In the digital transformation market, the technology giants and the industrial giants and industry leaders once appeared in a state of melee, and now they are moving toward their respective roles and complement each other.
Editor’s note: This article is from “Financial” magazine app,文| Han ShulinEdit|Mark.
Since the Siemens Industrial Cloud officially entered China in the end of March this year, the industrial Internet platform created by another European manufacturing giant ABB has also identified domestic partners.
September 18 during the Huawei Connected Conference, Huawei and ABB, a Swiss-based company, announced a strategic partnership, and ABB will provide ABB’s digital solutions for Chinese customers based on Huawei Cloud. Specifically, ABB combines its industry solutions and proprietary technologies with Huawei’s cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and platform services capabilities to serve Chinese customers.
For why Huawei is selected, ABB said that through detailed analysis, Huawei Cloud has become a partner of ABB with its strong technology, customer service capabilities in the public sector, and high standards in compliance and network security.
Compared to Siemens’ MindSphere platform, ABB’s ABBAbility platform is currently a platform for its own digital capabilities and is a collection of ABB’s own 220 industrial digital solutions. On the MindSphere platform, in addition to Siemens’ own applications, it also emphasizes its openness as an Internet of Things operating system, attracting third-party developers to develop applications.
In terms of domestic partners of the two companies, Ali, which cooperates with Siemens, has a public cloud layout earlier and is the leader of the public cloud market in China. According to data released by consulting firm IDC in August this year, in the first quarter of 2019, Alibaba ranked first with 43.2% of the domestic public cloud IaaS market share, while Huawei relied on high-speed growth in the first quarter to 5.2%. Tied for fifth with Baidu. However, Huawei has more traditional corporate customers than Ali.
The strategic cooperation between ABB and Huawei Cloud is similar to the cooperation between Siemens and Alibaba Cloud. It is the digital platform launched by European industrial giants and the cloud infrastructure services of domestic IT and Internet companies. A typical case of a three-way customer offering a digital transformation solution.
A similar collaboration has taken place overseas, in terms of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS),Siemens has cooperated with two global public cloud giants Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and ABB has reached a cooperation with Microsoft Azure. In addition, ABB has also reached an agreement with IBM on artificial intelligence.
In the wave of digital transformation in the industrial sector, companies with different identities are joining together. After the initial exploration, the relationship between OT (Operation Technology) companies represented by General Electric, Siemens, ABB, and IT companies with information technology represented by Microsoft, SAP, Huawei, and Ali is becoming more and more close. The integration with OT is a core topic in the digital transformation of the industrial sector.
Ali is used to calling himself DT (Digital Technology), and Huawei has always called itself ICT (Information & Communication Technology). For the sake of simplicity, this article is collectively referred to as IT.
With the deepening of digital transformation, OT and IT companies have more and more cooperation, and each other borrows the professional capabilities of each other to serve the transformation target. On the other hand, OT itself is constantly expanding its software development capabilities, and Siemens is among the top 10 software companies in the world.
However, the boundaries of the two types of enterprises have not been blurred, but instead they have gradually defined their strengths and priorities in the transition. In the industrial field, IT companies and OT companies are more likely to cooperate with each other than to compete.
The first is cooperation on cloud services. From the perspective of the architecture of cloud technology, the industrial Internet platform provides platform services (PaaS), and they generally do not involve infrastructure services (IaaS). For example, Siemens has cooperated with Amazon, Microsoft and Ali in the world, and the latter provides IaaS, and it focuses on the development and application of the PaaS platform itself. In China, the tree root interconnection born out of Sany Heavy Industry has reached a cooperation with Tencent Cloud. Xugong Information, which was invented by Xugong Group, cooperated with Alibaba Cloud.
Compared with Internet companies, industrial enterprises, especially large industrial enterprises, are relatively conservative in public data cloud. This requires the platform to have local deployment capabilities, and ultimately IT companies that need IaaS services have the ability to deploy locally. For the sake of cost and convenience, SMEs have a much higher acceptance of public clouds. Many domestic industrial Internet companies interviewed by Caijing reporters generally do not provide private cloud solutions for SMEs.
