Data Analytics Capabilities for the Industrial Internet Are Becoming Increasingly More Available

For example, Siemens Industry Inc. is now partnering with SAP SE to provide cloud services on an open-source base, and the next step is to create an application layer where tools and analytic technologies will reside, according to a Plant Engineering article.

Jagannath Rao, president of Siemens’ customer services division, told attendees of a user conference in June that the layer will contain both customer applications and Siemens apps, and will allow third parties to operate in the application layer as the result of an open ecosystem, according to Plant Engineering.

A recent Automation World article touts GE’s plan to enter the cloud services market with Predix Cloud. According to GE, this cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) “will capture and analyze the unique volume, velocity and variety of machine data within a highly secure, industrial-strength cloud environment.”

GE businesses will begin migrating their own software and analytics to Predix Cloud in the fourth quarter, and the service will be commercially available to customers and other industrial businesses for managing data and applications in 2016.

Infor’s upgraded edition of its CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise software, also featured in Automation World, delivers new tools for document management, providing a central repository that supports “the entire lifecycle” of business documents—from input through storage, retrieval and sharing.

The software suite also includes an integrated suite of financial performance management applications, packaged analytics, and compliance tools that operate across enterprise systems to deliver a “real-time, single version of the truth for the enterprise.” Infor is also buying GT Nexus, reported to be the world’s largest cloud-based global commerce platform, according to AW.

Looking ahead, Sean Riley, Software AG’s director of industry solutions, manufacturing & supply chain says the key technology to watch in manufacturing is visual analytics.

“Soon enough, the information about how a manufacturer got to a specific outcome will become just as important as the outcome itself,” he wrote in a Manufacturing Business Technology article. However, using visual analytics goes one step deeper.

“Visual analytics enables manufacturers to quickly identify best practices and drive future automated decisions throughout the entire enterprise by combining the outcomes and the processes used to obtain those outcomes,” he said.

“Visualization for a manufacturer will be used to support decisions on how exceptions will be managed in the future. This is why incorporating and visualizing the process steps and the outcome of the followed process is crucial to the long-term success of a manufacturer.”