The Smart Automation market overview has been available since mid-April. It is an online market overview that is alive and developing. It now offers direct contact to the listed providers. And the first subpages of individual platform manufacturers will be added shortly.
Market overviews are an important companion to the development of new markets. Whether we are talking about innovations in hardware or software, the existence of a market overview with the names of the manufacturers and their products shows that it is a market in its own right. This is also the case with Smart Automation.
Within just a few years, a market of Linux-based and open app platforms has developed in the field of industrial manufacturing automation. Twelve well-known providers took part in an online survey and can now be found with their logos, brief information and two comparative tables in one place on the Internet.
By contrast, the platforms that were not really open, which individual providers had presented in previous years, have not caught on. They have already disappeared from the market or drifted into insignificance. Well-known examples of this are GE Predix from General Electric and Adamos from a group of companies in the mechanical engineering sector.
Market overview online, digital, up-to-date
The digital nature of the platforms, their app stores and their openness is reflected in the nature of the market overview. It is created digitally and is permanently available in German and English, online and up-to-date. For example, it took less than three days for three additional platforms to become a regular part of the market overview after their registrations on the day it went live: those of FLECS Technologies, SALZ Automation and TTTech Industrial Automation. Two others had corrections made to their table entries after publication, which were implemented immediately.
The market overview is now updated twice a year before the Hanover Fair and the SPS in Nuremberg. The questionnaire is also put to the test each time and continues to evolve. In terms of the providers’ own positioning, the market overview will thus reflect the pace at which they are developing their platforms and the associated app stores. And it will be an interesting indicator of how Hanover Fair and SPS are developing as marketplaces for Smart Automation.
Mediator between manufacturers and industrial customers
The wish of platform manufacturers and visitors to the Smart Automation site for a direct contact option has been implemented with a contact form. This allows interested parties to contact the provider they are most interested in directly with their specific requirements. And the provider can see immediately whether and how they benefit from participating in the market overview.
In addition, two providers are already creating exclusive subpages to highlight important details about the special features of their platforms. These will certainly not be the only ones.
With the development of the market overview, the Industry Digitalization news portal has taken on a task that will be at the heart of the portal’s activities in the coming years. After all, Linux-based automation of manugfacturing will be at the heart of the digital transformation of industry. The market overview and news from users and manufacturers will mediate between potentially interested companies in the manufacturing industry and platform providers in the newly emerging market.
In order to present the providers and their solutions in detail, we have started to conduct interviews with the manufacturers’ experts, which will be published here in the near future. And there is now a separate section and a special news teaser on Industry Digitalization for all news relating to smart automation, making it easier to find.