The top IoT software platforms for 2016

Stephanie Stefanovic, Nov. 23, 2016 – 

A new report from Forrester has identified and compared the top 11 IoT software platform providers for this quarter.

According to the report, IBM, PTC, GE and Microsoft lead the pack, while  AWS, SAP and Cisco Jasper offer competitive options, and LogMeIn, Ayla Networks, Exosite and Zebra Technologies lag behind.

Forrester evaluated vendors based on 25 points of criteria, which were divided into three "high-level buckets":

Current offering: Vendors' current offerings were evaluated according to the functional categories of connect, manage, secure and analyse.

Forrester looked at the breadth of protocol support and cloud integration, the strength of the management console for managing virtual devices using a rules-based engine, support for developers through SDKs and prebuilt applications, and the platform's identity and access management functions. Forrester also examined each platform's capacity for analytics, including advanced capabilities such as predictive analytics, augmented reality, and edge analytics.

Strategy: Forrester assessed each vendor's strategic positioning as a factor of several evaluation criteria, including planned enhancements, geographic reach and the robustness of its partner ecosystems.

Market presence: This category indicates the relative ranking of the vendors in the areas of customer installation, geographic client distribution and dedicated employee resources.

 Back