Edge and cloud data integration enables adaptive production through AI- and digital-twin-powered solutions.
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 integrating Siemens Industrial Edge with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, customers can enable data flow from production lines to the edge and cloud, supporting AI and digital twin solutions for improved machine performance, product quality, and maintenance.
Siemens Industrial Edge integrates with Azure IoT Operations, part of Microsoft Azure’s adaptive cloud approach
Industrial companies have traditionally managed data separately in IT and OT environments. Today, integrating OT and IT is key to making manufacturing more adaptive. Edge computing helps by enabling data capture and processing directly on the shop floor.
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.
As part of the Azure adaptive cloud approach, Azure IoT Operations connects on-premises industrial edge solutions, like Siemens Industrial Edge, with the cloud for continuous data flow.
In this way, the 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 Industrial Edge 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.
Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform designed to streamline data management and analytics for AI.
Turning shopfloor data into real outcomes
Siemens and Microsoft are collaborating to help industrial manufacturers implement edge-to-cloud solutions. Using the Siemens Industrial AI portfolio with Azure Machine Learning, producers can train AI models in the cloud and run them at the edge to enhance product quality and reduce manual rework. Siemens Industrial Edge data, integrated with Azure IoT Operations and cloud services, enables digital twin creation to optimize equipment efficiency. The collaboration also leverages live production data with generative AI to support workforce training and operations. Siemens Industrial Copilot for Operations assists operators with troubleshooting and machine insights through natural language queries.
For more information, visit siemens.com.
