Industrial Connectivity

Industrial Connectivity is the logical capability of bridging operational technology (OT) — PLCs, CNC controllers, drives, sensors, gateways — to information-technology (IT) consumers such as MES, IIoT platforms, historians, and PLM digital-twin services. It abstracts dozens of proprietary device protocols behind a small number of canonical interfaces (OPC UA, MQTT Sparkplug, REST/JSON).

What it covers

• Driver portfolio spanning Modbus, Ethernet/IP, Profinet, S7, BACnet, OPC UA, and a long tail of vendor-specific protocols.
• Tag namespace and aggregation — a unified, contextualized address space across mixed-vendor plants.
• Edge gateways and store-and-forward for intermittent or unreliable links.
• Security — segmentation, authentication, and signing/encryption per IEC 62443.
• Brownfield onboarding — connecting older equipment without rip-and-replace upgrades.

Relationships (see sidebar)

• Supports the Manufacturing Execution and Quality Management processes.
• Implemented by systems like PTC Kepware and Siemens Brownfield Connect.
• Feeds the IoT Platform capability and ultimately the Digital Twin.