by Gary Mintchell | Mar 28, 2025 | Cloud, Edge, Generative AI
The third of Siemens pre-Hannover news releases concerns Xcelerator Edge with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations.
- Siemens Industrial Edge works seamlessly with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, making OT and IT data planes fully interoperable for manufacturing
- Edge and cloud data integration enables adaptive production through AI- and digital-twin-powered solutions
- Industrial customers benefit from improved machine performance, product quality and reduced machine maintenance
Siemens announces an extended collaboration with Microsoft in the context of Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens’ open digital business platform, to simplify the integration of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) for enterprise customers. By combining Siemens Industrial Edge with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, customers will benefit from complementary solutions that enable a seamless flow of data from production lines to the edge and to the cloud. This edge-to-cloud data integration enables AI- and digital-twin-powered solutions to improve machine performance, product quality, and reduce machine maintenance.
A core component of the Azure adaptive cloud approach, Azure IoT Operations is designed to seamlessly integrate on-premises industrial edge solutions, like Siemens Industrial Edge, with the cloud, ensuring a continuous flow of data for smarter operations.
In this way, the powerful OT data plane provided by Siemens Industrial Edge works easily with Azure IoT Operations, to create an interoperable OT and IT data plane for manufacturing. The data layer from Siemens Industrial Edge effectively addresses mission-critical production applications such as virtualized control, low-latency closed-loop AI, executable digital twins, or production line-level analytics. It allows manufacturers to deploy responsive, reliable, flexible and secure applications to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and increase uptime and quality. By coupling with Azure IoT Operations, industrial producers can easily leverage this OT data in cloud-based, data-driven use cases to optimize production across sites and gain insights from advanced analytics.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 28, 2025 | Cloud, Enterprise IT
I wrote about a company new to me from The Netherlands thanks to a media relations person I’ve known for quite some time. Leaseweb Global provides cloud services and Infrastructure as a Service. They are back with an announcement regarding adding NVIDIA L4, L40S and H100 NVL GPUs to its infrastructure portfolio.
Through this offering, Leaseweb notes it is meeting the compute needs of a wide variety of sectors – including the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Media & Entertainment and Gaming industries – at a price point that enables significant cost savings when compared to the wider marketplace.
Available across Leaseweb’s entire global network, spanning the European, North American and Asia Pacific regions, the expanded GPU offering supports customers with a scalable, efficient deployment framework optimized for high-performance computing (HPC), ranging from AI model training and video analytics to graphics processing and video rendering functionality. Leaseweb’s new NVIDIA GPU solution aims to help customers improve their operations, reduce costs, and enhance computational speed for demanding workloads. The announcement also underlines Leaseweb’s commitment to meeting the demand for powerful infrastructure solutions with industry benchmark performance chips that can be deployed within hours to ensure high availability service provision.
This marks the next step in Leaseweb’s journey to providing a complete AI offering for its customers, which will include integration into Leaseweb’s public cloud and broader set of infrastructure solutions. By providing a comprehensive, scalable solution for a wide variety of workloads, Leaseweb is reinforcing its position as a trusted partner for organizations focused on balancing price with performance and availability. With further plans to integrate this offering into its broader solutions suite, the company is strongly positioned to become a leading provider of GPU infrastructure, supporting customers as they invest in these transformational technologies.
“This announcement represents an important step for customers where GPU availability is increasingly important and will give organizations around the world the price/performance flexibility they need, as soon as they need it,” commented Liat Mendelson Honderdors, Principal Product Manager, AI and GPU at Leaseweb.
“Our customers value Leaseweb’s extensive industry expertise as they plan and deploy infrastructure for their most processor-intensive workloads. With considerations ranging from price and performance to data sovereignty and compliance, Leaseweb’s solutions and state-of-the-art global network means we are ideally suited to helping our customers grow their business and expand into new markets, even at hours’ notice. By incorporating best-in-class NVIDIA technology into our infrastructure portfolio, we’re laying the foundation for a broader solution set that will continue to evolve with customer needs,” Mendelson Honderdors concluded.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 15, 2025 | Cloud, Enterprise IT, Operations Management, Technology
Technology advancements and innovations plus applications solving bigger problems have led my work, research, and writing from virtual PLCs to virtual servers. That’s why I have loved technology ever since I was 14 and soldering resistors, capacitors, and coils into circuits.
