MindSphere – The Internet of Things by Siemens

MindSphere – The Internet of Things by Siemens

By Victor Moran

Siemens is a German company founded back in 1847 by Werner Von Siemens (1). With over 377,000 employees worldwide and a revenue of €83.0 billion in 2017, the company is a global leader in the fields of electrification, automation and most recently, digitalization (2). The company has evolved in the last decade more from a hardware / equipment manufacturer into a software and digital solution provider, a lot of this, done through mergers and acquisitions and the development of their Digital Factory division.

With globalization, manufacturers have been forced to find creative ways of keeping the best quality possible while maximizing costs and productivity. With this in mind, in 2016 the company placed a lot of its future on the launch of Mindsphere, which by their own definition is “the cloud-based, open IoT operating system that connects your products, plants, systems, and machines, enabling you to harness the wealth of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) with advanced analytics” (3). With this, the company is betting on leading the latest version of the industrial revolution with a product that offers extreme versatility, ease of programing and app development and real time connections among capital equipment at the manufacturing sites.

Some of the main solutions that MindSphere aims to solve are:

1. Real time connectivity between equipment, fleets and sites no matter who the manufacturer of the equipment is.
2. Open interfaces to facilitate the connectivity among this devices. This is achieved without compromising data security via encryption.
3. A wide variety of pre-developed applications that connect seamlessly with Siemens original equipment (Simatic PLCs) and 3^rd party developed ones. Big focus is on energy management, predictive maintenance and fleet management however this is still in the early stages and new applications and solutions are being developed consistently.
4. Data management, data security and analytics to make sure all this is worth it by making it user friendly and valuable for the end user (4).

Even though MindSphere is still in its infancy, its future looks promising given the big installed based of Siemens equipment across the globe, its ease of communication and the flexibility it offers to developers.

On a personal level, the projects that we have driven within Siemens have still been slow to deploy and hard to get resources from the outside given how early we are however the results so far have proven to show a lot of potential for implementation across sites and have driven a degree of standardization across equipment for ease of replica. It is still unclear how big of a success it will be with our customer base however what is pretty evident is that its being sold as part of the bid digitalization portfolio which includes all the software required for product development, simulations, 3D modeling, product realization and distribution. It is not a solution by itself but interacts extremely well as part of a holistic approach to digitalize the industries moving forward.

References:

1. https://www.siemens.com/global/en/home/company/about/history/people/founders.html
2. https://www.siemens.com/global/en/home/company/about.html
3. https://www.siemens.com/global/en/home/products/software/mindsphere.html
4. https://www.pac-online.com/mindsphere-siemens-cloud-industry-what-it-all-about
5. https://blog.acdist.com/siemens-mindsphere
6. Self-experience working at Siemens for 12 years