HPE partners with ABB to increase efficiency of industrial plants

ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have entered into a strategic global partnership that combines ABB’s digital offerings, ABB Ability, with HPE’s innovative hybrid information technology (IT) solutions. The partnership will provide customers with solutions that generate actionable insights from vast amounts of industrial data to increase efficiency and flexibility of their operations and create competitive advantage.

“This alliance between two global leaders is unprecedented in terms of breadth and depth, and it will be groundbreaking 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.”

Customers will benefit from ABB’s deep domain expertise in operations technologies (OT) and HPE’s leadership in information technologies (IT). 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. 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. Together, we will bring intelligence from cloud-based solutions to on-premises deployments in industrial plants and data centers for greater uptime, speed and yield,” said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. “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.”

To provide a true end-to-end experience for customers, the ABB-HPE partnership will include co-innovation, co-development, joint go-to-market and service.

Computing where it is required

Running data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment helps customers 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 help customers:

· Create deep 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; and

· Manage and control industrial processes across the supply chain – by leveraging hybrid IT to provide a seamless experience from edge to cloud to core, making critical data available across locations.

The partnership will enable ABB Ability solutions to run on hybrid platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, enabling customers to deploy applications to their preferred location – on HPE infrastructure in industrial plants and data centers or in the Microsoft Azure public cloud – to meet the specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

ABB and HPE will also deliver joint solutions for data centers, including –

· Data center automation – to enable data center power, cooling and building systems automatically adapt to changing IT demands or incidents. To that end, ABB and HPE will integrate ABB Ability Data Center Automation, which controls, monitors and optimizes mission-critical data center facilities infrastructure, with HPE OneView, HPE’s IT infrastructure automation software.

· Secure edge data center – specifically designed to run in harsh industrial environments, bringing enterprise-grade IT capacity closer to the point of data collection and machine control. This solution is being developed in collaboration between ABB, HPE and Rittal, the world’s largest manufacturer of IT racks, and will be an off-the-shelf ready IT data center solution for industrial customers enabling real-time insight and action.