Simulating a change before making it is not a new idea in engineering, but the tools available to do it have changed considerably. A digital twin - a virtual representation of a physical asset, process, or facility that stays connected to real operational data - now lets manufacturers, infrastructure owners, and product teams test decisions virtually before committing time and capital to the physical version. What has changed most in 2026 is the convergence between engineerin

Most manufacturers already have machines generating useful data - the problem is that it sits locked inside individual PLCs, historians, and control systems that were never built to talk to each other, let alone to the cloud. Industrial IoT (IIoT) software exists to solve exactly that problem, connecting operational technology to the applications, analytics, and decisions that depend on it. What has changed in 2026 is how much of this market has been reshaped by ownership cha

If your plant, refinery, or production line is sitting on years of historian data that nobody has time to dig into, Seeq is one of the names that comes up most often in industrial analytics conversations. The Seattle-based vendor has built its entire business around making time series data from process manufacturing usable, without forcing engineers to become data scientists first. For IT and OT leaders weighing up how to get more value from existing historian investments, Se