2018 Internet Of Things 50: 10 Coolest Industrial IoT Companies

Top Players In Industrial IoT

While IoT is coming to businesses of all stripes, industrial customers are leading the way on IoT spending. Research firm IDC forecasts that the three biggest markets for IoT spending in 2018 are all in the industrial realm -- manufacturing, transportation and utilities. Those verticals are expected to spend a combined $347 billion on IoT solutions this year, according to IDC. Vendors with leading industrial IoT solutions include big names such as GE, Siemens and Honeywell, as well as up-and-coming startups such as Foghorn Systems. Here are 10 vendors with the coolest industrial IoT offerings right now.

Bayshore Networks

Top Executive: Mike Dager, CEO

Bethesda, Md.-based Bayshore Networks is the maker of a cybersecurity offering for stopping attacks against industrial systems, dubbed the Bayshore Industrial Cyber Protection Platform. The offering blocks threats to industrial plants and machinery while also providing operational insight, and recently was certified to run on Dell Edge Gateways.

Eaton

Top Executive: Craig Arnold, CEO

While integrating IoT innovations across its portfolio of power management offerings, Ireland-based Eaton also offers lighting and controls tailored to the needs of industrial buildings. Eaton is partnering with IoT solutions company Enlighted to provide industrial buildings with sensory systems.

Foghorn Systems

Top Executive: David King, CEO

Mountain View, Calif.-based Foghorn Systems offers an industrial IoT software stack that blends sensor data from industrial machines with cloud-based management, analysis and machine-learning capabilities. The company's Lightning ML platform is universally compatible across all major industrial IoT systems.

GE

Top Executive: John Flannery, CEO

GE's industrial IoT platform, Predix, provides a foundation for running, securing and scaling industrial applications. The platform specializes in capabilities such as asset connectivity, edge technologies, big data processing, analytics and machine learning, and Boston-based GE also offers advanced security features such as two-party encryption.

Honeywell

Top Executive: Darius Adamczyk, President, CEO

Honeywell's industrial IoT platform, Connected Plant, enables industrial customers to turn their data into business insight with capabilities around data management, advanced analytics and security. Morris Plains, N.J.-based Honeywell recently added a new visualization and analysis offering, Uniformance Cloud Historian, to the platform.

Johnson Controls

Top Executive: George Oliver, CEO

Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls' IoT portfolio includes its Smart Equipment offerings, which use embedded controls and secure connectivity to provide a range of benefits to industrial buildings. Those include reduced downtime, optimized operational efficiencies, improved serviceability and lower energy usage.

KMC Controls

Top Executive: Richard Newberry, CEO

Indianapolis-based KMC Controls manufactures edge devices with embedded sensors (KMC Conquest) such as thermostats; analyzes the data gathered by the devices; sends the data to an IoT appliance such as the KMC Commander BX; and securely transmits the data to cloud storage (such as the KMC Cloud).

PAS

Top Executive: Eddie Habibi, CEO

Houston-based PAS is focused on securing power generation and manufacturing facilities, with security offerings for industrial systems such as distributed control systems, programmable logic controllers and turbo machinery controls. A new partnership with Siemens is aimed at offering improved real-time monitoring for control systems.

Schneider Electric

Top Executive: Jean-Pascal Tricoire, CEO

France-based Schneider Electric offers a variety of technologies that are tailored to the needs of industrial IoT, including through its EcoStruxure platform, which offers embedded connectivity and intelligence, ’smart operations’ capabilities, and infrastructure for cloud-based apps and analytics that is built atop Microsoft's Azure IoT suite.

Siemens

Top Executive: Joe Kaeser, CEO, Siemens AG

Among the industrial IoT offerings from Germany-based Siemens is the MindSphere platform, which automatically connects assets within industrial plants. Meanwhile, Siemens' data hosting platform provides energy analytics, machine tool analytics and other services that are crucial to industrial customers.