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What’s new with Industry 4.0? Takeaways from Hannover Messe 2016

The manufacturing and technology industries merged together again for the world’s leading industrial fair in Germany. And with Industry 4.0 maturing and digital technology advancing so quickly, all eyes were on Hannover Messe to get a pulse on where the industry is heading.

So what is proving new with Industry 4.0? That was the question our Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posed in his opening keynote at the event.

What’s new today is that, for the first time, the products that industrial manufacturers produce are connected with all of the web of activity around them.

But it doesn’t stop there.

With that connectivity, they also have the ability to reason about that activity—that data that’s now continuously being generated—and gain insight and predictive power that can then be fed back to the manufacturer’s operations and digital services.

These new digital feedback loops that we call systems of intelligence is the new inflection point that both industrial manufacturing and technology industries are collectively bringing forth.

This convergence of information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) is pervasive and transformative. It will change how you engage with your customers, how you empower your employees, how you optimize your operations, and how you transform your products and the business models around them.

These systems of intelligence are what industrial manufacturers will build, transforming industry leaders from world-class manufacturers to world-class manufacturers with world-class digital capabilities.

Intelligence revolution

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Microsoft strongly believes that data-driven intelligence will accelerate, and is accelerating, the manufacturing industry’s transformation. And we are focused on helping fuel this intelligence revolution through business ecosystems for interconnected services, people and things.

To help reduce barriers to industrial Internet of Things (IoT) adoption and make it easier to create systems of intelligence, Microsoft announced it is working with the OPC Foundation to enable industrial IoT scenarios with millions of OPC UA compliant devices. You can learn more about Microsoft’s extended support of OPC UA in Azure IoT and Windows IoT here.

We also showcased a number of real-world examples of manufacturing leaders on the forefront of this business transformation.

Forum Industry 4.0 featuring Sanjay Ravi

Here are a few examples I shared during my session in the Forum Industrie 4.0 meets the Industry event series examples of how manufacturers are using systems of intelligence to drive business success.

Reimagining business

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To transform how they engage with their customers, Liebherr is using intelligence to predict a potential breakdown of their commercial refrigerators and freezers, with service tickets generated automatically so the problem is fixed immediately, crucial for maintaining proper storage for medicines and vaccines that need to be maintained with very limited temperature variations.

To empower their employees, I shared in my presentation how Volvo Cars is planning to use the power of HoloLens to help its employees visualize and interact with its products in deeper ways than was ever possible and revolutionize the way they plan to market and sell their vehicles. You can watch the video here.

Jabil, one of the world’s leading design and manufacturing solution providers is using machine learning, predictive analytics and the cloud to revolutionize operations by creating digital, intelligent and predictive factories that discover errors and failures before they happen. You can read the news here, and learn more about how Jabil and other companies, including Fujitsu, NEC and ZEISS, are working with Microsoft to reshape the way they do business.

And one of the most exciting and biggest examples, literally, of how systems of intelligence can transform business models was with Rolls-Royce—with a massive aircraft engine dominating the Microsoft booth. In a new collaboration with Microsoft, Rolls-Royce is using today’s advanced analytics solutions to take engine management and servicing to a new level, one that will proactively help airlines use their equipment more efficiently and potentially save millions of dollars per year. Watch this video to see how.

These were just a few of the tremendous examples of industry innovators reimaging their businesses through data-driven intelligence. Thank you to all our manufacturer showcases and partners who shared your incredible experiences with us this year!

Key takeaways

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A few insights and surprises stood out for me from this year’s event.

The first was the positive feedback we received centered on Microsoft’s work with the OPC Foundation and news of extended support of the OPC UA standard and its ability to accelerate these ecosystems of intelligence. There was a lot of surprise that this was done so quickly. There was also a lot of excitement that we are now able to connect more than 36 million industrial devices out there to the cloud.

The next was to see how quickly the IT and OT convergence is happening aided by the hyperscale cloud and advanced analytics to help manufacturers create new digital products.

And finally, we loved hearing from leading manufacturers about their feedback on Microsoft’s Industry 4.0 viewpoint and how well it aligns with their own goals for digital business transformation and the role of Microsoft in being a technology partner to help them accelerate their journey.

We appreciate the insight as we continue to fulfill our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We look forward to working with you as we take the Industry 4.0 efforts to the next level, and drive great success for your businesses, but also for the environments we live in.

So what other highlights stood out for you? We’d love to hear about them over on Twitter.  And if you missed Microsoft, and our customers and partners, at the show, you can visit our news and event pages for more information. I also encourage you to read this article by David Greenfield in Automation World that gives an insightful perspective on the themes from this year’s event.

We’ll see you next year!

LinkedIn: Sanjay Ravi

Twitter: @sanrav