U.S. manufacturer, Emerson, is working with Microsoft to help industrial manufacturers get more value out of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Announcing the partnership at its Global Users Exchange this week, Emerson said its Plantweb IIoT platform will be integrated and hosted on Microsoft ‘s Azure IoT Suite. The aim is to create a solution that can improve overall operational performance and efficiency for its enterprise customers.
Integrated IIoT solutions
Plantweb is a digital plant architecture that uses predictive analytics to improve plant performance. In future, it will be hosted on Microsoft Azure IoT, a cloud environment in which customers can manage their data and connected devices from anywhere. Emerson is also adopting Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT technology to make serving data to the Azure IoT Suite easier. These capabilities should remove the need for in-house domain experts as Emerson will provide the real-time monitoring of infrastructure that manufacturers require, the company said.
Emerson chose Microsoft as a partner for its “comprehensive offerings that span the intelligent edge with Windows and the intelligent cloud with Azure.” It hopes that with the new capabilities provided by Microsoft, customers will have access to one “turnkey ‘connected service’ model” that will enable them to quickly deploy IIoT applications, delivering more immediate business benefits.
More partnerships and mergers
“Emerson and Microsoft have a long-standing relationship to deliver sensor-driven distributed applications to run plant processes safely and reliably,” says Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer, Emerson Automation Solutions. “By integrating Microsoft IoT offerings, including cloud-based Azure IoT Suite and smart device-driven Windows 10 IoT, we are excited to expand the Emerson Plantweb digital ecosystem to cloud applications that can also be delivered in a turnkey ‘connected service’ model for the entire enterprise.”
Sam George, Microsoft partner director, Azure IoT said, “Emerson has a laser focus on helping their customers achieve their highest performance and their offerings are a great example of the transformational power of IoT. Our proven success with the Azure IoT Suite and Windows 10 IoT in industrial applications provides the flexible, secure environment industrial manufacturers need to confidently adopt Industrial IoT.”
This is not the first convergence of IoT solutions by organizations searching for one complete offering; HPE and PTC announced a very similar offering just yesterday. The growing number of IoT collaborations is positive, but it remains to be seen whether this will translate into real enterprise adoption.