Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for John Rinaldi · Real Time Automation · August 2026
From the outside, Real Time Automation reads as a search-led business: a deep catalog, unusually good documentation, and a buyer who arrives already knowing that a protocol gateway is a thing that exists. That is a real channel with one limit built into it. It only reaches the engineers who have already named the problem. This map is the rest of that market across the US: the segments those engineers sit in, what they are called, and roughly how many companies carry them. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Industrial machinery and equipment builders
The design-in buyer. A machine builder picks the network stack once, early in a product program, and lives with that choice for the life of the platform. Long cycle, engineer-led, and effectively closed to everyone else the day the decision is made.
Who signs: engineering manager, embedded software engineer, controls engineer, product line manager.
19,000 to 22,000
US machinery manufacturing establishments; roughly 8,000 to 10,000 of them carry 20 or more people
Instrument, sensor and control device makers
Smaller by count and denser in fit, because connectivity is a line on the datasheet rather than an internal preference. These companies compete on which networks they support, so a protocol they cannot support is a bid they cannot enter.
Who signs: director of engineering, firmware lead, product manager, applications engineer.
4,500 to 5,500
US establishments making navigational, measuring and control instruments
Plants running mixed-vendor equipment estates
The gateway buyer rather than the design-in buyer. Sites that bought equipment across three decades and now need two networks to talk to each other. Fast decisions, modest orders, high repeat, and the largest single pool on this page.
Who signs: controls engineer, plant engineering manager, maintenance and reliability lead, the IT and OT manager who owns the data.
25,000 to 30,000
US manufacturing establishments at 100 or more people
Control system integrators and panel builders
Less a customer segment than a multiplier. One integrator carries dozens of plant accounts and specifies hardware on nearly every one of them, which means a single relationship reaches an estate rather than a site.
Who signs: principal or project engineer, owner, purchasing lead.
Roughly 3,000 to 4,000 firms
no public register covers integrators and the trade association lists only several hundred, so this band is deliberately wider than the others
Building, water and energy operators
The building automation and utility side of the same catalog, bought by facilities and operations engineering rather than by manufacturing. Different vocabulary, identical problem, and a segment that never reads factory automation media.
Who signs: facilities engineering director, building automation contractor, control room or SCADA engineer, utility operations manager.
8,000 to 10,000
US water, power and building services employers at 20 or more people

Where the openings are

1
Search only reaches the engineer who has already named the problem. That is a good channel and a narrow one. The engineer at the start of a product program has not named it yet, because the network decision is three months away and nobody has told him it will be painful. He is reachable by role and by company, and he is not reachable by keyword.
2
The specification moment happens once per platform. Miss it and the next opening is the next product, which may be four years out. A channel built on named roles at named companies can arrive at concept stage on purpose. An inbound channel arrives when someone is already searching, which is usually after the choice is locked.
3
Legacy estates are the biggest pool and the least searchable. The plants carrying twenty-year-old networks are the ones most likely to need a translator and least likely to know one exists as a product category. They search when a line stops. Everything before that moment is dark to an inbound channel and open to an outbound one.
4
Integrators are a route, not an account. A few thousand firms sit between you and several tens of thousands of plants, and they make the hardware call. Worked as a named list rather than as inbound traffic, that group behaves like distribution: slow to open, durable once open, and almost never contested by a competitor who is waiting to be found.
Built from public federal registry data covering US establishments and employers, current to the most recent published year, and counts are banded deliberately. Establishment counts describe sites rather than companies, so a manufacturer with several plants appears more than once. Industry codes are self-reported. The integrator population has no public register anywhere and is described rather than counted.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
enquirerconsulting.com