Dive Brief:
- Volkswagen (VW) is continuing its Industrial Cloud efforts with Siemens as an integration partner, according to a announcement Friday.
- Siemens is responsible for ensuring the machinery and equipment at VW's 122 manufacturing locations "are networked efficiently in the cloud," according to the announcement. The company will partner with machinery and equipment suppliers to build applications from the MindSphere IoT system on VW's Industrial Cloud.
- MindSphere will offer predictive maintenance applications for machines with optimized maintenance cycles that can be calculated in advance. The companies intend to co-create functions and services on the cloud which will eventually become available to partners.
Dive Insight:
VW has been on a roll with technology partnerships the last several months.
The planned modernization in industries is leading traditionally nontechnical companies to outsource their needs. Wednesday VW announced its multi-year global agreement with AWS this week to create this "cloud-based digital production platform."
VW was already an AWS customer but the partnership will extend the company's uses of AWS' IoT, ML, analytics and computing solutions to streamline plant assembly efficiencies. VW data scientists will also use the Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy ML models for plant machinery and operations.
In October, VW announced a similar partnership with Microsoft Azure, though the use cases differ. As an existing Azure customer for production workloads, the companies expanded their partnership to streamline the driver experience.
Using a public cloud provider like AWS for running applications isn't enough to address the manufacturing and logistics the Industrial Cloud demands.
Because of this, the company is bulking up its reliance on tech companies like Siemens. Siemens will help VW make manufacturing data more transparent so future production processes can be improved upon. Eventually, connected suppliers and machinery producers will also gain insights into VW's production environment, according to the announcement.
