# Digital Manufacturing Platforms in the Industry 4.0 from Private and Public Perspectives
## 4 Results  
### IoT Platforms  
An IoT platform is a middleware between the IoT devices and IoT gateways on one hand and applications on the other hand. The IoT platform enables the building of applications and are also called Application Enablement Platforms or AEPs. The essential features and capabilities of an IoT platform are on the level of connectivity and network management, device management, data acquisition, security, event processing, monitoring, analysis, visualization, integration, storage, and application enablement.  
There are several vendors with different architectures, ways of connecting and managing IoT devices, possibilities to manage and analyze data, capabilities to build applications, and optionsto leverage IoT in a meaningful way for any given IoT use case in any given context--consumer applications, enterprise IoT applications, and Industrial IoT or Industry 4.0. In the end, IoT is part of an integrated approach to leverage data from devices and assets. There are hundreds of players in the market and although the IoT platforms have many functions in common there are differences in the offerings with sometimes very different features [28].  
The main players in the IoT platform market are:  
Microsoft Azure IoT [29]: The Microsoft Azure IoT offers device monitoring, rules engine, device shadowing, and identity registry. Upon these basic services, Azure IoT incorporates several existing products such as Stream Analytics, Power BI, IoT Hub, notifications hub, and some pre-packed machine learning. In addition, Azure Digital Twins allows to create digital models of any physical environment; including places, things, and people.  
Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud Service [30] is a managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud-based offering that allows to connect devices to the cloud, analyze data from those devices in real time, and integrate data with enterprise applications, web services, or with other Oracle Cloud Services, such as Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service.  
Google Cloud IoT Core [31]: Google Cloud IoT Core is a fully manageable IoT platform. This platform is labeled as a major rival against the other similar platforms, since it mainly concentrates on intelligence. To achieve this intelligence, it utilizes ad-hoc queries using Google Big Query and Cloud Functions workflows. Thus, the devices can automate changes based on real-time events, data visualizations are done using Google Data Studio, and machine learning is done with Cloud Machine Learning Engine.  
IBM Watson IoT [32]: This cloud IoT platform enables users to connect their devices and the IoT device data into a repository from where this cloud IoT helps them gain insight into an IoT network to not just improve their operations, but also launch various new business models. The users of this cloud platform receive real-time data exchange, data storage, device management, and secure communications.  
AWS IoT Core [33]: This cloud IoT platform helps turn cars, sensory grids, and turbines to \"smart\" objects by helping in connecting and managing the sensors on these objects. The AWS IoT Core provides a secure device gateway, device shadows, device SDK, a registry for recognizing the different devices, a message broker, and rules engine that would evaluate the inbound messages.  
Bosch IoT Suite [34]: This cloud platform is one with services designed to meet the requirements of every IoT project. The platform was initially designed and built to provide the IoT solution developers flexibility and ease to perform their daily tasks.  
Above the mentioned IoT platforms there are large generic IoT cloud platforms from vendors such as IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more. The so-called IoT network providers' platforms, such as AT&T and Orange Business Services, as well as Telefonica or Vodafone are another category of IoT platforms.