When Today Meets Tomorrow in the Cloud with Siemens’ Bill Boswell - Futurum Tech Podcast Interview Series

On this special episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast — Interview Series, host Daniel Newman welcomes Bill Boswell, Vice President of Marketing at the Siemens Digital Industries Software, to discuss digital transformation in the age of COVID-19 and what companies across all industries are facing.

It’s Not Time to Slow Down

We are in an unprecedented time right now. Companies have the opportunity to pause and look at what they’re doing across the board. How they’re operating, what technologies are being used, how employees function. This is not the time to slow down. This is the time to embrace digital transformation. Some companies understand that and are innovating and collaborating faster than ever before. Today’s products are smarter and more personalized. More data is being collected than ever before. And many companies are blurring the lines between the digital and physical worlds.

Siemens helps customers use technologies to find opportunities in their industries. Customers are using automation in their supply chain. They are making decisions with technologies like digital twins. They are using software applications that run in the cloud to manage business more efficiently.

Siemens is not just a software development company. They also have factories and manufacturing plants across the globe which gives them a unique opportunity to use the technology that their customers use. Bill pointed out that Siemens has the opportunity to be working right alongside customers, understanding their pain points, knowing what they need in order to speed up the technology of innovation.

Digital Twins Improve Production

One of the great things that Siemens offers to customers is a comprehensive digital twin. There are a lot of definitions of ‘digit twin’ out there, but the way Siemens looks at it depends on your use case and industry. There’s a digital twin of the product that is the design of the product. Everything from your customer requirements to the physical simulation, design, electrical, and mechanical. Then there’s the digital twin of production, which covers manufacturing, planning, and simulating the workstations of the entire factory as you move through the process.

The next digital twin covers performance that allows you to see how it is operating, and then you can close the loop back into your digital twin of the design or your digital twin in the production to make the whole product or the whole production better.

Industrial IoT Isn’t Your Mama’s IoT

Most of the time when we think about IoT, we think about the smart speaker in our house or maybe the wearable on our wrist. But industrial IoT covers so much more than that. It could be a smart machine. It could be a smart manufacturing line, smart robots. It could be smart trains. It could be wind turbines. It can be energy grids. It can be entire infrastructures for cities.

The consumer IoT products have to be manufactured somewhere. Industrial IoT goes behind the scenes. What kind of sensors do you need during the manufacturing process. What kind of smart machines do you need? And then ultimately, what do you do with the data you’re collecting.

Edge Computing or the Cloud?

These devices, whether it’s consumer IoT or industrial IoT, create a lot of data and we have a lot of choices of where we are going to store and interact with that data. There are some analytics that you want to do as close to where the sensors are as possible, and that may be because you want to have reduced latency or no delay for health and safety kinds of things.

You may also want to do some edge computing because you can only transfer data around so fast. You need to be able to do the stream process close to where the device is to possibly optimize how much data is being sent to the cloud. Companies today are learning to put their compute resources in the right spot and it’s usually a hybrid combination.

Companies, especially manufacturers are using the edge and computing closer to the device in order to make decisions almost instantly. They are able to realize the power of real-time analytics. But then going a step further, Bill noted that companies are able to take this data and analytics and connect it with their other systems like CRM or ERP systems that help the company operate.

IoT as a Service Working with the Cloud

Customers today face the dilemma of being an IoT company and building the sensors and services they need themselves or buying an off the shelf solution that might not fit all of their needs. Siemens realized there was a middle ground. Companies could buy IoT as a Service on top of their cloud to get the best of both worlds. Siemens isn’t reinventing the wheel, they’re enhancing it to fit what customers need.

If you’d like to learn more about Siemens, their offerings and partnerships check out their website and be sure to listen to the whole episode, too. While you’re at it, hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode.