Is MQTT becoming the de facto standard of Industry 4.0? The impact of IoT on industrial automation protocols

Although industrial control systems have switched from analog to digital many decades ago, the problem of having multiple proprietary protocols preventing these systems from properly integrating with each other still persists to this day. OPC UA was conceived with the purpose to address this problem, but its success was only partial, and it’s still not as pervasive and adopted as it should be. MQTT is changing that scenario quickly, with smart sensors, cameras, and now even PLCs natively implementing this old but revamped protocol and edge computing is one of the vectors behind this transformation.