PTC Extends Alliances with Rockwell Automation and Microsoft

PTC and Rockwell Automation, Inc. releases Factory Insights as a Service, a turnkey cloud solution that enables manufacturers to achieve impact, speed, and scale with their digital transformation initiatives, the company says. The new offering, unveiled during PTC’s Global Partner Summit event at the LiveWorx 2020 digital transformation event, marks an advancement to the collaboration among Rockwell Automation, Microsoft and PTC.

Factory Insights as a Service, powered by technology from PTC, Rockwell Automation and Microsoft, is delivered in the cloud in a turnkey fashion and supports the industry’s most common high-value digital transformation use cases:

Factory Insights as a Service includes many of the key product components of PTC and Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, including PTC’s ThingWorx, Kepware, and Vuforia products, optimized for OT data coming from Rockwell Automation’s automation and information offerings. It leverages Microsoft’s cloud, industrial IoT and edge services, including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, enabling manufacturers to connect individual sites and implement projects across their enterprise network.

This enables customers to save time and money by reducing the complexity that they typically undertake as part of an industrial internet of things (IIoT) implementation and greater digital transformation effort. Factory Insights as a Service is an on-ramp for manufacturers interested in improving their operations by providing intelligence and insights on operational performance, asset use and workforce efficiency.

“Factory Insights as a Service offers our industrial customers a leaner, accelerated approach to digital transformation,” says Jim Heppelmann, president and CEO, PTC. “The offering reduces reliance on IT and OT resources, and, most importantly, takes a value-first approach that allows manufacturers to focus on initiatives that create business impact at scale.”

“Simplifying and accelerating digital transformation initiatives for our clients is a fundamental driver for our alliances with PTC and Microsoft,” says Blake Moret, chairman and CEO, Rockwell Automation. “Factory Insights as a Service builds on the breakthrough capabilities of FactoryTalk InnovationSuite to quickly operationalize some of the most critical use cases improving production, asset, and workforce efficiency, while future-proofing our customers’ digital transformation roadmap.”

“We believe in the power of collaboration to help manufacturing companies accelerate the delivery of value to their customers and unlock new business opportunities. By teaming up with PTC and Rockwell Automation to converge IT and OT excellence, we empower businesses to rapidly deploy their relevant use cases at scale—from asset, workforce, and production-floor performance to accelerate impact across the global production network,” says Jason Zander, executive vice president, Microsoft Azure at Microsoft.

To learn more about Factory Insights as a Service, click here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.