Licensed for individual use only
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software
Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Danny Mu and Charlie Dai
November 25, 2019
Why Read This Report
Key Takeaways
In our 26-criterion evaluation of industrial internet
of things (IIoT) software platform providers in
China, we identified the seven most significant
ones — CASICloud, Haier COSMOPlat, Huawei,
Inspur Cloud, PTC, ROOTCLOUD, and XCMG
IT — and researched, analyzed, and scored them.
This report shows how each provider measures up
and helps CIOs select the right one for their needs.
CASICloud, Haier COSMOPlat, And PTC Lead
The Pack
Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which
CASICloud, Haier COSMOPlat, and PTC are
Leaders and Huawei, Inspur Cloud, ROOTCLOUD,
and XCMG IT are Strong Performers.
Analytics, Prebuilt Apps, And Extensibility
Integrations Are Key Differentiators
As older technology becomes outdated and less
effective, improved analytics and application
enablement will dictate which providers
lead the pack. Vendors that can provide rich
advanced analytics features, extensive prebuilt
applications, and seamless integration with
third-party apps will help firms accelerate their
digital transformation.
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For CIOs
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China,
Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Danny Mu and Charlie Dai
with Frederic Giron, Paul Miller, Han Bao, and Bill Nagel
November 25, 2019
Table Of Contents
Related Research Documents
2 Industrial IoT Platforms Are Key To Industrial
Transformation
The Forrester Tech Tide™: Internet Of Things, Q3
2019
2 Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software
Platforms, Q4 2019
4 Vendor Offerings
Now Tech: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In
China, Q2 2019
5 Vendor Profiles
Leaders
Strong Performers
7 Evaluation Overview
Vendor Inclusion Criteria
9 Supplemental Material
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For CIOS
November 25, 2019
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Industrial IoT Platforms Are Key To Industrial Transformation
China’s industrial sector accounts for 41% of the country’s GDP and 22% of the world’s added
industry value — more than any other country.1 In recent years, IIoT software platforms have
become more popular in China; hundreds of vendors promise increased efficiency to compete in
this highly dynamic market.2 But industrial firms now face even tougher challenges, such as rising
customer expectations for personalization, eroding labor arbitrage, and the trade war’s pressure on
manufacturing exports.3 They must accelerate their digital transformation, but early IIoT software
platforms’ rudimentary and homogenized features, such as asset connectivity and status reporting,
aren’t enough to help industrial firms achieve their goals.
As a result of these trends, industrial IoT software platform customers should look for providers with:
›› Comprehensive tools for advanced analytics. Descriptive analytics are not enough; industrial
firms in China are no longer satisfied with only knowing what’s already happened. They need to
discover anomalies in real time, predict when and how to conduct the next round of maintenance,
and adapt production lines to dynamic market environments. The underlying big data management
workbench and low-code analytics tools are key differentiators in industrial operations to
accelerate the development of analytics applications for operational decision making.
›› Rich prebuilt applications and easy integration with third-party apps. Connecting devices and
products is only a basic part of the IIoT application value chain. Enterprises need turnkey solutions
that help them address their unique business and technical requirements. As such, IIoT platforms
should provide extensive prebuilt application and business-related KPIs and provide seamless
integration between the device management layer and enterprise systems like enterprise resource
planning (ERP) and CRM.
›› A focus on business over devices. In China, firms prefer “industrial internet platforms” to
“industrial IoT platforms.” That is, platforms should not only help firms optimize production lines,
but also ease collaboration with partners, reduce time-to-market, and engage customers to enable
mass customization. To help industrial firms improve orchestration and facilitate innovation, leading
IIoT platform vendors in China differentiate themselves with collaboration that spans the entire
lifecycle and touches design, manufacturing, and the supply chain.
Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers.
It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does not represent the entire vendor
landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our reports on industrial IoT software
platforms in China.4
We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations
and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see
Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool.
© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
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For CIOS
November 25, 2019
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 1 The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China
Q4 2019
Challengers
Contenders
Strong
Performers
Stronger
current
offering
Leaders
Haier COSMOPlat
PTC
Inspur Cloud
CASICloud
XCMG IT
Huawei
ROOTCLOUD
Weaker
current
offering
Weaker strategy
Stronger strategy
Market presence
© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
3
For CIOS
November 25, 2019
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
D
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FIGURE 2 The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China Scorecard, Q4 2019
Current offering
50%
3.46
4.20
3.00
3.71
4.08
3.21
3.26
Connectivity and security
30%
3.00
4.00
4.00
3.80
4.20
3.40
3.60
Management console
20%
3.60
4.00
3.00
4.60
4.60
2.80
4.20
Application enablement functions
30%
3.60
4.00
2.00
3.50
3.80
2.90
3.00
Analytics and data
20%
3.80
5.00
3.00
3.00
3.80
3.80
2.20
Strategy
50%
4.00
4.90
2.30
3.30
3.80
3.50
3.30
Partner strategy
20%
5.00
5.00
3.00
3.00
3.00
3.00
3.00
Commercial model
20%
5.00
5.00
1.00
3.00
3.00
5.00
3.00
Innovation roadmap
30%
3.00
5.00
3.00
3.00
5.00
3.00
3.00
Platform differentiation
10%
5.00
5.00
3.00
5.00
5.00
3.00
3.00
5%
3.00
3.00
3.00
5.00
3.00
5.00
3.00
15%
3.00
5.00
1.00
3.00
3.00
3.00
5.00
0%
4.00
5.00
3.00
4.00
1.70
3.60
4.30
Customer base
50%
3.60
5.00
3.00
3.00
2.40
3.60
5.00
Connected devices
50%
4.40
5.00
3.00
5.00
1.00
3.60
3.60
Market approach
Delivery model
Market presence
All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
Vendor Offerings
Forrester included seven vendors in this assessment: CASICloud, Haier COSMOPlat, Huawei, Inspur
Cloud, PTC, ROOTCLOUD, and XCMG IT (see Figure 3).
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For CIOS
November 25, 2019
The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 3 Evaluated Vendors And Product Information
Vendor
Product evaluated
CASICloud
INDICS
Haier COSMOPlat
COSMOPlat
Huawei
FusionPlant
Inspur Cloud
InCloud
PTC
ThingWorx
ROOTCLOUD
ROOTCLOUD IIoT Platform
XCMG IT
Hanyun Platform
Vendor Profiles
Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.
Leaders
›› Haier COSMOPlat enables mass customization. Haier is the world’s largest producer of
consumer electronics and home appliances, with a more than 10% share of the global market.5
To keep delivering growth and differentiation in the age of customer, Haier built COSMOPlat, a
platform that enables a customer-centric, collaborative approach to the entire industrial process
from product design to manufacturing. In China, Haier COSMOPlat is more than just an industrial
IoT platform; it connects 330 million customers and 43,000 firms to create an ecosystem for mass
customization.6 Haier started commercializing the platform in China and globally in 2015.
Haier COSMOPlat provides comprehensive predefined business-relevant KPIs and prebuilt
applications to help customers accelerate the platform deployment process. Its digital twin
capability helps firms ease device and production management and increase efficiency. It also
provides data analytics enabled by AI and machine learning. However, to fully empower customers,
Haier COSMOPlat must expand the array of native connectors and interfaces to third-party
enterprise systems such as CRM, ERP, and enterprise asset management.
›› PTC leverages its global leadership for local transformation. The only global vendor we
evaluated, PTC has been serving industrial customers for more than 30 years. PTC’s differentiated
capabilities span device and edge connectivity, device management, and prebuilt applications. It
also supports a broad range of key augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) hardware and
software partner solutions with rich features for data management and digital twin at all stages.
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The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
PTC’s ThingWorx supports a variety of deployment options, from on-premises to public and private
cloud. Its management console is the most intuitive of the IIoT players in China; provides a range
of security features including TLS-based encryption, certificate-based authentication, and policybased access control; and has received ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 certifications. PTC still has more
to do in China; for example, gaining TRUCS certification for its IIoT services in China will help it
better address local regulatory needs. Compared with its global strength, PTC’s partner ecosystem
and vertical coverage in China are relatively limited.
