ABB and Hewlett Packard partner on IT/OT integration

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

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 centres 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 centres 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 of the cloud to the core.”

With an installed base of 70 million connected devices, 70,000 digital control systems and 6000 enterprise software solutions, ABB and has a four-decade-long history of creating digital solutions for customers. HPE in turn is a leader in helping customers optimise their IT environments with secure, software-defined technologies that seamlessly integrate across traditional IT, multiple public and private clouds and the intelligent edge to drive key business outcomes.

“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.”

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.

Research firm IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will grow to $1.4 trillion in 2021 from an expected $800 billion in 2017. The largest investments are being made in areas such as manufacturing, transportation and utilities. To tap into the opportunities of the IoT, companies are investing in new solutions that digitise their industrial equipment and integrate it with their broader IT environments. By joining forces, ABB and HPE are bringing together the capabilities needed to accelerate this transformation.

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 centres or in the Microsoft Azure public cloud — to meet the specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

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