Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and European industrial technology powerhouse, ABB, have inked a global strategic partnership set to see the companies merge their respective IT and operational technology (IT) prowess for greater insights from industrial data.
The partnership is expected to provide end customers with solutions that generate actionable insights from vast amounts of industrial data to increase the efficiency and flexibility of their operations.
Specifically, the arrangement will see ABB and HPE deliver joint industry solutions that pull in both OT and IT infrastructure to turn industrial data into insights, combining cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure with IT systems running in corporate data centres as well as at the edge of the network.
For example, the partnership will enable ABB Ability solutions to run on hybrid platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack.
Broadly, ABB and HPE plan to jointly develop market and service digital industrial solutions that help end users create deep insights and automatic action from industrial data, manage and control industrial processes across the supply chain.
The companies will also deliver joint solutions for data centres, including data centre automation, facilities infrastructure with HPE’s IT infrastructure automation software, and secure edge data centre infrastructure solutions.
“This strategic partnership marks the next level of the digital industrial transformation,” ABB CEO, Ulrich Spiesshofer Together, said. “We will bring intelligence from cloud-based solutions to on-premises deployments in industrial plants and datacentres for greater uptime, speed and yield.
“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,” he said.
The ABB-HPE partnership will see the companies embark on co-innovation, co-development, joint go to market and service.
For outgoing HPE chief, Meg Whitman, the alliance between the two companies represents not only an unprecedented move in terms of breadth and depth, but also a way for both tech players to dig further into market opportunities presented by the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) space.
“It will be ground-breaking for the progress of the industrial internet of things [IoT],” Whitman said. “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,” she said.
