Siemens, AWS say latest collaboration helps bridge IT, OT gap
Siemens and Amazon Web Services have announced another collaboration in the IT/OT convergency space, with AWS IoT SiteWise Edge available as an application in the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace, the two companies announced in a post-Thanksgiving release on Nov. 27.
The announcement was touted by the two as a means to simplify the IT/OT convergence with an “integrated edge-to-cloud experience” for customers to optimize their industrial operations by collecting, organizing, and analyzing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data at scale “to make better, data-driven decisions.”
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From the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace, customers can deploy SiteWise Edge “for centralized app and device management and combine it with a variety of other apps and edge devices, from Siemens and other vendors, to configure an IoT solution for their specific challenges.”
“The addition of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge to our Industrial Edge Marketplace creates new opportunities to deploy edge and cloud applications at scale and manage closed-loop automation workflows,” said Rainer Brehm, CEO of factory automation at Siemens. “Our customers are constantly facing new challenges to boost productivity, flexibility, and sustainability across their production processes.”
Siemens launched its open Industrial Edge platform in 2018 and expanded it in October 2021 with the Industrial Edge Marketplace, an independent, cross-vendor app store where industrial customers can buy apps from different IoT providers.
The platform and marketplace are part of Siemens Xcelerator, an open digital business platform, which creates an ecosystem for collaboration between customers, Siemens, and third parties to accelerate digital transformation. And as such they are also part of Industrial Operations X, an open and interoperable portfolio for automating and operating industrial production.
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According to the Siemens release, which quotes Beecham Research as a source, the majority (74%) of customer IoT projects remain isolated experiments, require a long time to deploy at scale or do not achieve the expected return on investment due to a dissimilar landscape of OT and IT systems. According to Siemens, its collaboration with AWS will help bridge that gap.
To this end, customers using AWS IoT SiteWise Edge and Siemens Industrial Edge benefit from a wide range of industrial connectivity options, data storage and management, security capabilities, and analytics and visualization technologies across the edge and the cloud, according to the Siemens release. With this offering, automation engineers, maintenance technicians, and operations managers can decide what data needs to be collected and where it is stored, processed, or analyzed.
