The News: Honeywell announced the Spring 2022 release of new offerings and enhancements to Honeywell Forge, the company’s enterprise performance management software solution, designed to assist customers in accelerating the digital transformation of their operations. This class of offerings, which includes Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse, is developed to help organizations potentially simplify operations and lower costs by providing increased visibility to data as well as real-time insights, monitoring, and automation. Read the Honeywell Forge Press Release here.
Honeywell Forges Ahead with Forge Connected Warehouse Debut and Expanded Software Capabilities across Spring 2022 Release
Analyst Take: I see the debut of the Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse solution as advancing Honeywell’s strategic commitment to becoming a trusted software supplier across the digital ecosystem. I believe Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse fully aligns with growing organizational demand for real-time visibility across warehouse site operations, coupled with smart analytics to minimize unplanned downtime, resolve recurring issues, and automate more business processes.
Highlights of the Honeywell announcement include that the Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse now provides the Site Operations dashboard aimed at site performance optimization and improved access to Honeywell Forge Connect for connecting devices and integration with existing warehouse systems, as well as the availability of the Asset Performance Management (APM) for Warehouse module built to enable maintenance teams to swiftly collaborate on equipment and operations issues.
The enhancements to existing Honeywell software solutions include the new Honeywell Forge Pilot Connect, Honeywell Forge Predictive Maintenance, Sine occupant experience solutions, UniSim Design, and Honeywell Forge Inspection Rounds, as well as new Cyber Core services for OT Cybersecurity applications. Taken together, I view the new portfolio-wide software enhancements as further validating HCE’s ability to ensure Honeywell Forge solutions meet the top priority digital transformation and software development objectives of organizations, particularly in the aerospace, smart buildings, and industrial sectors.
Honeywell deftly aligned its first Media and Analyst Event to help raise ecosystem awareness of the Forge Connected Warehouse and the Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE) unit’s overall software portfolio development proposition. At that event, HCE demonstrated its strategic commitment to becoming a more influential player in providing software solutions throughout the industrial market using data points such as generating ~$1.1 billion in annual revenue, ~3500 total headcount, 1800+ software engineers, and 150+ data scientist and AI specialists on staff.
From my view, one key message that resonated is why organizations should consider the Honeywell Forge portfolio. The considerations include Honeywell’s deep base of industrial experience, coupled with domain expertise across the five major targeted verticals of retail warehouse, real estate, industrial development, aerospace, and life sciences. This includes a portfolio development and marketing focus on supporting enterprise scaling and extendable objectives, as well as a commitment to working with Honeywell clients to assist in improving overall return on investment.
I also see Honeywell making further inroads with its go-to-market “land and expand” sales approach which focuses on selling to on-site decision makers. After demonstrating the value of the Honeywell Forge solution at the site or a handful of sites, the company has an opportunity to escalate to selling enterprise-wide SaaS subscriptions.
I would expect to see Honeywell putting sales emphasis and marketing assets focusing on its AI/ML assets, especially since the company already internally develops the AI/ML capabilities that are natively integrated across the Honeywell Forge portfolio and those capabilities might not yet be widely known. In addition, and as mentioned earlier, with 150+ in-house data and AI scientists to help assure consistent AI/ML portfolio development and innovation, Honeywell offers a compelling value proposition. These capabilities can easily put to use by organizations looking to advance their digital transformation journeys across both the OT and IT domains.
Overall, I anticipate that the new Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse solution and the Spring 2022 portfolio enhancements can help boost Honeywell’s goal of expanding its ecosystem presence and influence as a trusted supplier of purpose-developed software solutions throughout native edge to cloud environments, especially for customers interested in advancing the digital transformation of operations.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Honeywell Investor Day 2022: All Eyes on Expanding Market Share and Investor Profitability
Image Credit: Honeywell
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
