Siemens, HighByte team to offer industrial AI software platforms

Siemens is making more industrial AI news by partnering with another software company, HighByte, to allow customers to connect industrial data from both IT and OT sources to build AI models, agents and applications through the two companies’ industrial software operations platforms. 

The pair are offering their software jointly on one platform so customers can scale industrial data sets. Siemens also announced last week at Realize LIVE, its digital transformation show in Detroit, the company's orchestration software, Intelligence Center X, that is designed to help organizations scale industrial AI into everyday workflows through collaboration between people and agents. Intelligence Center X is available through the company’s Xcelerator software portfolio. 

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HighByte’s Intelligence Hub is an industrial data operations software designed specifically for data modeling, orchestration and governance and is available as an application on the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace. 

The Siemens-HighByte collaboration aims to allow customers to consume and reuse industrial data sets from HighByte to build AI models, agents and applications at scale, using Siemens’ new Intelligence Center X. 

"The partnership solves a core challenge to make AI-powered industrial production a reality: making data from diverse sources accessible, understandable and actionable across the enterprise," said Rainer Brehm, COO for automation and CTO at Siemens Digital Industries, the industrial software arm of the German multinational corporation based in Munich.

"By bringing together Industrial Edge's robust OT connectivity with HighByte's DataOps capabilities and Intelligence Center X, we bridge the gap between shop floor operations and IT systems." 

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By integrating HighByte’s Intelligence Hub with Siemens’ Industrial Edge's Connectivity Suite, the two companies aim to allow users to connect to a wide variety of OT data sources such as PLCs, SCADA systems, and industrial protocols.

HighByte's DataOps functionalities extend this connectivity to IT data sources, creating a unified data infrastructure that spans the entire production operation and essentially enables OT and IT convergence. 

Key capabilities of the integration, according to the companies, include: 

• Data contextualization and pipelining: By using HighByte Intelligence Hub, users can apply scalable transformation rules to process data from multiple sources across IT and OT domains, adding business context and converting raw operational data.  
• Dataset transformation: Those contextualized datasets can then be made available to IT services with HighByte serving as a true unified namespace provider that standardizes data access across the organization.  
• Adjust machine setpoints: HighByte’s Intelligence Hub can be used to adjust machine setpoints securely by sending commands from IT data sources back to PLCs via Industrial Edge's Connectivity Suite. 

"Industrial organizations have long struggled with fragmented data across IT and OT systems," added Tony Paine, CEO at HighByte.  

"By directly integrating HighByte Intelligence Hub with Industrial Information Hub on Industrial Edge, we give customers a direct path to contextualized and standardized data. This is the foundation needed to build data products and leverage AI at scale with Siemens’ Intelligence Center X.” 

See also: Why manufacturing is moving to edge-to-cloud architectures for resiliency 

The brand-new Intelligence Center X, which was Siemens' highest-profile unveil at Realize LIVE, combines data, models and workflows on a single governed foundation that aims to allow companies to deploy AI-driven applications and agents in a controlled setting, according to Siemens. 

Technical details of the software package

The software combines the Mendix low-code platform with Siemens’ Graph Studio and AI Studio software from the Rapidminer portfolio to orchestrate agents and applications that businesses can use. 

The software, according to Siemens, is designed to connect industrial data across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and service into shared lifecycle intelligence that AI can then act on.  

As a part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, the software is designed to work alongside existing enterprise and operational data solutions to enable agentic AI workflows to operate with trusted data across the broader ecosystem, which is supported by Siemens’ data and cloud ecosystem partners, the company claimed.

The software deploys in three patterns, including being layered on Siemens AI products; as a standalone platform for asset-intensive organizations running other OT vendors; or as an agentic enterprise platform for financial services, insurance, health care, government and retail organizations that require scalable AI.

See also: New Darktrace report spotlights growing cybersecurity risks manufacturers face from AI 

Additionally, HighByte announced the general availability of Intelligence Hub version 4.4, which introduces a Pipeline AI Agent that enables manufacturers to configure, understand and edit industrial data pipelines through use of a natural language interface.

The Pipeline AI Agent in version 4.4 connects to the user’s large language model of choice and enables conversational interaction for pipeline configuration. 

According to HighByte, Central Data extends the Intelligence Hub’s existing Central Configuration capability to expose the data plane of remote hubs to a central hub.