ThingWorx vs. Watson IoT Platform

ThingWorx is great if you want to create an MES-like solution for your company, but have data coming not only from the plant floor, but also from databases, azure, and others. You can seamlessly integrate those data and create reports like visuals and mashups. It is also a great solution if you have multiple plants and need to monitor everyone simultaneously and even compare results between locations. ThingWorx is not recommended if all you need is a BI solution, it is not a reporting software and it should not be used as it.

Incentivized

As long as we have a clear understanding of the "real" pain points-- and that involves gathering both structured and unstructured data-drawing conclusions-- Watson IoT has a role to play. The area I am most keen on that a move the Watson can help achieve would be to go from preventative maintenance, to predictive maintenance, to eventually prescriptive maintenance.

Incentivized

• Quick monitoring of extraordinary behaviour of a monitored component
• As the Kepware tools and libraries have become more integrated, the platform has an unrivalled set of interface solutions.
• Modelling is simple enough to explain to non-specialists but very powerful in its expression.

Incentivized

• The asset information is available in both static and dynamic format (from thermal images, to OEM data, to time series data). The ability to ingest all the information using a single platform has great value.
• Another benefit is a seamless integration with Maximo. This has been a challenge with other 3rd party systems available.
• The experience of IBM Maximo systems updates is positive.

Incentivized

• The MQTT interface needs improvement, its crashed during development of new entities on a frequent basis.
• The standard time series and trend tools are very basic and dont compare well with Top-end historians but its possible with some relative easy interfacing to use 3rd party applications.
• Care, forethought and experience is required when building complex applications, it's difficult to delete entities once the network becomes large and complex. N+Maintaining synchronicity between multiple dev and productions systems has to be carefully managed.

Incentivized

• Some of the tutorials could use a little more improvement - While there is a considerable amount of documentation, most of the good documentation for Watson IoT we found to be from third-parties.
• Administration and billing tools could use a bit more improvement - The UI is a bit clunky and poorly-designed here.
• Be prepared to work with IBM support to get this going - Their turn-around support for inquiries can be lengthy, and setup time may also be quite lengthy because of this.

Incentivized

We started more than a year ago and do not plan to replace it

Incentivized

Experienced and knowledgeable customer support executives, Thingworx is a very large product and contains a myriad of features which is not easy to remember without enough training or hands-on experience

Incentivized

Azure and Oracle IoT and Thingworx all provide very good support and very easy analytics when it comes to data streams. ThingWorx and Azure both have very good security and provide a robust set of capabilities. However, ThingWorx's main advantage is its built-in templates for custom apps that are industry-agnostic unlike many of its peers.

Incentivized

AWS offers an "IoT" product that similarly connects devices securely to centralize data exchange, predict downtime, and overall increase the efficiency of an IoT infrastructure. Like some of the other AWS products, the documentation is lacking and UI is quite hard to use, which is why we chose to use IBM Watson instead.

Incentivized

• The use of ThingWorx as a near-complete, full-stack industry 4.0 solution has been at the forefront of recent and ongoing research.

• Positive - This tool greatly increases most company's manufacturing and production efficiency, and the use-cases are extensive. It was a great way of decreasing down-time for us.
• Negative - Took lots of work and energy to get up and running, we had to rely on IBM support and tutorials many times during this process.
• Positive - Quite cheap, most of the tiers of pricing cost very little, and it's possible to use Watson IoT for a few months for free to see if it is beneficial for your company.

Incentivized