›› CASICloud enables smart manufacturing with native experiences. Established by the stateowned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) and its affiliated units in 2015,
CASICloud inherited advanced equipment and manufacturing experience from the defense giant.
CASICloud built its INDICS platform to support production processes and cover elements of the
industrial chain from product design to manufacturing. INDICS isn’t just an industrial IoT platform;
it also provides manufacturing operations management, product data management, and resource
planning. INDICS’s industrial platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) can
help large firms enhance their manufacturing capabilities and small and medium-size businesses
accelerate the process of cloud transformation.
INDICS provides predefined device models to facilitate device management as well as VR-based
production line optimization solutions. The platform includes comprehensive software development
kits, low-code development tools, and industrial templates to accelerate the development of
industrial apps. However, there is room to natively support more industrial protocols including
Profibus, HART, and Canbus.
Strong Performers
›› Inspur Cloud provides holistic services to industrial customers. Inspur is the world’s thirdlargest server vendor (and China’s largest) and runs an advanced systems integration business
in China.7 InCloud is Inspur’s industrial IoT platform; it covers infrastructure-as-a-service, PaaS,
and SaaS and delivers everything from device connectivity and management to industrial big
data management and analytics — even industrial SaaS products like ERP, CRM, human capital
management, and manufacturing execution systems.
InCloud provides more than 100 templates for device management and strong capabilities to
integrate IoT applications with legacy applications like Oracle and SAP. Prebuilt solutions for
more than 10 verticals — including mechanical processing and manufacturing, metallurgy, and
petrochemicals — are also available on InCloud. Users can deploy Inspur Cloud’s solutions in their
own data center or on other public clouds in China. Forrester found that Inspur Cloud still needs to
package some of its solutions into services to better serve customers.
›› ROOTCLOUD is focusing on its partner ecosystem to pioneer its IIoT business. One of the first
vendors to offer an IIoT platform in China, ROOTCLOUD architected its platform on a PaaS layer
using containers, microservices, and low-code technologies. It can integrate with a wide range of
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The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
devices and systems, normalizing data and mapping it to a unified data model in a visual approach,
and it already connects more than 560,000 devices in 70 vertical segments. To cover broad business
scenarios, ROOTCLOUD has a comprehensive strategy to partner with hardware vendors, software
API vendors, and systems integrators, with commercial models tailored to each category.
ROOTCLOUD aims to provide rich industrial PaaS features spanning verticals such as equipment
manufacturing, energy, textiles, and construction equipment, but reference customers said that
the platform could be easier to use. While it provides graphical workflow modeling for machine
learning, there’s room to further improve its video analysis capabilities.
›› XCMG IT is turning its in-house strength into platform competence. The IT arm of XCMG, the
largest manufacturer of construction machinery in China and the fifth largest worldwide, XCMG
IT manages the firm’s more than US$28 billion in assets with its IIoT platform. It also serves more
than 1,000 enterprises across 63 industries in more than 20 countries. The platform has strong
connectivity capabilities across devices, edge, and cloud. XCMG IT is strengthening the platform
via strategic investments in areas like data models for industrial equipment; in the meantime, it is
proactively exploring the possibilities of using AI and 5G for digital innovation.
XCMG IT lacks AR/VR features, and its digital twin capabilities are limited to 3D simulation and
device profiling. It supports both streaming analytics and visual modeling of machine learning
workflows for data scientists; however, it still needs to improve domain-specific AI capabilities like
out-of-the-box image and video analysis. Reference customers commented on the high level of
staff turnover in the professional services organization.
›› Huawei is building the cornerstone for industrial IoT. Huawei’s cloud is the only leading Chinese
public cloud that we evaluated. Its general IoT services are already used by a large number of
customers in verticals like transportation, construction, and utilities. FusionPlant is Huawei’s
industrial IoT platform for verticals including manufacturing, petrochemicals, chemicals, and
industrial products.
