Picture a mid-size manufacturer running roughly 5,000 connected devices, sensors, AGVs, and robotics controllers across three plants, on a mix of private 5G on the factory floor and cellular as backup coverage in areas the private network doesn’t reach. The OT team manages the private network and the equipment it serves. The IT team manages everything that touches the corporate network and cloud systems. When a connectivity issue interrupts a production line, the first twenty minutes are usually spent figuring out which team’s system is actually responsible, not fixing the problem.
Private 5G, cellular backup, and legacy wired OT systems all have to work together. Still, they were built by different teams, on different timelines, answering to different priorities. That mismatch, not the private network technology itself, is what makes industrial IoT connectivity genuinely hard to manage.
The OT/IT Convergence Problem
Operational technology networks were built to be isolated, and for good reason: a factory floor running safety-critical equipment shouldn’t depend on the same network as email and file sharing. But that isolation is exactly what breaks down as manufacturers connect more of the floor, robotics, AGVs, PLCs, environmental sensors, to systems that need to reach the cloud: predictive maintenance platforms, ERP systems, quality management tools.
The result is two networks, two sets of tools, and two teams that don’t share a consistent view of device status. When a connected device on the floor stops reporting, OT sees a device issue, and IT sees a network issue, and reconciling those two views costs time a production line downtime clock doesn’t have.
What Connectivity Failure Actually Costs on a Factory Floor
According to Siemens’ 2024 True Cost of Downtime report, unplanned downtime costs the world’s 500 largest companies a combined $1.4 trillion annually, 11% of total revenue, up from 8% in 2019. Not every downtime incident traces back to connectivity, but when a connected device on the floor goes dark and nobody can tell immediately whether it’s a hardware fault, a network handoff issue, or a private network configuration problem, diagnosis time stretches, and diagnosis time is exactly what that $1.4 trillion is measuring.
How Simetric Supports Industrial IoT Connectivity
Simetric doesn’t control robotics, AGVs, or PLCs, and it doesn’t operate the private network infrastructure itself. As an enterprise orchestration layer, it governs the connectivity those devices depend on, coordinating cellular backup and mixed connectivity models under the same policy framework OT and IT teams can both see.
That governance spans approximately 80 million SIMs across more than 300 mobile network operator integrations and 1,200+ normalized APIs, so when a factory-floor device fails over from private network to cellular backup, or a device’s connectivity status needs checking, both teams are looking at the same record instead of two separate systems that don’t talk to each other. A carrier or private network can tell a team a connection dropped. What both teams actually need to know is whether the device itself stopped reporting, and why, and that answer has to be the same regardless of which team is asking. Carrier portals report on their own network. Simetric is the platform that governs all of them, public and private.
Simetric doesn’t replace the private network vendor’s infrastructure or the OT systems already running the floor. It sits above them, giving connectivity status one consistent source of truth that both sides of the OT/IT divide can work from.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Simetric control or manage our robotics, AGVs, or PLCs directly?
No. Simetric governs the connectivity layer those devices use to communicate, not the automation or control systems themselves. It coordinates cellular and mixed connectivity so those devices stay reachable, it doesn’t operate the equipment.
Does this replace our private 5G network provider?
No. Simetric doesn’t operate private network infrastructure. It governs how that private network and any cellular backup work together under one policy framework, giving OT and IT a shared view of connectivity status rather than replacing either team’s existing systems.
How does this help with OT/IT convergence specifically?
By giving both teams the same connectivity record instead of two conflicting ones. When a device issue and a network issue currently look like two different problems on two different screens, the fix usually turns out to be the same fix, teams are just starting from different information.
What happens when a device fails over from private network to cellular backup?
Simetric tracks that transition as part of the device’s connectivity record, so a team can see when and why a device moved to backup coverage instead of that information disappearing into a private network log one team can see and the other can’t.
Give OT and IT One Shared View of the Floor
Stop reconciling two separate pictures of the same connectivity problem. Simetric governs cellular and mixed connectivity for factory-floor devices under one policy framework both teams can see.
See how this connects to IoT security and compliance and analytics and reporting across your industrial environment. Then schedule a demo to talk through your specific OT/IT setup.
Learn more: Siemens: The True Cost of Downtime 2024 | ARC Advisory Group: IT/OT Convergence in an AI World