IT Meets Automation at the Hanover Fair

“IT Meets Automation” – that could have been the motto for this year’s Hanover Fair in Germany last month.  This year’s show was by far the most interesting Hanover Fair in a decade.  While Industrie 4.0 was once again the pervasive theme, this year’s visitors were treated to exhibits, demonstrations, and even some real products that put concepts, like Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things, to real use. 

Maybe this year’s IT focus was an indirect result of the fact that the USA was the fair’s partner country.  By the second day of the show, the German press was already reporting on how the “American” IT companies were stealing the show from the German industrial companies.  This was clearly evident from the exhibits in and around hall 7, which was was dominated by the likes of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, AT&T, and SAP.  These companies used to exhibit at the CeBIT show in Hanover, an IT exhibition that separated from the Hanover Fair in 1986 as the IT industry grew.  But many of these companies no longer exhibit at CeBIT, preferring to put out their own company events instead.  While their presence at the industry show does not exactly mark the return of IT to Hanover Fair, it is a clear indication of the interest these companies have in driving the converge of IT and automation.

Industrie 4.0 has many implications, but many industrial companies are learning that it all starts with the right “platform”.  In this case, platform refers to the IT architecture that supports the many IT-driven aspects of Industrie 4.0, such as data analytics and remote services.  A platform provides the ready-made infrastructure to gather, store, and evaluate data.  Platform tools allow users to create their own online services based around these data in the same way that a web hosting company provides tools to design your own website.  Industrial companies normally have little to no experience in this area, so instead of trying to invent a solution themselves, these companies take advantage of the growing offering of platforms and services, such as SAP’s HANA and Microsoft’s Azure. 

This new area of cooperation is the very essence of the IT-automation convergence on display this year in Hanover.  For many years it wasn’t clear whether industrial suppliers would expand into IT, or whether IT providers would gain vertical industry knowledge to offer industry solutions.  As the convergence crystalizes, it is becoming clear that each side is doing what it does best:  IT companies provide infrastructure and services tailored to the needs of industrial users, while industrial companies use these platforms and tools to develop modern, industry-specific solutions.

Both SAP and Microsoft had partner booths that allowed industry companies to show the types of applications that they are solving using these platforms and tools.  For example, Rolls-Royce demonstrated how it diagnoses aircraft engines in flight, managing both routine and predictive maintenance.  The start-up company Foghorn Systems offers an “edge computing” development and deployment platform that pushes intelligence for predictive maintenance to the “industrial edge” of the network where data originate.  SAP’s booth hosted a variety of partners that use the HANA platform, including Siemens, Cisco, and GE, as well as many small start-up companies.

Siemens once again had the most comprehensive booth of any supplier at the Hanover Fair.  Only ABB’s booth was comparably large with a similar concept of solution focuses mixed with individual product displays.  What made Siemens stand out was the focus on specific industry solutions designed around the Digital Enterprise, combining classic automation hardware with extensive design-to-production software, augmented by truly new and exotic solutions, like a cloud-based remote data services platform for machine builders.