ABB and Red Hat partner on scalable digital solutions

ABB and Red Hat have announced a global partnership to enable industries using ABB’s process automation and industrial software to leverage Red Hat’s enterprise platforms and application services built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The collection, management and analysis of industrial plant data is critical to improving the efficiency of operations while addressing safety, security and productivity needs.

The partnership enables virtualisation and containerisation of automation software with Red Hat OpenShift to provide greater flexibility in hardware deployment, optimised according to application needs. It is also designed to provide efficient system orchestration, enabling real-time, data-based decision-making at the edge and further processing in the cloud.

The Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its foundation, provides ABB with a single consistent application platform, from small single node systems to scaled-out hyper-converged clusters at the industrial edge, which ABB says will simplify development and management efforts for ABB’s customers.

“This exciting partnership with Red Hat demonstrates ABB’s commitment to meet customer needs by seeking alliances with other innovative market leaders,” said Bernhard Eschermann, Chief Technology Officer, ABB Process Automation. “The alliance with Red Hat will see ABB continue helping our customers improve their operations as they navigate a rapidly evolving digital landscape. It will give them access to the tools they need to integrate plant-wide IT and OT, while reducing risks and optimising performance.”

ABB says Red Hat OpenShift will increase the deployment flexibility and scalability of ABB Ability Edgenius, an edge platform for industrial software applications, together with ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite. With this partnership, ABB will have access to capabilities like zero-touch provisioning (remote configuration of networks) which can increase manageability and consistency across plant environments.

“Red Hat is excited to work with ABB to bring operational and information technology closer together to form the industrial edge,” said Matt Hicks, Executive Vice President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “Together, we intend to streamline the transition from automated to autonomous operations and address current and future manufacturing needs using open-source technologies. As we work to break down barriers between IT and the plant level, we look to drive limitless innovation and mark a paradigm shift in operational technology based on open source.”

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