📋 Tender Overview
Siemens announces an extended collaboration with Microsoft in the context of Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens’ open digital business platform, to simplify the integration of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) for enterprise customers. By combining Siemens Industrial Edge with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, customers will benefit from complementary solutions that enable a seamless flow of data from production lines to the edge and to the cloud. This edge-to-cloud data integration enables AI- and digital-twin-powered solutions to improve machine performance, product quality, and reduce machine maintenance.
In the past, industrial companies have managed data and workloads in separated IT and OT environments. Today, making manufacturing more adaptive calls for OT and IT to converge. Edge computing plays a pivotal role by bridging the gap between shopfloor and cloud, allowing data to be captured and processed directly at the source: on the shopfloor. With Siemens Industrial Edge, manufacturers can simply and quickly deploy and manage applications in a factory environment. Connectivity applications deployed to Siemens Industrial Edge devices enable continuous data flows from industrial assets to Azure IoT Operations. A core component of the Azure adaptive cloud approach, Azure IoT Operations is designed to seamlessly integrate on-premises industrial edge solutions, like Siemens Industrial Edge, with the cloud, ensuring a continuous flow of data for smarter operations.
In this way, the powerful OT data plane provided by Siemens Industrial Edge works easily with Azure IoT Operations, to create an interoperable OT and IT data plane for manufacturing. The data layer from Siemens Industrial Edge effectively addresses mission-critical production applications such as virtualized control, low-latency closed-loop AI, executable digital twins, or production line-level analytics. It allows manufacturers to deploy responsive, reliable, flexible and secure applications to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and increase uptime and quality. By coupling with Azure IoT Operations, industrial producers can easily leverage this OT data in cloud-based, data-driven use cases to optimize production across sites and gain insights from advanced analytics.
“Siemens and Microsoft are reducing complexity for industrial customers by easing the burden of integrating and managing infrastructure, data and applications,” explained Rainer Brehm, CEO Factory Automation at Siemens. “It is now easier to deploy and scale automation solutions across machines, lines and factories, enabling higher machine performance and reduced maintenance time.”
Siemens Industrial Edge also provides a unified and scalable control plane for critical OT workloads, allowing customers to centrally deploy and manage production-level use cases at scale, while Azure provides a unified control plane for IT workloads in the cloud and on-premises. By using both infrastructure solutions together, users can quickly deploy and manage workloads in hybrid environments at scale, wherever they are needed, and focus on the real results: harnessing data and technologies like AI and digital twins, to streamline their production and make it more adaptive.
“Through the Microsoft adaptive cloud approach, manufacturers can now leverage Siemens Industrial Edge with Azure IoT Operations and unify their data with Microsoft Fabric. This marks a significant milestone in Siemens’ and Microsoft’s common journey towards accelerating the digital transformation of manufacturers by enabling them to create data-driven applications in hybrid environments faster than ever before,” said Dayan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President, Manufacturing and Mobility, at Microsoft. Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform that simplifies data management and analytics, readying it for AI.
