Editorial “Industrial IoT as IT and OT Convergence: Challenges and Opportunities”

During the last decade, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its quick and pervasive evolution have significantly revolutionized the Information Technology ecosystem. The IoT will consist of billions of interconnected Smart Objects generating and consuming a huge amount of heterogeneous data. This massive amount of information has the power to revolutionize how applications and services are designed and deployed allowing them to work more efficiently and profitably. In this context, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) represents one of the main enablers of the fourth industrial revolution (also denoted as Industry 4.0) and it is disrupting existing approaches and creating opportunities for growth in terms of innovations, developments, and disruptive business models. In industrial environments, Operation Technology (OT) has the role of supporting physical value creation and manufacturing processes involving devices, sensors, and software required to control and monitor plants and equipment. On the other hand, Information Technology (IT) combines all necessary information processing and technologies. Traditionally, industries have seen and handled OT and IT as two different specific domains, keeping separate technology stacks, protocols, standards, management, and organizational units. The advent of the IIoT is changing this vision and progressively these two domains started to share common approaches and technologies. The convergence of IT and OT together with the IIoT represents an appealing challenge both for the academic and the industrial research communities, to bring enhanced performance and gains in terms of flexibility and interoperability. The Special Issue “Industrial IoT as IT and OT Convergence: Challenges and Opportunities” is composed of seven high-quality papers, selected by Guest Editors with the support of Reviewers providing valuable comments and useful improvement suggestions.