Here is a Dutch company (the product is available globally, of course) that has launched a “highly efficient” Virtual Private Server (VPS) solution.
Some of the year-end prognoses sent my way (many sort of self serving) predicted les reliance on cloud and a return to more on prem solutions. Perhaps this company provides help both ways.
Their blurb touts, “Powered by High Performance CPUs, Local NVMe Storage and Lightning-fast 10 Gbps Uplink Speed, Packages Start at Just €3.99/month.”
Leaseweb Global, a cloud services and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, January 14 announced the launch of a new highly efficient Virtual Private Server (VPS) solution. Designed for businesses that need a combination of exceptional price-performance, fast local storage and easy deployment, Leaseweb VPS packages start at just €3.99/month to deliver affordable solutions that don’t compromise on quality.
Leaseweb’s new VPS solution provides customers with the flexibility to expand their infrastructure as their business needs grow. Delivered via a low-touch, self-service portal, it requires limited technical expertise for setup or management, enabling users to configure their server, monitor resources and manage snapshots with ease. This makes it ideal for businesses seeking a straightforward, scalable and efficient hosting service, as well as those looking for an entry-level solution to Leaseweb Public Cloud.
Technical specifications keep advancing.
With lightning-fast 10Gbps uplink speed, and powered by high performance processors and local NVMe storage, the Leaseweb VPS solution provides ample compute, RAM and generous traffic across all packages. In addition, built-in security and reliability features, including firewalls, DDoS protection and ISO-certified data centers, offer peace of mind and comprehensive protection for all customers. For those customers wanting to include backup, this is available as an add-on service.
“Our new VPS solution has been designed from the ground up to offer the ideal balance of performance, usability and cost,” said Mathijs Heikamp, Director Product Management at Leaseweb Global. “By combining the latest hardware, advanced automation and an intuitive self-service portal, we’re delivering a cloud infrastructure solution that can effortlessly adapt to customer requirements.”
Here is information about Leaseweb since this company is new to me—and perhaps to you.
Leaseweb is a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider serving a worldwide portfolio of 20,000 customers ranging from SMBs to Enterprises. Services include Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Dedicated Servers , Colocation, Content Delivery Network , and Cyber Security Services supported by exceptional customer service and technical support. With more than 80,000 servers, Leaseweb has provided infrastructure for mission-critical websites, Internet applications, email servers, security, and storage services since 1997. The company operates 28 data centers in locations across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America, all of which are backed by a superior worldwide network with a total capacity of more than 10 Tbps.
Leaseweb offers services through its various Leaseweb Sales Entities which are Leaseweb Netherlands B.V., Leaseweb USA, Inc., Leaseweb Singapore PTE. LTD, Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH, Leaseweb Australia Ltd., Leaseweb UK Ltd, Leaseweb Japan KK, Leaseweb Hong Kong LTD, and Leaseweb Canada Inc.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 12, 2024 | Cloud, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
I seldom do case studies here. I don’t have time to do a proper set of interviews that would emphasize team rather than product. This one came from Rockwell Automation’s company Plex. Gathering appropriate data and displaying it in ways that boost decision making constitutes a recurring problem for operations management. This story details establishing real-time reporting, insight into inventory tracking, and visibility across production.
The client company, Advanced Vehicle Assemblies, LLC (AVA) is known for its unique, complementary manufacturing processes that enable the production of complex metal assemblies. Founded in 2021, AVA has expanded significantly and now ships approximately 52.2 million parts annually.
The problem statement from AVA CIO Rob Arrowsmith: data was not easily accessible, and functions difficult to learn.
The result: real-time data is accessible, and online learning resources are abundant and easy to follow.
[Note: what follows was written by Plex marketing. I did not edit out all the adjectives and adverbs. It is a good story of actually implementing a complex software application in a short amount of time.]
AVA split from its former sister company in June 2020 and this transition kicked off an urgent search for a new ERP system. They were temporarily covered under a shared service agreement from their previous affiliation, but the end date was nearing. As a result, the company looked for an ERP solution that minimized hardware maintenance — a stark contrast to their previous experience — and could be implemented within their tight timeline.
