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This week we’re looking at an acquisition moving IIoT closer to open source, how traffic control services use IoT, the importance of edge processing, and more!

For years, the pitch for industrial IoT platforms went something like this: buy into our ecosystem, use our tools, and trust us with your operational data. It was a compelling argument in the early days, when connecting factory floors to enterprise systems was genuinely hard and turnkey platforms felt like the only realistic path. Industrial operators weren't software companies. They didn't want to be. So they signed the contracts, accepted the lock-in, and hoped the vendor would still be around in five years. That bet hasn't always paid off.

This week, SUSE acquired Losant — a Gartner Magic Quadrant-recognized IIoT platform — and immediately pledged to open source the technology. And that second bit is the interesting part. SUSE's stated goal is to accelerate interface standardization and interoperability across the industrial IoT ecosystem, to push the IIoT platform market in a fundamentally new direction.

Vendor lock-in has been one of the most persistent if also least publicly discussed barriers to IIoT adoption. Nobody wants to say out loud that they're afraid to commit to a platform because they don't trust the vendor's long-term roadmap but it’s a concern you’d be negligent to ignore. Industrial deployments have decade-long time horizons. Operators have watched platforms get acquired, repriced, and quietly sunset. Interoperability between competing systems has been a chronic headache. The result is a market where pilots succeed and scaled deployments stall, and the reasons are rarely technical.

Open source changes that calculus in concrete ways. When the underlying platform is open, operators aren't wholly dependent on a single vendor's roadmap. The code doesn't disappear if a company changes direction. Integrations become easier to build and share. And critically, standardization efforts gain momentum when the technology is a community resource rather than a proprietary asset. There's a well-worn precedent here: enterprise Linux looked like a risky bet for mission-critical infrastructure twenty years ago, until Red Hat and SUSE proved that open foundations and commercial support weren't mutually exclusive. The data center is now almost entirely built on open source, and it's more reliable and innovative than it was in the proprietary era.

Of course there’s a counter argument. Industrial environments have zero tolerance for downtime, OT teams often lack deep software engineering capacity, and regulated industries have strict requirements around software provenance. Open source in IIoT will only reach its potential if the commercial ecosystem around it — support contracts, managed services, certified implementations — develops at the same pace as the code itself. What made enterprise Linux safe for conservative organizations wasn't just the technology. It was the companies that made adoption feel like a supported, manageable risk.

The data center didn't get better because one vendor won. It got better because open infrastructure became a shared foundation, and competition moved up the stack to where it actually creates value. Industrial IoT has been waiting for that foundation for a long time. SUSE just placed a significant bet that the wait is over. Whether the rest of the ecosystem follows — and how quickly — is one of the most interesting questions in IIoT right now.

Traffic control service companies play a critical role on construction sites, road repair projects, and utility work across the U.S. and Canada. Your crews manage lane closures, signage, flagging, and public safety in environments where timing and coordination matter as much as following the rules.

Yet many traffic control businesses still rely on phone calls, paper forms, whiteboards, and text messages to run daily operations. That approach worked years ago. In 2026 and beyond, it creates delays, missed updates, and avoidable risk.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Matt Hatton, Founding Partner at Transforma Insights, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss IoT trends and predictions for 2026. The conversation covers the key findings of the Communication Service Provider IoT Benchmarking Report, the IoT Transition Topics, the role AI will play in IoT, and the evolving landscape of connectivity.

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