Rockwell Automation is an industrial automation company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Rockwell was initially active in the edge computing sector with seven total patent assets, but their most recent issuance is from 2019 and their last publication is from the same year. However, Rockwell has shown a strong interest in edge computing from an announcement in June of 2021 for a $2.2B acquisition of Plex Systems. Plex is a Michigan based software company known for their Plex manufacturing cloud-edge technologies.

Rockwell does benefit from being in a specialized field of edge computing that the major tech companies such as Intel and Cisco likely won’t try to pursue. However, there are other startups in the space like Oden Technologies that had a patent issued in 2020 related to edge computing and manufacturing. Rockwell would be wise to keep an eye on the patent trends and invest some of that capital into protecting their intellectual property before Oden or another smaller company excludes them from the market by patenting across the space.

To keep an eye on trends in the patent space and watch to see what companies are investing in intellectual property, check out the Edge Computing Patent Forecast®!