SD-WAN Underpins the Move to Industry 4.0

Service providers that are able to differentiate their managed SD-WAN products according to the needs of specific industry verticals put themselves in an excellent position to win big deals, grow market share, and drive revenue growth.

Thomas Gall of the University of Southampton recently published the paper, “The value of public information in vertically differentiated markets”, which whilst academic examines the tried and test adage that 'Differentiation increases profits'. 

Clavem Research fully agrees with the suggestion in Mr. Gall's paper that vertical differentiation is defined by 'perceived quality differences between products in the same market'. The full paper can be read here. 

This is why Clavem Research has created market insight content that looks directly at the differentiation of SD-WAN services by four industry verticals: manufacturing, healthcare, retail and finance. The shared knowledge benefits the industry and players in clarifying how SD-WAN can solve technology challengers for manufacturing and logistics companies and who the leading providers might be measured on the criteria of innovation, investment, product maturity, and market momentum and traction.

Digital transformation in the manufacturing and logistics vertical is an essential evolution for players to achieve competitive advantages. Digital platforms give manufacturers and logistics and supply chain companies opportunities of being quicker-to-market than rivals, and to extend to end-users and channels an amazing customer experience. On-demand and virtualized solutions result in greater agility and reduced CAPEX. SD-WAN is a technology mainstay for moving more apps to the cloud and for providing a support pillar for IoT, AI, edge computing, and big data analytics. 

Existing connectivity solutions are not fit for task for supporting these rapidly evolving technologies. However migrating legacy IT networks to newer and more innovation digital solutions raises challenges, which has given rise to multiple examples of fully managed services with advisory services added to help with a transition. IT managers still need to support their legacy platforms, and are under constant board-level pressure to lower IT spend, which is a fine balancing act. SD-WAN is an ideal technology choice for centralized management and control of complex WAN platforms, with clear views made available through portals to achieve an optimised network. Autonomous network for supporting industrial scale telemetry will continue to evolve to deliver networks that can self-allocated bandwidth prioritized for mission critical apps on-demand and in real-time. 
SD-WAN deployments in manufacturing and logistics can be designed to drive improvements to: 

• Supply chain accuracy
• Stock and supplier management for just-in-time engineering
• Rapid product time-to-market 
• Plant re-tooling
• Integration of acquired sites
• Better security for SCADA systems
• Use of predictive maintenance, IoT, AI, and robotics
• Leveraging 5G network slicing, Multi-access Edge Computing, and cloud

To gain access to more insights and see the Clavem Research Leaderboards, please contact us

Company Updates:

• Clavem Research Launched its SD-WAN in Manufacturing USA Market Leaderboard - Europe, APAC and Global Classes are Coming Soon
• Joel Stradling, Founder & Lead Analyst at Clavem Research, is contributing content on Vertical-specific SD-WAN Use-Cases in collaboration with the MEF Marketing & Education Committee to support the production of an MEF White Paper for advancing the MEF 70 SD-WAN industry standard.
• Clavem Research is presenting and chairing the session 'The Deployment of 5G: Growth, Complexity and Optimising Connectivity' at the SDN NFV World Congress (runs from Oct 14-17) in the Hague on October 16th (event link)