It's an exciting time to be a part of the IoT industry journey and Siemens MindSphere already has many stories to tell.
Founded in Berlin in 1847 and now employing around 377,000 people worldwide, Siemens is Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company, focusing on electrification, automation, and digitisation. The company produces technology for industries such as power generation, rail transportation, healthcare, and water treatment; but beyond this, Siemens also offers related services and software solutions.
Breaking New Ground
With its introduction of MindSphere in Hanover 2016, Siemens has its sights set high in its aim to be the leader in IoT and Cloud platform solutions. And, it's well positioned to be just that! MindSphere empowers its customers with cutting edge solutions for shop-floor automation, along with the capturing and analysing of industrial, operational machine data, the value of which is becoming increasingly apparent to businesses worldwide.
What's more, since MindSphere has been created as an open platform, it allows service providers to partner with Siemens to develop and sell their own solutions and apps based upon its architecture. This means that providers are not considered to be competitors of Siemens in the IoT space, but partners.
A Philosophy of Partnership
MindSphere offers a development environment that uses both the open PaaS functions from Siemens and the access to a variety of cloud services. The focus lies on expanding the ecosystem surrounding the IoT system worldwide to establish it as the standard for the industrial Internet and I have no doubt that they will succeed. Companies such as sensor specialist Sick, machine manufacturer Heller and robot manufacturer Kuka joined forces in early 2018 to form the Mindsphere World user association.
And it's gaining developer ground! At this year’s Hannover Messe, several new MindSphere applications were introduced, including Festo , Eisenmann , and Rittal. A stream of new partners are steadily joining their ranks as education about the power and value assets of MindSphere is slowly taking root in the heart of industry digitisation.
Transparency and Insights
Much of MindSphere's appeal lies in the fact that its operating system works on a variety of cloud infrastructures, including SAP, AtoS and Microsoft Azure. The system itself is the interface used to create customer-specific apps, making it extremely versatile and responsive to industry needs.
MindSphere is comprised of three layers: MindApps, MindSphere and MindConnect. MindApps are apps from Siemens and partners that are used to deliver asset transparency and analytical insights. The MindSphere operating system itself is the interface used to create customer-specific apps as described above and MindConnect offers secure and encrypted data communication to deliver plug–and-play connection of both Siemens and third-party products to the Mindsphere OS.
It's an exciting time to be a part of the IoT industry journey and Siemens MindSphere already has many stories to tell. I personally can't wait for the next chapter...
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