Industrial & Operational Tech – A Better Way To Assess Risk
Companies that build and sell industrial and operational technology face a distinctive risk environment. Their products are often deeply embedded in customers’ critical workflows such as facility operations, fleet management, industrial process control, or transaction processing, which means that both the cost of failure and the value of trust are unusually high. They operate across long sales cycles, complex channel relationships, and demanding validation requirements, often selling to buyers who are slow to adopt and slow to switch. Many are navigating a fundamental business model transition, from hardware and perpetual licenses toward software, subscriptions, and outcome-based offerings, that requires them to take deliberate strategic risks at the same time as they manage the day-to-day risks of running an engineering-intensive business in a world being transformed by AI. That’s why at VDC Strategy we think carefully about how industrial and operational technology vendors should approach strategic risk, and why we think a more rigorous risk assessment framework is critical.