At the specific business implementation level, a practical difficulty in industrial Internet promotion is the wide variety of on-site industrial agreements, which makes industrial data acquisition much more difficult than consumer Internet.
Different automation equipment manufacturers generally have their own industrial agreements, there are more than a dozen of the mainstream, the situation on the spot is very different. How to obtain on-site data is the first step in the advancement of all industrial Internet businesses, andThis is often done by OT companies that understand the equipment and understand the industry. This is also the “hard work, tired” that has to be done. Industrial Internet companies from a number of manufacturing companies interviewed by Caijing reporters will make great efforts to break through one protocol and one device, develop proprietary software and hardware to make data connections, and cover as many industrial agreements as possible. It is also the first barrier for IT companies to quickly enter the industrial site.
In terms of software development capabilities, the boundaries are relatively clear.
In the case of Siemens, in the view of Siemens Group CTO Boleren, its ability focuses on the manufacturing execution system (MES) at the production floor level, as well as the simulation, design and simulation software for products and production lines. Will be involved in the traditional IT concept of enterprise resource management (ERP) software, which is the boundary of SAP, Oracle, and on the other hand do not do cloud infrastructure (IaaS), this is the Amazon, Microsoft, Ali things . Siemens is located in the IOT eco-centered area, surrounded by various partners such as ERP and cloud service providers.
IT companies have a lower level of capabilities, in addition to providing infrastructure services in the aforementioned cloud services, but also include the underlying tools and algorithmic technologies.
Kang Rong, vice president of Microsoft Greater China, told the reporters of Caijing that OT is a chef and Microsoft provides them with ingredients, but Microsoft does not specifically go to practice dishes or Sichuan cuisine, and will not compete with chefs because Microsoft I don’t know what the customer’s taste is.
The implication behind this metaphor is that as an IT company, Microsoft does not understand the very subdivided industry knowledge, such as the composition of a chemical formula or the life of a component. The food provided by Microsoft is more low-level. Artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, used by OT companies to develop specific applications for different industries. In Kang Rong’s view, companies in the IT industry have a wide range of competing relationships, but between IT companies and OT companies, they are fully complementary and complementary.
Xu Gongliang, general manager of Xugong Information, also told the Caijing reporter that companies like Ali should provide tools and algorithms for data modeling and data analysis. This is its strength, but specifically to meet the needs of different industries and customers. Not its strengths, but customers also trust partners who understand their needs. “It seems to be a track, but it is actually a different track,” Zhang Qiliang said.
Overall, when empowering third parties, the role of IT companies is primarily to provide cloud infrastructure services, providing underlying data analysis tools, algorithms, and IT systems such as traditional ERP.
Foreign IT and Internet companies have a clear understanding of entering the industrial field from the very beginning, while domestic Internet companies have gradually returned to their more professional fields after experiencing the initial arduous exploration.
The OT company is directly oriented to users and the site. They want to develop the industrial Internet PaaS platform to provide users with the practical problems of data connection.It may be necessary to develop application software together with the business characteristics of the company.
This means that when helping companies digitally transform, OT companies not only sell hardware or software products separately, but often assume the role of a consulting company. This is true for domestic industrial Internet companies. The IOT Service Division was established in the 2020+ strategy proposed last year, and Schneider established the Intelligent Manufacturing Company in May, which is a reflection of this trend.
On the other hand, traditional consulting companies such as Accenture and McKinsey are also constantly acquiring software companies in the sub-sectors, and working with OT and IT giants such as Siemens and Microsoft to make the business more comprehensive, from the traditional The consulting company becomes a system integrator. In this process, the IT service capabilities and underlying algorithm tools of IT companies are brought together to the enterprise customers who are undergoing digital transformation through the specific business of OT companies and consulting companies. OT companies and consulting companies have begun to appear. Direct competition.
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