ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have announced a strategic global partnership at the HPE Discover conference in Madrid. According to the companies, the partnership will provide customers with solutions that generate actionable insights from vast amounts of industrial data to increase the efficiency and flexibility of their operations and create competitive advantage.
ABB and HPE will deliver joint industry solutions 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 accelerate data processing in industrial plants and at the same time enable effective control of industrial processes across locations.
"This strategic partnership marks the next level of the digital industrial transformation," said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. "Together, we will bring intelligence from cloud-based solutions to on-premises deployments in industrial plants and datacenters for greater uptime, speed and yield. ABB and HPE will deliver solutions that span the entire range of computing required by enterprises today, from the edge to the cloud to the core.”
“This alliance between two global leaders is unprecedented in terms of breadth and depth, and it will be ground-breaking for the progress of the Industrial Internet of Things,” said Meg Whitman, CEO, HPE. “Together with ABB, we will shape a digital industrial future where everything computes, equipping machines with intelligence to collaborate, allowing plants to flexibly adapt to changing demands, and enabling global supply chains to instantaneously react to incidents. This partnership will create exciting business opportunities for our joint 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. The largest investments are being made in areas such as manufacturing, transportation and utilities.
Running data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment helps 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 solutions that create 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. The partnership will enable ABB Ability solutions to run on hybrid platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack.
ABB and HPE will also deliver joint solutions for data centers, including data center automation and secure edge data center.
