As industries around the world accelerate their digital transformation to reduce operational expenses, create new service offerings, and achieve sustainability goals, industrial IoT platforms are playing a foundational role. Microsoft is deeply committed to helping the world’s industries achieve these goals and for many years we have invested in capabilities to empower this, including our industrial IoT platform.
This is why we are sharing that Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms1 for the second year in a row and placed Microsoft furthest on Completeness of Vision and highest on Ability to Execute. Microsoft also shares the Leaders quadrant in this report with key Azure partners like PTC and Hitachi. Together, we are in a unique position to support industrial customers around the world to achieve their goals.
As we set out years ago to build our Industrial IoT Platform capabilities, there were several key tenets we used to guide us:
- Security first: Security is the most critical fundamental to Industrial IoT solutions. To enable this, we’ve built on our decades of security experience and created a suite of capabilities for customers and partners that enable their IT and OT teams to work well together. From chip to cloud, using Azure Active Directory, Azure Key Vault, Azure IoT Hub and Device Provisioning Service, Azure Sphere, Azure Defender for IoT, and Azure Sentinel, we provide the richest set of security capabilities in the market. Security is never done, and we continue to expand our security capabilities each year, most recently with our acquisition of ReFirm Labs to provide deep security scanning of device firmware.
- Open and interoperable: Industrial customers expect choices, not lock-in, and from day one we have embraced open interoperability. Microsoft fully embraces open standards and open-source and have taken a standards-based approach to Industrial IoT. We are the number one contributor of open-source software to the OPC Foundation, a founding member of the Digital Twin Consortium and the Open Manufacturing Platform, and also work in many industry-related bodies including The Smart Manufacturing Institute, VDMA, The Open Group, bitkom, DIN, A*Star, Labs Network Industries 4.0, ODVA, The Industry Internet Consortium, ZVEI, Platform Industries 4.0, NAMUR, Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, and GAIA-X.
- Edge and cloud: The new durable compute paradigm in the industry includes the edge and the cloud working in harmony—we believe the edge is equally important as the cloud. In Industrial IoT, we have taken this to a whole new level with on-premises disconnected edge computing that can be deployed across industrial ISA-95 compliant networks. Our edge computing support enables the productivity and intelligence of the cloud to be distributed and run connected or disconnected on the edge.
- Partner-led: As the world’s industries accelerate their digital transformations, we believe that a rich and diverse partner ecosystem is called for to provide the thousands of specialized solutions using Industrial IoT capabilities. From the earliest days, we have had a partner-led strategy in Industrial IoT with the world’s leading independent software vendors (ISVs) and global system integrators (GSIs), many you find along with us in the Gartner IIoT Magic Quadrant.
It was wonderful to see Gartner recognize our efforts in these four areas. We look forward to accelerating the world’s industries in achieving their goals, continuing the work with our world-class partners in Industrial IoT, and ultimately helping to make the world a better place by enabling sustainable industries.
Next steps
- Read the full complimentary Gartner report.
- Visit our website to learn more about Azure Industrial IoT Solutions.
- Download the IoT Signals Research for free.
- Learn more about the Open Manufacturing Platform.
- Read our Zero Trust for IoT security paper.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request.
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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms, 18 October 2021, Alfonso Velosa et. Al.
