IDC TechScape Helps Manufacturers Systematically Categorize and Assess Connected Product Technologies

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.

IDC Manufacturing Insights today announced a new IDC TechScape, part of the DecisionScape methodology/series of reports, designed to mitigate technology risk by helping organizations align their tolerance for risk with the anticipated maturation of a technology. The new report, IDC TechScape: Worldwide Manufacturing Connected Products Technologies, 2015 (Doc #255573), is intended to help senior executives assess their organization’s technology landscape to determine whether their efforts are aligned with analysts’ assessment of the industry’s overall technology adoption progress. While it is clear that an individual company’s tolerance for risk plays a significant role in determining its path forward, this study helps organizations more systematically categorize and assess relevant connected products technologies, taking into account adoption criteria specific to each technology.

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With connected products, manufacturers can improve product uptime, increase lifetime customer value, and influence future product design. Technology is at the center of this transformation through connected products; manufacturers need to recognize the combination of technologies that are essential to creating connected products and deploying them for tangible business benefits.

This IDC TechScape study focuses on technology adoption within manufacturing for connected products. It assesses key technologies that are driving evolution beyond industry technology best practices in place today, and considers technology-specific analyst insights regarding anticipated rate of adoption, potential risks impacting future success, and industry market interest. IDC expects that manufacturing executives will use the IDC TechScape model to:

• Assess the progress of their own technology adoption efforts in comparison with the industry overall.
• Identify new technologies that should be added to consideration in their technology road map.
• Add new insights to increase the robustness of their own technology decision frameworks.

The IDC TechScape is composed of three separate adoption profiles. The categories that define the three types of adoption curves in an IDC TechScape are:

• Transformational: disruptive technologies that are likely to be next generational by their potential to fundamentally transform current industry best practices.
  • Covered technologies/processes: Autonomous operations, remote operations, Big Data analytics, applications and services delivery, wireless sensing and locating, and human machine interface (HMI)/user interface.
• Incremental: technologies that represent current industry best practices. These technologies are generally recognized as the technologies most likely to be enabling connected products in manufacturing and are expected to continue to incrementally evolve over time.
  • Covered technologies/processes: Low-power WiFi, cybersecurity, enterprise cloud digital billing, fourth-generation (4G) cellular technologies (Long Term Evolution-Advanced [LTE-A]), integrated mobile devices, WiFi, business intelligence (BI) and data management, and Bluetooth.
• Opportunistic. technologies that contribute to industry progress but are not considered integral to current best practices.
  • Covered technologies/processes: Industry cloud, content delivery, and wired sensors.

Within each adoption profile, IDC Manufacturing Insights positions individual technologies relative to their adoption maturity. IDC has identified five basic stages to technology adoption: evaluate, test, deploy, maintain, and replace. The IDC TechScape graphic is expected to change over time with individual technologies advancing in adoption and potentially shifting curves as technologies currently categorized as “transformational” go mainstream and become the new “incremental” best practices.

IDC encourages business and IT leaders to use this IDC TechScape to start a conversation around what makes the most sense today for their company regarding connected products technology adoption and where to strategically move in the coming months as this transformational market continues to evolve at a rapid pace. According to the report, the most important guiding factor that manufacturers should consider is the value the product provides to the customer. But manufacturers should also tailor their decisions to the product price and cost as well as the product life cycle.

IDC Manufacturing Insights’ Research Manager Heather Ashton notes, “The manufacturing industry is undergoing a transformation from the proliferation of connected products. Leading manufacturers already recognize that new revenue and growth is developing because of the information and intelligence those complex products can generate. This groundbreaking IDC TechScape provides IT buyers with an industry snapshot as to where specific technologies lie today relative to current industry best practices, identifies the technologies likely to become best practices in the future, and their current state of adoption maturity relative to each other. Within our discussions of individual technologies, we also identify our analysts’ best opinions regarding key momentum factors, highlighted as IDC TechScape Markers of Momentum, where we rate technologies based on adoption speed, risk, and market interest.”

To arrange a one-on-one briefing with Heather Ashton or Kimberly Knickle, please contact Sarah Murray at 781-378-2674 or sarah@attunecommunications.com. Reports are available to qualified members of the media. For information on purchasing reports, contact insights@idc.com; reporters should email sarah@attunecommunications.com.

About IDC TechScapes

IDC TechScape reports mitigate technology risk by helping organizations align their tolerance for risk with the anticipated maturation of a technology.

About IDC Manufacturing Insights

IDC Manufacturing Insights assists manufacturing businesses and IT leaders, as well as the suppliers who serve them in making more effective technology decisions by providing accurate, timely, and insightful fact-based research and consulting services. Staffed by senior analysts with decades of industry experience, our global research analyzes and advises on business and technology issues facing asset intensive, brand oriented, technology oriented, and engineering oriented manufacturing industries. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology market. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world’s leading technology, media, research, and events company. For more information, please visit www.idc-mi.com, email info@idc-mi.com, or call 508-988-7900. Visit the IDC Manufacturing Insights Community at http://idc-community.com/manufacturing.

IDC
Allyson Hughes, 508-935-4546
Program Director
ahughes@idc.com
or
Attune Communications
Sarah Murray, 781-378-2674
Partner
sarah@attunecommunications.com