At this moment, companies that are managing industrial processes like refining gas or oil or making different foods are relying on hardware based PLCs or programmable logic controllers in order to monitor and to control their manufacturing. In the industrial arena, big names like Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Honeywell, and others sell these PLCs and along with them they create the add on software and monitoring sensors.

This is a big business but just like virtualization, it has disrupted some of the other players in the networking sector such as hardware centric companies.
The big question is going to be how those players are going to respond and what about the smaller companies that are going to get in their way. There’s a new report out that helps us to take it all in. https://iot-analytics.com/software-based-plcs-revisiting-industrial-innovators-dilemma/