The age of AI agents in manufacturing need Industrial Data Fabrics: Status quo and predictions for 2025

Munich, December 19, 2024 – Market research and strategic consulting firm PAC sees industrial data fabrics as a growth topic for 2025 and started to evaluate the existing vendor landscape already in 2024. PAC sees AVEVA, Databricks and SAP currently as the “Best in Class” vendors in the European market and Cognite as a hidden champion.

PAC is constantly analyzing new emerging topics, like industrial data fabrics. Two elements are highly relevant in this context. First, PAC predictions give an outlook on short-term trends for the next year. Second, PAC INNOVATION RADARs evaluate the current vendor landscape around new emerging topics. Together, these elements give a solid status quo and outlook.

Prediction: 2025 will be the year when industrial companies overcome IT/OT data silos and prepare for the AI age

In 2025, many manufacturing companies will focus on unifying their data management to overcome data silos across IT and OT. This will especially involve establishing company-wide data catalogues combined with a governance framework to provide structured access to these data sources. In PAC’s view, the push in 2025 will be triggered by four factors: first, pressure to prepare for the upcoming AI age. Thanks to ChatGPT, everybody now understands how important it is to have company-wide access to data, not only to analyse it for different purposes but also to train new AI models. This is especially relevant because the next step in the evolution is becoming evident – the rise of AI agents. These rational agents are goal-driven software bots that can perform more complex tasks and collaborate in multi-agent systems. To be successful in this space, in-house AI agents also must be able to access different data sources. Second, there is competitive pressure, as leading industrial companies like Siemens and ABB have already moved in this direction and established internal data clouds. This will force other companies to follow fast. Third, a growing number of offerings provide more choices to customers today. While platforms like Snowflake, Cognite, and Databricks have existed for some time, we observe that prominent vendors have also started offering solutions in this space. Examples are Microsoft Fabric and SAP Datasphere. Fourth, a growing number of partnerships between prominent OT data platform vendors like Rockwell Automation and AVEVA and vendors like Cognite and Databricks are established to unlock the big existing OT data silos (data historian). All this will drive the market for industrial data platforms in 2025 and beyond. That is why in 2024, PAC started to evaluate the vendor landscape for industrial data fabrics.

Status quo: PAC RADAR Open Digital Platforms for industrial data fabrics in 2024

Key aspects of a data fabric architecture include decentralized data storage, unified data access (this allows data discovery and harmonizes data governance and security), semantic data models (define the meaning of data in context) and open access to data analytics, AI and low-code capabilities (help gain insights and create workflows)

“When data is the new oil, data fabrics are gas stations that democratize access to oil in a consumable way and prepare it for direct ingestion into data processing engines” says Arnold Vogt, Head of Digital & IoT at PAC.

As we focus on multi-cloud data platform offerings for industrial use cases, we recognize that only a handful of vendors offer a manufacturing-related platform around the data fabric concept today. While some smaller, specialist vendors like Snowflake, Cognite, Cloudera, and Databricks have for some years supported the data fabric concept (mostly from an industry-agnostic perspective), the picture became more colorful when Google launched its manufacturing-specific data platform in 2022. This can be seen as a kickstart, and other big vendors like Microsoft and SAP followed suit with their own initial offerings during 2023.

As the concept of data fabrics is not easy to realize in an industrial context, it is not surprising that numerous cooperations between IT and OT vendors have emerged in this space. One example is Rockwell Automation, who launched FactoryTalk DataMosaix in partnership with Cognite. Another example in this context is the AVEVA Data Hub, which provides cloud-based data management within the AVEVA Connect cloud platform and has been integrated with Microsoft Fabric. As OT vendors increasingly want to be perceived as relevant IT players with strong capabilities around industrial data and analytics, we expect to see more partnerships with IT vendors, but also acquisitions.

An important element of data fabrics are open table formats. Open table formats are a type of data storage format that is designed to be easily accessible and interoperable across different data processing and analytics tools. They typically have a scheme that defines the structure of the table, and can be used to store a wide range of data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake are the two most popular open data formats, both designed to address challenges associated with managing and querying large-scale data lakes. While Delta Lake is certainly the firstcomer, Iceberg is the newer format with more capabilities. It remains to be seen who will win the open-source battle and become the leading industry standard for data fabrics.

PAC INNOVATION RADAR “Open Digital Platforms for Industrial Data Fabrics”

More information on the PAC INNOVATION RADAR “Open Digital Platforms for the Industrial World in Europe 2024” (Further topics evaluated in this report include Industrial edge, Connected worker, Industrial metaverse, Smart logistics services, Industrial copilots)

More information on PAC Predictions 2025

About PAC

Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) is a content-based company with a consulting DNA. Since 1976, PAC has delivered focused and objective responses to the growth challenges of software & IT service vendors worldwide. We are the preferred partner for European software and IT service companies to define their strategy, strengthen market share, optimize GTM, and help position their thought leadership. PAC is proudly an analyst-lead consultancy spread over multiple locations across Europe. We cover market research for over 30 countries worldwide, delivered through our portfolio pillars Guidance, Insights and Visibility and our renowned research platform SITSI ®.