{"id":16100,"date":"2020-11-19T11:22:26","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T11:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/?p=16100"},"modified":"2021-01-11T11:22:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T11:22:43","slug":"rockwell-automation-and-microsoft-team-up-to-simplify-your-work-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/rockwell-automation-and-microsoft-team-up-to-simplify-your-work-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockwell Automation and Microsoft team up to simplify your work life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Automation Fair At Home is taking place online this week. Here is a highlight from day 3. If you missed the event so far, you can still register for Thursday and Friday <\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/events.rockwellautomation.com\/profile\/101917\"><i>online here<\/i><\/a><i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>19 November 2020<\/i>. Technically, the focus of the yesterday\u2019s Automation Fair At Home press conference was the benefit of edge-to-cloud technology being delivered via the expanding partnership between Rockwell Automation and Microsoft.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But quickly into the discussion between Tessa Myers, Rockwell Automation vice president of product management, and Sam George, Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure IoT, it became clear that this is more than a partnership between two companies; rather this initiative involves the wider ecosystem of stakeholders, from OEMs to system integrators, from data scientists to factory-floor managers, from software developers to business owners and everybody in between.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Rockwell Automation and Microsoft may be directing this production to optimize operations, but the end users\u2014the customers\u2014are the most important actors.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The backstory: earlier this fall, Rockwell Automation and Microsoft announced a five-year partnership expansion to develop integrated, market-ready solutions to help industrial customers improve digital agility through cloud technology. By combining each company\u2019s expertise in the industrial and IT markets, respectively, teams can work together more seamlessly, enabling industrial organizations to save on infrastructure costs, speed time-to-value, and increase productivity.<\/p>\n<p>The goal is to deliver innovative edge-to-cloud-based solutions that connect information between development, operations and maintenance teams through a singular, trusted data environment that enables development teams to digitally prototype, configure and collaborate without investing in costly physical equipment. This unified data environment also enables IT and OT teams to not only securely access and share data models across the organization, but with their ecosystem of partners as well.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis partnership provides Rockwell Automation and Microsoft customers with a holistic, simple solution for IIoT development and operations and removes data silos that hinder industrial digital transformation initiatives,\u201d said Rockwell Chairman and CEO Blake Moret at the time the partnership was announced. \u201cBy eliminating a core barrier to automation initiatives, industrial organizations establish a digital thread connecting the entire enterprise, which in turn accelerates innovation, maximizes productivity and optimizes operations.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>During yesterday\u2019s press conference, reps for the two companies further detailed this collaboration, the latest in more than two decades of fruitful partnership. \u201cA little over a year ago we decided to engage in a co-innovation challenge,\u201d explained Myers. \u201cWe wanted to explore what more we could do, together, to enable digital transformation for our industrial customers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The result of that exploration is the creation of FactoryTalk as a service offering, a cloud-based solution design to help streamline customers\u2019 tasks in increase productivity. This offering is comprised of three sub-elements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Design Hub: Increasing design-time productivity to reduce time-to-market and mitigate risk. (This element launches early in 2021.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The Operations Hub: Boasting simplified access to real-time data for analytics and cloud-based applications to drive operational efficiency.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The Maintenance Hub: Focusing on asset management and predictive maintenance, enabling performance and workforce productivity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cWe asked ourselves \u2018How do we ignite and enable our ecosystem of partners, machine builders, system integrators, end users and service providers to help all of industry leverage technology to progress their efforts?\u2019\u201d said Myers.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a lofty challenge. The partners are confident they can accomplish it.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe see a new computer paradigm across industry,\u201d said George. \u201cNot just IIoT, but a true balance between cloud and edge efforts. We at Microsoft Azure come from the cloud, but not everything belongs there. You have workloads running on the edge and cloud. There should be a distribution of work between the two.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This is customer-driven innovation, the two stressed throughout the press conference, emphasizing the motivation to simplify, simplify, simplify. Making it easier for OEMs to manage the insertion of smart-devices in their equipment. Making it easier for data scientists to develop insights from the data, rather than wasting time processing that information. Making it easier for end-users to configure all of their disparate programs to enable true optimization of all of their efforts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA common challenge for customers undergoing digital transformation is the large number of assets within legacy systems, which makes getting at data\u2014consistently\u2014difficult,\u201d said Myers. \u201cWe want to alleviate the burden of getting to the right data. We want to free the customer to think about what they can do with the information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSimplifying that journey is an amazing first step,\u201d echoed George. \u201cWhen customers gain that access, when they understand true efficiencies, that leads to new questions, which leads to improvements, that then leads to new questions.\u201d <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>These partners are eager and able to provide answers. Summarized Myers, \u201cWe have very talented team members working on this collaboration, but we are always guided by customers\u2014the challenges and needs they have. We engage with customers on what things are most impactful for them, and that helps guide us in this work. We are leveraging the domain expertise of Rockwell Automation and Microsoft, but we are guided by customers as we move forward on this journey.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technically, the focus of the yesterday\u2019s Automation Fair At Home press conference was the benefit of edge-to-cloud technology being delivered via the expanding partnership between Rockwell Automation and Microsoft.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-releases","category-rockwell-automation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swmcommunications.co.za\/press-office\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}