Alongside the frequent maintenance required by the old ERP system, AVA also faced the fact that the old system did not include Manufacturing Execution System (MES) integration. The absence of real-time production reporting and inventory tracking led to reliance on manual processes, causing significant delays and a lack of trust in the collected data. As AVA aimed for rapid independence and organizational rebuilding following the split, the selection of a new ERP system became a critical aspect of their strategic focus.
As it navigated the landscape of ERP options during the summer of 2020, AVA conducted surveys, evaluations, and demonstrations to help identify their top priorities with the help of user feedback. Despite the tight timeframe, the culmination of this rigorous process led them to select Plex as their new ERP system in late 2020. This choice marked a pivotal step for Advanced Vehicle Assemblies, LLC as they embraced a new ERP system that promised to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and support their journey towards becoming a thriving, independent enterprise.
Embarking on their ERP system revamp journey, AVA utilized the Milan, Michigan facility as their first Plex implementation site in December 2020. This location shared the outdated ERP system with AVA’s sister company, adding an extra layer of complexity to the transition. Knowing time was of the essence, Milan aimed to go live on Plex within 60 days.
To ensure a successful transition, AVA enlisted the support of Plex implementation services, who assigned a project manager to the Milan site. This project manager brought a deep understanding of the project’s parameters and the urgency of a rapid go-live timeframe. To bolster their efforts, the Plex team tapped on outside consultants to assist with the critical data cleansing phase as it was loaded into Plex. Employee training sessions and workshops were also prioritized, acknowledging the importance of preparing users for the impending changes.
As the go-live date loomed, an impressive collaboration unfolded, with up to seven Plex team members present at the Milan location during each shift. This emphasis on teamwork from all sides underscored the collective commitment to a successful implementation. Despite the challenge of a 60-day timeline, the Milan site successfully implemented Plex within the desired timeframe. Employees showcased resilience and adaptability as they mastered the main Plex functions, navigating the natural learning curve that comes with migrating to a new manufacturing solution.
The Plex implementation brought about a transformative wave of improvements for AVA, revolutionizing their operational landscape. One of the most notable enhancements was the establishment of real-time production reporting and inventory tracking. The newfound ability to access data in real time instilled a heightened sense of awareness of inventory for AVA, enabling employees to address issues promptly, fostering agility in their responses and elevating overall operational efficiency.
Furthermore, the implementation of Plex significantly augmented visibility across production. With operators more engaged and proactive on the shop floor, AVA witnessed quicker problem resolution. The benefits of Plex extended beyond the shop floor as it empowered AVA to successfully grow its business while maintaining a lean operational structure, minimizing the need for additional personnel to manage the Plex ERP system. Additionally, key Performance Indicators (KPIs) became more visible and dynamic, seamlessly integrating into Plex as native components rather than being extracted from external Excel sheets.
Plex also eliminated the necessity for financial consolidation software, streamlining processes and making contextual data easily available. The intuitiveness of the Plex system unlocked this accessibility, making it easy for users to navigate and find the information they need. The cloud-based nature of Plex, coupled with its highly configurable background settings, provided a foundation of flexibility that empowered AVA to continue to test and implement improvements. This adaptability positioned Plex as a transformative tool that not only met AVA’s original expectations for their ERP system but exceeds them into the present and future.
After the Plex implementation, Advanced Vehicle Assemblies, LLC has gone on a revolutionary journey marked by significant improvements across various facets of their operations. The shift from an outdated ERP system to Plex resulted not only in material improvements but also newfound capabilities and efficiencies. Perspectives have also evolved across departments, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and data utilization.
For AVA, the most significant achievement with Plex has been the ability to attain complete independence. Upon completion of the implementation, internal surveys affirmed the success of Plex as it earned high marks for reliability, speed, and ease of use. The adoption and integration of the software extends beyond that of the Milan, Michigan location, with AVA employees able to take on the remaining Plex implementations internally with little to no Plex support required on site.
As AVA looks towards the future, the success of the Plex implementation stands as a testament to the company’s resilience and adaptability, setting the stage for continued growth and operational excellence for years to come.
by Gary Mintchell | May 17, 2024 | Automation, Cloud, Data Management, Embedded Control, Manufacturing IT, Networking
While at Automate 2024 I saw Travis Cox of Inductive Automation and Benson Hougland of Opto 22. It was tough seeing them since their booth was always packed. I wound up walking through the show and out into the corridor with them.
