First: foundational digitization
Not the flashy stuff, but the unglamorous work of getting your data infrastructure right.
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Organizations aren't struggling with vision. They're struggling with execution.
After countless conversations with customers across industries, this is the pattern I see again and again. Leaders know where they want to go. They understand the promise of Industry 4.0, the potential of AI, the imperative to modernize. But when it comes to actually getting there, they're stuck.
They're trying to modernize legacy OT environments while keeping operations running. They're working to secure increasingly connected systems without creating bottlenecks. They're attempting to extract usable data from fragmented infrastructure that was never designed to talk to itself. And they're doing all of this while IT and OT teams operate on different architectures, different priorities, and sometimes different languages entirely.
The ambition is autonomy and real-time insight. The reality is siloed infrastructure, inconsistent data, and complexity that compounds with every new point solution added to the stack.
The real gap is foundation
Here's what I've come to believe: the biggest obstacle between organizations and their goals has nothing to do with vision or strategy. It's the foundational network backbone required to harmonize, secure, and scale.
IT/OT convergence is the prerequisite for everything that comes next. You can't automate what you can't securely connect and contextualize. Physical AI, real-time decision-making, predictive maintenance, autonomous operations: none of it works without a resilient, converged infrastructure underneath.
The network has evolved beyond basic infrastructure. It's now the platform everything else depends on. The organizations that invest early in that foundation will be the ones that unlock real-time autonomy, predictive insight, and measurable productivity gains. Those that don't will find themselves bolting on solutions that promise quick wins but deliver more complexity, more technical debt, and more security exposure over time.
What leaders should be paying attention to
Over the next two to three years, I'd encourage leaders across industrial and enterprise environments to prioritize three things:
Second: network resilience
Your network has become the platform everything else runs on. Treat it that way.
Third: scalable architectures that support AI at the edge
Physical AI is coming. The question is whether your infrastructure is ready for it.
And what should you be wary of? Point solutions that promise quick wins. They're tempting, but they often create more problems than they solve: complexity that compounds, legacy burdens that accumulate, and security gaps that widen.
How we're showing up differently
I realize every company in this space claims to be a "partner, not a vendor." I'm not interested in that debate. I'm interested in whether we actually help customers get from where they are to where they need to be.
At Belden, we've been investing in what we call our ecosystem of experts. That means bringing together deep domain expertise, cybersecurity leadership, and commercial execution, with a focus on outcomes rather than just products.
When customers work with us, they gain access to people who understand their vertical, their operational constraints, and how to design resilient, future-ready networks. We've had to learn some of these lessons ourselves. Over the past year, we restructured our commercial organization to break down internal silos, bring teams closer to customers, and accelerate our ability to deliver complete solutions rather than just components. That work continues, but it's made us sharper.
This is also why we recently welcomed Jeff Winter to Belden as Vice President of Commercial Strategy.
Jeff has spent over two decades helping leaders understand what's possible in modern industrial and enterprise environments and, more importantly, what it takes organizationally, technically, and culturally to make it real. He's been recognized as the #1 global thought leader for Industry 4.0 by Onalytica.
His role at Belden is to help bring this vision to life. His work across vertical markets, ecosystem partners, and our commercial teams to align our investments in technology, partnerships, and go-to-market are coordinated and scalable. And he’ll continue to serve the broader industrial community as an independent voice, which is part of what makes his perspective so valuable.
The road ahead
I've sat in enough customer meetings to know that most organizations aren't asking for more technology options. They're asking for help making sense of what they already have. That's the work we're focused on.
The next era of industrial automation won't be defined by who has the best vision. It'll be defined by who executes.
