Introduction of an open Industrial Edge ecosystem

Automa­tion and indus­tri­al soft­ware provider Siemens opens a dig­i­tal, mul­ti-ven­dor, inde­pen­dent app store for indus­tri­al cus­tomers. The mar­ket­place forms the trans­ac­tion mech­a­nism specif­i­cal­ly for the Siemens Indus­tri­al Edge plat­form. A nov­el IT plat­form that enables IT tech­nolo­gies to be applied on the store floor in a scal­able way in the pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment. In addi­tion to the Siemens Edge Apps for dis­crete indus­try and machine tool man­u­fac­tur­ing, third-par­ty providers Brain­cube, Cybus, SeioTec and Tosi­box have already launched their offerings.

This means that cus­tomers ben­e­fit from a wide range of soft­ware com­po­nents from dif­fer­ent providers and man­u­fac­tur­ers that can be inte­grat­ed into pro­duc­tion in a stan­dard­ized man­ner. The diverse offer­ing already ranges from con­nec­tiv­i­ty, data stor­age, visu­al­iza­tion and analy­sis to machine mon­i­tor­ing, ener­gy and asset management.

The new offer­ing enables B2B cus­tomers to pur­chase and oper­ate mul­ti­ple soft­ware com­po­nents on an all-in-one plat­form. The mar­ket­place offers cus­tomers an intu­itive and end-to-end user expe­ri­ence when buy­ing and oper­at­ing soft­ware and ser­vices, as they already know from the B2C sec­tor. In just a few steps, they can put togeth­er their app shop­ping bas­ket, place the order, pay and use the pur­chased prod­ucts — regard­less of the manufacturer.

In addi­tion to tra­di­tion­al pay­ment meth­ods, cred­it card pay­ment is also pos­si­ble. In addi­tion, mar­ket­place part­ners do not have to deal with order­ing, pay­ment and deliv­ery of the soft­ware in direct inter­ac­tion with the cus­tomer, as has been the case with avail­able indus­tri­al stores. Sup­port­ed by Siemens and a glob­al pres­ence, the plat­form offers app devel­op­ers ide­al mar­ket access to indus­tri­al automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy. The offer­ing is to be expand­ed and extend­ed step by step, with Siemens focus­ing on offer­ing addi­tion­al ser­vices and soft­ware apps from part­ners that are the main focus with­in the ecosystem.