial IoT platform developers to different pivoting routes

August 22, 2019 | Case Study

Large tech giants and cloud service providers like PTC, Amazon, and Microsoft have entered (mostly with M&A) and grasped a large portion of the market share in the crowded landscape of industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms. In addition, the technologies related to IIoT hardware and connectivity have matured. As a result, the IIoT platform market is now nearing commoditization, following the path of a typical life cycle of emerging technology. Consequently, many startups are now pivoting. While the majority of companies are pivoting either toward edge devices or toward applications, which only continues the saturation, some are selecting niches that might be more successful. Here, we highlight the pivoting cases of three companies that we previously rated highly when the market was still growing.