These two companies plus Cirrus Link (MQTT and Sparkplug) are perhaps the best partnership combination I’ve seen in my years reporting in this market. Ignition running on Opto’s Groov Epic platform with MQTT and Sparkplug as the communications architecture solve many customer problems.
Hougland told me that they are continuing to build out the Groov platform. And to watch for cool things coming.
Cox told me that the big thing to pay attention to right now from Inductive Automation is the integration with Snowflake (more below). He says the integration keeps improving.
Here is Cox describing the integration at the last Ignition Community Conference:
And well, we got all the community to participate, where they’re basically leveraging Ignition or Ignition Edge or potentially have a smart device that speaks MQTT Sparkplug and they’re gonna build a data model, publish that up to a Chariot broker that’s in the cloud. Real simple. Then we can use the IoT bridge for Snowflake by Cirrus Link and all that data from Sparkplug goes directly into the Snowflake database. We’re showing it on a dashboard within Ignition, but it’s going to Snowflake database as well. And we can easily go and query that data. And we went one step further and we’re actually showing the anomaly detection within the Data Dash. So we’ll do a demonstration of this in just a moment, but wanna show you just how easy it is for this solution. And it’s all something we could do right now. It’s very, very simple to get started with this whole thing.
What is Snowflake, you may ask. Here is Pugal Janakiraman from Snowflake speaking at ICC 2024:
Snowflake is a globally connected cloud vendor agnostic data platform. It’s one single managed service from Snowflake. We take care of security, we take care of governance, we take care of scalability. And after that, much more cool, your API of choice is still SQL. You don’t have to learn hundreds of new services. You continue to use SQL as a mechanism to leverage data which is present in Snowflake, whether it is around building dashboards or you want to build an AI and ML model or build inference around those models, you still use SQL as an API for doing that.
Snowflake is a cloud-native database. Data can still reside on-premise or it can reside in whatever is your cloud vendor of choice. You can run analytics without the data movement out there. So we provide that kind of collaboration mechanisms. We provide AI and ML-based analytics. This is how the journey started for us. Ignition on Edge with zero coding using Snowpipe Streaming API, send the data to Snowflake.
by Gary Mintchell | May 14, 2024 | Cloud, Edge, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
I heard from Hannover Messe that AVEVA was launching a hybrid/cloud MES solution. Being curious, I was able to talk with Rob McGreevy, Chief Product Officer, AVEVA about this.
Why hybrid cloud MES? Today’s manufacturing is high speed/high volume, need to get closer to the edge, closer to the critical control, the machines, yet we need to move data from edge to cloud.
I get why edge, but why cloud? The reason for cloud is analytics, being able to use AI for process centerlining comparatives. We can get to predictive prescriptive quality based on hundreds of variables. Predictive usage of sustainable resources. All this becomes more feasible by connecting realtime data from the edge to the cloud.
This further information about the product comes from the press release. Software solution providers keep pushing the ball a bit further at a time.
AVEVA launches hybrid cloud
To mitigate barriers to industrial innovation, AVEVA is launching at Hannover Messe in April its new hybrid cloud Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution that addresses the supply chain challenges by enabling manufacturing companies to fully visualize and optimize multi-site operations in the cloud.
AVEVA has expanded CONNECT, its industrial intelligence platform with data and visualization services for hybrid Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solutions.
AVEVA’s new hybrid MES solution enables manufacturing companies to manage production data in the cloud, to improve supply chain agility with enterprise-wide visibility into distributed plant operations. This enables companies to optimize their operational performance and sustainability with new insights and guidance provided by advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and data visualization.
AVEVA’s hybrid MES solution combines advanced model-driven MES capabilities at the edge with cloud-based data, analytics and visualization services available on the CONNECT industrial intelligence platform. The ability to collect and securely store data from AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System and process data sources, such as AVEVA PI System and AVEVA’s Operations Control, in a single, secure location in the cloud, makes it easier to aggregate, contextualize and securely share operational data, eliminate organizational data silos, and foster greater collaboration. This unlocks new value from the combined data sets for optimal centerlining of production equipment, soft sensors and predictions that improve quality, throughput and energy use, as well as anomaly detection that gives early insight into production losses before they occur.
