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The Shift to Open Industrial IoT Architectures with Data Streaming
Operational Technology (OT) has traditionally relied on legacy middleware to connect industrial systems, manage data flows, and integrate with enterprise IT. However, these monolithic, proprietary, and expensive middleware solutionsstruggle to keep up with real-time, scalable, and cloud-native architectures.
Just as mainframe offloading modernized enterprise IT, offloading and replacing legacy OT middleware is the next wave of digital transformation. Companies are shifting from vendor-locked, heavyweight OT middleware to real-time, event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink — enabling cost efficiency, agility, and seamless edge-to-cloud integration.
This blog explores why and how organizations are replacing traditional OT middleware with data streaming, the benefits of this shift, and architectural patterns for hybrid and edge deployments.
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