Siemens is adopting IBM's hybrid cloud and Red Hat OpenShift for its MindSphere platform in a move to bring manufacturers' physical and digital worlds closer together.  

The joint initiative will see Siemens apply IBM’s hybrid cloud approach, built on Red Hat OpenShift. This will extend the deployment flexibility of MindSphere, its cloud-based IoT platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that lets users connect machines, devices, third-party applications and services, and physical infrastructure to the platform. 

The new combination will allow customers to run MindSphere on-premises in a private cloud, unlocking speed and agility in factory and plant operations with real-time value from operational data, as well as through a hybrid, multi-cloud model, for product support, updates, and enterprise connectivity. 

Industries like manufacturing are relying on data gathered by IoT platforms to design more efficient products, improve business models, and increase productivity. However, an IBM Institute for Business Value study found a single manufacturing site can generate more than 2,200 terabytes of data in a single month, yet less than 1% is typically used for real-time analysis due to volume and latency issues related to remote cloud services.

Manish Chawla, industry GM for energy, resources, and manufacturing at IBM, said the pandemic forced manufacturers to reimagine everything from the supply chain, to operations, to employee communication, and safety. “Adoption of digital technologies to aid in reinventing these workflows accelerated; what likely would have been a transformation spread across 3 to 5 years happened within a few months," Chawla said. 

The vendors claim that the new offering will allow users to retain full physical control of their data to better cope with regulatory requirements and data privacy.

“In some instances ... putting data in a public cloud environment is just simply not possible, so a private cloud is needed,” Chawla said. “Another operation for the same company may leverage a public cloud architecture. The benefit of this collaboration is that all facilities could still run the same applications, with common data governance and a uniform set of principles.”

The collaboration also expands the partnership between IBM and Siemens following the introduction of a service lifecycle management offering that leverages elements of Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio and IBM Maximo. That offering allows for a more efficient building of data and network systems.