2019 Internet Of Things 50: 10 Coolest Industrial IoT Companies

IoT 50: Industrial

Oil and gas rigs. Automotive manufacturers. Critical infrastructure. These are the kinds of operations that underline why the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a massive market. By taking existing systems and connecting them to software—whether in the cloud or at the edge—companies in the industrial space can improve uptime, predict critical failures and increase production. With companies in manufacturing, transportation and utilities forecast to spend $329 billion on IoT solutions in 2019 according to IDC, there is a big opportunity for vendors to bring new products to market.

What follows are 10 companies with the coolest IIoT offerings in 2019.

Falkonry

Top Executive: Nikunj Mehta, CEO

After raising a $4.6 million funding round last year, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Falkonry is expanding development, sales and marketing for its predictive analytics tools, which rely on operational machine learning to help industrial companies improve operations without the need for data scientists.

FogHorn Systems

Top Executive: David King, CEO

FogHorn Systems, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup backed by $47.5 million in funding, is racking up partnerships for its edge intelligence software that allows companies to run real-time analytics at the edge, with Dell EMC joining Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Google Cloud as technology partners.

GE Digital

Top Executive: Steven Martin, acting CEO

As San Ramon, Calif.-based GE Digital gets spun out as a stand-alone $1 billion industrial IoT company, the vendor continues to invest in its product road map, launching new edge and private capabilities for its Predix platform and giving customers easier way to deploy solutions.

Hitachi Vantara

Top Executive: Brian Householder, CEO

Hitachi Vantara is continuing its IoT offensive with new offerings like Lumada Maintenance Insights, an extension of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's Lumada platform that uses machine learning and data analytics to deliver intelligent repair recommendations at large industrial companies.

Honeywell

Top Executive: Darius Adamczyk, CEO

Honeywell provides a variety of hardware and software offerings for industrial IoT applications, such as data management and onsite control and analytics. The Morris Plains, N.J.-based company’s Connected Plant solution, for instance, provides prescriptive analytics and digital twin simulations, among other things.

IoTium

Top Executive: Ron Victor, CEO

With the backing of former Cisco CEO John Chambers, GE Ventures and Juniper Ventures, Santa Clara, Calif.-based IoTium is making a major international push for its software-defined converged infrastructure offerings, which combine security, networking and edge computing in one platform.

KMC Controls

Top Executive: Richard Newberry, CEO

A major player in the building automation space, New Paris, Ind.-based KMC Controls provides hardware and software offerings, such as the BACnet advanced application digital controllers and sensors for controlling building systems and HVAC equipment and its KMC Commander enterprise IoT platform.

Schneider Electric

Top Executive: Jean-Pascal Tricoire, CEO

A major hardware player in industrial IoT, France-based Schneider Electric provides an open and interoperable IoT platform called EcoStruxure that offers smart operations: capabilities and embedded connectivity and intelligence across multiple verticals, including health care, retail and manufacturing.

Seeq

Top Executive: Steve Sliwa, CEO

After raising a $23 million funding round from Siemens-backed next47 and other investors last year, Seattle-based Seeq is looking to expand beyond its 100-plus customers for its advanced analytics software that can help diagnose problems using historical data and predict when systems will fail.

Siemens

Top Executive: Joe Kaeser, CEO

Siemens is strengthening the application development capabilities of its MindSphere industrial IoT platform with last year’s acquisition of Mendix, a provider of low-code development tools. Beyond software, the German company offers the SIMATIC line of IoT gateways for handling plant floor data.