ABB, HPE partner to bring intelligence to industrial plants

Nov. 29, 2017 – ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have announced a strategic global partnership that combines ABB’s digital offerings, ABB Ability, with HPE’s hybrid information technology (IT) solutions.

The parties say the partnership will provide 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,” adding that customers will benefit from ABB’s 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 Cloud platforms, like Microsoft Azure, with IT systems running in corporate data centres and at the edge of the network. 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.
 
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.
 
ABB and HPE will also deliver joint solutions for data centres, including:
• Data centre automation to enable data centre power, cooling and building systems automatically adapt to changing IT demands or incidents. To that end, ABB and HPE will integrate ABB Ability Data Centre Automation, which controls, monitors and optimizes mission-critical data centre facilities infrastructure, with HPE OneView, HPE’s IT infrastructure automation software.
• Secure edge data centre – 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, a manufacturer of IT racks, and will be an off-the-shelf ready IT data centre solution for industrial customers enabling real-time insight and action.

“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 to the cloud to the core.”
 
“This alliance between two global leaders is unprecedented in terms of breadth and depth, and it will be ground-breaking for the progress of the Industrial Internet of Things,” added Meg Whitman, CEO of 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.”