- Industry Update
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This content is courtesy of Automation.com
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- Claroty and Siemens partner on cybersecurity
- PTC and Rockwell Automation strategic partnership
- IIoT applications for the process industry
Claroty and Siemens partner on cybersecurity
Siemens, a global company for electrification, automation, and digitalization, will use industrial cybersecurity company Claroty's behavioral analysis technology in its industrial anomaly detection system. Siemens, through its global venture firm Next47, also invested in Claroty, joining a global syndicate of industrial organizations that invested $60 million in the company's Series B round, bringing the company's total investment to $93 million.
Industrial anomaly detection helps both operations and cybersecurity teams. Operations teams receive a detailed inventory of industrial assets and changes to the network. Cybersecurity teams can continuously monitor these critical networks for vulnerabilities, malicious activity, and high-risk changes across distributed industrial sites.
Siemens uses Claroty in a prepackaged offering, so customers can deploy anomaly detection in their operations. The company brings the offering to the market based on preinstalled packages on Siemens IPC. In the future, it plans to also offer it based on Siemens switches with an application processing engine provided by the Ruggedcom RX1500 series.
Siemens owns and operates nearly 300 factories, and it uses digitalizing for efficiency gains. Responsible digitalization must go hand in hand with cybersecurity. Therefore, the company is implementing a defense-in-depth security concept in its factories. Industrial anomaly detection is an important element of this concept.
The platform is comprised of multiple integrated products, built on CoreX technology. The products have a full range of cybersecurity protection, control, detection, and response.
PTC and Rockwell Automation strategic partnership
PTC and Rockwell Automation have entered into a definitive agreement for a strategic partnership that is intended to accelerate growth for both companies. They will be able to partner with customers around the world who want to transform their physical operations with digital technology. As part of the partnership, Rockwell Automation will make a $1 billion equity investment in PTC, and Rockwell Automation's chairman and CEO, Blake Moret, will join PTC's board of directors effective with the closing of the equity transaction.
The partnership involves both companies' resources, technologies, industry expertise, and market presence, and will include technical collaboration across the organizations as well as joint global go-to-market initiatives. In particular, PTC and Rockwell Automation have agreed to align their respective smart factory technologies and combine PTC's ThingWorx IoT, Kepware industrial connectivity, and Vuforia augmented reality platforms with Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk MES, FactoryTalk Analytics, and industrial automation platforms.
Rockwell Automation's solutions business will be a delivery and implementation provider, supported by an ecosystem of partners that both companies have established.
Under the terms of the agreement relating to the equity investment, Rockwell Automation will make a $1 billion equity investment in PTC by acquiring 10,582,010 newly issued shares at a price of $94.50, representing an approximate 8.4 percent ownership interest in PTC based on PTC's current outstanding shares pro forma for the share issuance to Rockwell Automation.
The price per share represents an 8.6 percent premium to PTC's closing stock price on 8 June 2018, the last trading day before the announcement. Rockwell Automation intends to fund the investment through a combination of cash on hand and commercial paper borrowings. Rockwell Automation will account for its ownership interest in PTC as an available-for-sale security, reported at fair value.
IIoT applications for the process industry
SAP and Endress+Hauser will intensify their cooperation in the development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications for the process industry. In the future, both companies intend to work closer together in the development of joint solutions, sales, and customer implementations.
The goal is to fully integrate the Endress+Hauser field instruments as digital twins into the SAP cloud platform. The companies want to take advantage of the services and smart apps from SAP's Leonardo system and Endress+Hauser's IIoT offering. The idea is to integrate master and sensor data, as well as measurement values, into customer business, logistics, and production processes and to develop digital services focused on predictive maintenance and predictive quality. An open platform concept is the basis for this approach.
Endress+Hauser's role in the partnership involves delivering field instrumentation knowledge in the form of digital services, which will be implemented by integrating the existing Endress+Hauser IIoT services and the SAP platform using a standardized approach.
In the SAP asset intelligence network, field instruments are represented as digital twins, which are a basis for integration into the customer's business processes. Using SAP Leonardo technologies, like machine learning, analytics, and blockchain, intelligent services can be enabled for the production environment.
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