ABB and HPE Bring Intelligence to Industrial Plants

Partnership to provide actionable insights across industrial plants,
cloud and on-premises data centers for higher productivity and innovation

ZURICH–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced a strategic
global partnership that combines ABB’s industry-leading digital
offerings, ABB AbilityTM, with HPE’s innovative hybrid
information technology (IT) solutions. The partnership will provide
customers with solutions that generate actionable insights from vast
amounts of industrial data to increase the efficiency and flexibility of
their operations and create competitive advantage.

Customers will benefit from ABB’s deep domain expertise in operations
technologies (OT) and HPE’s leadership in information technologies (IT).
ABB and HPE will deliver joint industry solutions that merge OT and IT
to turn industrial data into insights and automatic action, combining
widely-adopted cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure with IT systems
running in corporate data centers and at the edge of the network.
Employing the right mix of IT platforms will accelerate data processing
in industrial plants and at the same time enable effective control of
industrial processes across locations.

“This strategic partnership marks the next level of the digital
industrial transformation. Together, we will bring intelligence from
cloud-based solutions to on-premises deployments in industrial plants
and data centers for greater uptime, speed and yield,” said ABB CEO
Ulrich Spiesshofer. “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.”

With an installed base of 70 million connected devices, 70,000 digital
control systems and 6,000 enterprise software solutions, ABB is a
trusted leader in the industrial space, and has a four-decade-long
history of creating digital solutions for customers. HPE in turn is a
global leader in helping customers optimize their IT environments with
secure, software-defined technologies that seamlessly integrate across
traditional IT, multiple public and private clouds and the intelligent
edge to drive key business outcomes.

“This alliance between two global leaders is unprecedented in terms of
breadth and depth, and it will be ground-breaking for the progress of
the Industrial Internet of Things,” said Meg Whitman, CEO, HPE.
“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.”

To provide a true end-to-end experience for customers, the ABB-HPE
partnership will include co-innovation, co-development, joint go to
market and service.

Research firm IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on the Internet of
Things (IoT) will grow to $1.4 trillion in 2021 from an expected $800
billion in 2017. The largest investments are being made in areas such as
manufacturing, transportation and utilities.1 To tap into the
opportunities of the IoT, companies are investing in new solutions that
digitize their industrial equipment and integrate it with their broader
IT environments. By joining forces, ABB and HPE are bringing together
the capabilities needed to accelerate this transformation.

Computing where it is required

Running data acquisition, analytics and control processes near
industrial equipment helps customers avoid the latency, security and
reliability issues associated with data communication through remote IT
systems. ABB and HPE will jointly develop, market and service digital
industrial solutions that help customers:

• Create deep insights and automatic action from industrial data
  – by running ABB AbilityTM applications on enterprise-grade
  IT systems close to the industrial equipment to accelerate the
  processing of vast amounts of data; and
• Manage and control industrial processes across the supply chain
  – by leveraging hybrid IT to provide a seamless experience from edge
  to cloud to core, making critical data available across locations.

The partnership will enable ABB Ability™ solutions to run on hybrid
platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, enabling
customers to deploy applications to their preferred location – on HPE
infrastructure in industrial plants and data centers or in the Microsoft
Azure public cloud – to meet the specific requirements regarding
performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

ABB and HPE will also deliver joint solutions for data centers, including

• Data center automation – to enable data center power, cooling
  and building systems automatically adapt to changing IT demands or
  incidents. To that end, ABB and HPE will integrate ABB AbilityTM
  Data Center Automation, which controls, monitors and optimizes
  mission-critical data center facilities infrastructure, with HPE
  OneView, HPE’s IT infrastructure automation software.
• Secure edge data center – specifically designed to run in harsh
  industrial environments, bringing enterprise-grade IT capacity closer
  to the point of data collection and machine control. This solution is
  being developed in collaboration between ABB, HPE and Rittal, the
  world’s largest manufacturer of IT racks, and will be an off-the-shelf
  ready IT data center solution for industrial customers enabling
  real-time insight and action.

The partnership was announced today at the HPE Discover conference in
Madrid, where both companies demonstrated their first jointly developed
solutions and prototypes.

ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a pioneering technology leader in
electrification products, robotics and motion, industrial automation and
power grids, serving customers in utilities, industry and transport &
infrastructure globally. Continuing a history of innovation spanning
more than 125-years, ABB today is writing the future of industrial
digitalization and driving the Energy and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.
ABB operates in more than 100 countries with about 136,000 employees. www.abb.com

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology
company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the
industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data
center to workplace applications, our technology and services help
customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and
more secure.1 IDC Worldwide Semiannual Internet of Things
Spending Guide, see https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS42799917

Contacts

ABB Ltd
Media Relations
Phone: +41 43 317 71 11
Email:
[email protected]