ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announce a strategic global partnership that combines ABB’s digital offerings, ABB Ability, with HPE’s hybrid information technology (IT) products. ABB and HPE will deliver joint industry offerings that merge OT and IT to turn industrial data into insights and automatic action, combining widely-adopted cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure with IT systems running in corporate data centers and at the edge of the network, according to ABB. Employing the right mix of IT platforms will reportedly accelerate data processing in industrial plants and at the same time enable effective control of industrial processes across locations. To provide a true end-to-end experience for customers, the ABB-HPE partnership will include co-innovation, co-development, joint go to market and service.
Research firm IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will grow to $1.4 trillion in 2021 from an expected $800 billion in 2017, according to ABB. The largest investments are being made in areas such as manufacturing, transportation and utilities. To tap into the opportunities of the IoT, companies are investing in new solutions that digitize their industrial equipment and integrate it with their broader IT environments. By joining forces, ABB and HPE are reportedly bringing together the capabilities needed to accelerate this transformation.
Running data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment helps customers avoid the latency, security and reliability issues associated with data communication through remote IT systems. ABB and HPE will jointly develop, market and service digital industrial products that help customers:
· Create deep insights and automatic action from industrial data – by running ABB Ability applications on enterprise-grade IT systems close to the industrial equipment to accelerate the processing of vast amounts of data; and
· Manage and control industrial processes across the supply chain – by leveraging hybrid IT to provide a seamless experience from edge to cloud to core, making critical data available across locations.
The partnership will enable ABB Ability™ solutions to run on hybrid platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, enabling customers to deploy applications to their preferred location – on HPE infrastructure in industrial plants and data centers or in the Microsoft Azure public cloud – to meet the specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.
ABB and HPE will also deliver joint offerings for data centers, including
· Data center automation – to enable data center power, cooling and building systems automatically adapt to changing IT demands or incidents. To that end, ABB and HPE will integrate ABB Ability Data Center Automation, which controls, monitors and optimizes mission-critical data center facilities infrastructure, with HPE OneView, HPE’s IT infrastructure automation software.
· Secure edge data center – specifically designed to run in harsh industrial environments, bringing enterprise-grade IT capacity closer to the point of data collection and machine control. This product is being developed in collaboration between ABB, HPE and Rittal, manufacturer of IT racks, and will be an off-the-shelf ready IT data center offering for industrial customers enabling real-time insight and action.
For more information, visit: www.abb.com
