Between June and October Schneider Electric agreed to buy Cognite and PTC: a knowledge graph for plant data, and the software many machine builders design in. If you work on either platform, know what your contracts need to say before closing.

Three months earlier, the knowledge graph. On 30 June Schneider agreed to buy Cognite for $3.1 billion in cash. The group already has operational data, through the PI System that came with AVEVA in 2021; Cognite links engineering, operational and enterprise data in a knowledge graph for AI to work on. By the company’s account, revenue exceeded

The other ownership model. Before Schneider agreed to buy PTC, PTC had sold its IoT business, Kepware and ThingWorx. Since March both have formed Velotic together with GE Vernova’s former Proficy business, acquired by TPG, with more than $300 million of revenue by its own account. Its CEO is Brian Shepherd, previously at Rockwell Automation, Hexagon and PTC among others; its executive chairman is James Heppelmann, PTC’s former chairman and CEO. Velotic calls itself "hardware-agnostic", and the three product lines remain distinct. Velotic’s independence rests on ownership, and with a private-equity owner the next sale is usually part of the plan. At PTC the future owner is known; what is open is how much autonomy PTC will keep.

Waehner is global field CTO at the orchestration vendor Kestra and advises through his own company. His market map sorts industrial IoT into four columns, from connecting machines to applications, and sums up the past eighteen months’ changes of ownership in one sentence: "Private equity is building focused independents while the automation giants buy context, and both bets assume the plant is where the value sits." More useful to a buyer is the chapter on the standards that, in his view, decide whether today’s vendor decision is still reversible in five years. Nearly every vendor supports OPC UA, he writes; what to check is whether the server exposes real companion specification models or a flattened proprietary view: "An OPC UA server with custom variables is connected, not interoperable." He also says what standards cost. On some controllers OPC UA is a per-CPU runtime licence, and a read through the standard can cost up to two orders of magnitude more latency and controller load than the native protocol. Whether a platform decision stays reversible is settled at the purchase, in the data models and in the contract.

Finally, the part that is law. Since 12 September 2025 the Data Act has governed switching between data processing services, meaning services that give on-demand network access to a shared, scalable and elastic pool of computing resources (Article 2(8)); recital 81 counts infrastructure, platforms and software as a service among them. How far specialised industrial software as a service is covered is read differently. The contract must allow the customer to switch to another provider or to its own infrastructure, with a notice period of no more than two months to initiate the switch and then a transitional period of no more than 30 days in which the current provider keeps the service running and assists; where that is technically unfeasible, the provider may extend it, with reasons, to up to seven months (Article 25). From 12 January 2027 the provider may not impose switching charges, and until then no more than the costs directly linked to the switch (Article 29). Standard service fees until the end of the contract and proportionate penalties for terminating a fixed-term contract early do not count as switching charges (Article 2(36), recital 89). PTC offers Windchill+ and Creo+ as SaaS; a Windchill or Creo licence running in the customer’s own data centre is outside these rules. For services mostly custom-built for one customer and not offered at broad commercial scale, the rules on charges among others do not apply (Article 31). What the law leaves out belongs in the contract.