Industrial software has matured from a category of optimistic point tools into something more institutional. The question is no longer whether operators will adopt software; it is which layers of the stack reward investment, and which remain commoditised by their proximity to physical assets.
The leverage sits, increasingly, in the layers above the asset: scheduling, dispatch, audit and compliance, and the unglamorous records systems that connect operations to the rest of the enterprise. The closer software sits to those layers, the more it benefits from the long contract cycles that define industrial buying.
Below those layers, value is harder to capture. Sensor and telemetry vendors compete with hardware-bundled offerings, and the integration tax is structurally high. We continue to evaluate ventures here, but with a higher bar on differentiation thesis and channel strategy.