FusionPlant leverages the strong enterprise intelligence capabilities of Huawei’s cloud, such as big
data management and an AI development platform. FusionPlant can also use Huawei’s ARM-based
chips and AI chips to deliver performance at the edge. Huawei leverages a partner ecosystem to
deliver industrial solutions, partnering with firms like ABB and Bosch to deliver manufacturingspecific solutions and services. However, FusionPlant’s prebuilt applications and integration with
third-party apps are still limited compared with other vendors.
Evaluation Overview
We evaluated vendors against 26 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:
›› Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic
indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include device
management, data management, analytics, and integration with third-party applications.
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The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
›› Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of each vendor’s strategy. We
evaluated vendors’ commercial model, delivery model, platform differentiation, innovation road
map, partner ecosystem, and market approach.
›› Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence
scores reflect each vendor’s customer base and connected devices.
Vendor Inclusion Criteria
Forrester included seven vendors in the assessment: CASICloud, Haier COSMOPlat, Huawei, Inspur
Cloud, PTC, ROOTCLOUD, and XCMG IT. Each of these vendors has:
›› A generally available industrial IoT software platform. Each vendor offers a standardized IoT
software platform that connects to and manages smart devices and infrastructure in industrial and
manufacturing environments to integrate operational data and control into business processes. All
of the functionality we evaluated was generally available to paying customers as of May 31, 2019.
›› A significant focus on the industrial domain and its use cases. Each vendor demonstrates
understanding of and investment in supporting industrial use cases in areas including
manufacturing, oil and gas, construction, and utilities. Each vendor’s platform also provides native
support for key protocols of relevance to industrial firms.
›› Proven enterprise customer adoption. Each vendor generates more than $15 million in industrial
IoT software platform revenue in China. We included the vendors and products most important to
industrial enterprise customers as indicated by client questions and primary data sources.
›› A platform with a legal presence in Chinese market. Each vendor offers industrial IoT platforms
in China. For global players that architect their industrial IoT platforms on public cloud, we only
considered vendors that have officially launched a commercial operation that complies with
Chinese government regulations.
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Supplemental Material
Online Resource
We publish all of our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking the link at the beginning
of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and default weightings to serve only as a
starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs.
The Forrester Wave Methodology
A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a technology
marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester follows The Forrester Wave™
Methodology Guide to evaluate participating vendors.
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The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q4 2019
The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for the evaluation.
From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the inclusion criteria. We then gather
details of product and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos/briefings, and customer
reference surveys/interviews. We use those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in
the marketplace, to score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against
the others in the evaluation.
We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of each Forrester
Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester Wave using materials they
provided to us by [end of briefing period date] and did not allow additional information after that point.
We encourage readers to evaluate how the market and vendor offerings change over time.
In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ Vendor Review Policy, Forrester asks vendors to review our
findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy. Vendors marked as nonparticipating vendors in the
Forrester Wave graphic met our defined inclusion criteria but declined to participate in or contributed
only partially to the evaluation. We score these vendors in accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And
The Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And Incomplete Participation Vendor Policy and publish
their positioning along with those of the participating vendors.
Integrity Policy
We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with the Integrity
Policy posted on our website.
Endnotes
Source: The World Bank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.TOTL.CD).
1
2
There are several hundred industrial internet platforms in China, of which more than 50 have gained industry or
regional influence. Source: Alliance of Industrial Internet (http://www.aii-alliance.org/index.php?m=content&c=index&a
=show&catid=23&id=673).
See the Forrester report “Emerging Technologies Are Transforming ‘Made In China’.”
3
See the Forrester report “Now Tech: Industrial IoT Software Platforms In China, Q2 2019.”
4
Source: “The Haier Group, World’s Leader in White Goods, Incorporates Dais Product,” GlobeNewswire, April 5, 2018
(https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/04/05/1465829/0/en/The-Haier-Group-World-s-Leader-in-WhiteGoods-Incorporates-Dais-Product.html).
5
Source: Chen Jing, “The Industrial Internet Helps Companies ‘Grow Strong Bones’,” Economic Daily, May 9, 2019
(http://news.eastday.com/eastday/13news/auto/news/china/20190509/u7ai8553854.html).
6
Source: Inspur (http://en.inspur.com/en/2402170/2400037/index.html).
7
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