Azure IoT's adaptive cloud approach for intelligent factories is on display at IMTS 2024

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By Jason Farmer - Principal Program Manager, Azure Edge and Platform

Manufacturers face significant challenges at the edge, including legacy systems, complex operations, disparate data, and inconsistencies that hinder the ability to scale and apply AI consistently. With the adaptive cloud approach, customers can overcome these hurdles by integrating diverse solutions and data, applying AI universally, simplifying app development and deployment, and enhancing security across all operations. With a unified framework for IoT, edge, and multi-cloud environments, manufacturers can boost efficiency and innovation for multiple use cases.

At IMTS 2024 (Sept 9-13 in Chicago), we will showcase how Azure, our partners, and industrial standards come together with an adaptive cloud approach to accelerate industrial transformation. We'll explore how manufacturers can scale their intelligent factory initiatives, overcome key shop floor modernization challenges, and learn from real-world applications. As a result of centralizing infrastructure management, standardizing integrations, and enabling consistent deployment patterns across platforms, manufacturers can use common patterns to enable collaboration between IT and OT. We'll also showcase the role AI plays in accelerating and scaling these processes. For those not attending the event, this blog and online resources are available to provide further insights.

Scale intelligent factory initiatives with an adaptive cloud approach

The adaptive cloud approach can help manufacturers scale digital transformation initiatives, like automation, in a secure way. It helps organizations succeed in the modern era by using a framework that adapts information technology (IT) solutions to meet manufacturing production requirements. This approach will help both IT and OT maximize resources with widely adopted standards, optimize production with repeatable solutions, and efficiently manage their complex environments with a common architecture.

Many key shop floor modernization challenges can be solved with an adaptive cloud approach:

• Enabling IT departments to troubleshoot equipment remotely. By centralizing infrastructure management and giving IT visibility into individual factories, the IT maintenance staff can increase its effectiveness and decrease its supporting costs.
• Simplifying integration complexity. By leveraging a single management framework for all edge infrastructure (provisioning, management, monitoring, and updating), enterprises can lower deployment costs and achieve interoperability of data from solution to solution.
• Unlocking the ability to deploy any application or workload across multiple orchestration and edge platforms; increase adoption of repeatable software patterns and solutions on the shopfloor.
• Building a foundation for quicker innovation at a lower cost. By using one management framework, a unified data plane, and common industrial and technical standards from edge to cloud, enterprises can more quickly deploy new innovations at lower deployment costs.

Watch this video to see the adaptive cloud approach in action with an appliance manufacturer.

Partners leverage an adaptive cloud approach for faster results

By taking an adaptive cloud approach, our partner ecosystem is enabling customers to accomplish their modernization outcomes faster and at scale across both brownfield and greenfield environments. When partners take an adaptive cloud approach, they benefit themselves and their customers. Benefits include:

• Lower deployment cost and infrastructure integration complexity: by leveraging a single control plane for all edge infrastructure that simplifies edge provisioning, management, monitoring, and updates.
• Reduce data integration complexity: achieve edge and cloud data interoperability through out of the box data services.
• Unlock the ability to deploy any application or workload across multiple orchestration and edge platforms; increase adoption of repeatable software patterns and solutions on the shopfloor.
• Enable production AI at scale to increase uptime, throughput, quality, and unlock operational efficiencies and savings. 

Microsoft engages with five types of industrial partners to elevate the playing field for everyone and build a robust partner ecosystem. 

• Industrial automation partners connect to, modernize, and enable existing customer OT solutions seeking to digitally transform their operations.
• Connectivity partners ingest, normalize, and contextualize edge data from 100's of protocols for dedicated systems and gateways
• System Integrators connect existing customer IT and OT solutions and integrate with our platform to drive long-term success.      
• Independent Software Vendors build industry-specific solutions that are cloud-native and include end to end analytics and industrial AI services.
• Original Equipment Manufacturers receive a faster path to modernize customer’s production lines with assets ready to connect and work with Azure services.

Here are a few examples of partners taking an adaptive cloud approach to benefit their customers:

• DXC Technology, a trusted Microsoft partner for over 30 years, excels in both enterprise and operational technology with extensive global coverage. They understand that customers need future-ready, scalable architectures to quickly realize value from data, which is essential for accelerated industrial transformation. DXC builds fully integrated solutions and managed platforms, leveraging their industry-leading modular accelerators to help customers save costs and time while creating secure solutions. By adopting an adaptive cloud approach, DXC is at the forefront for driving momentum in AI-driven use cases, pushing the boundaries of innovation and performance.
• Rockwell Automation is a global leader in factory automation and industrial digital transformation. With over 100 years of industry expertise, Rockwell excels at delivering scalable solutions for modern manufacturing operations. Partnering with Microsoft, Rockwell enables a unified technology stack that bridges IT and OT, creating agile, replicable, and scalable solutions for the factory of the future. This adaptive cloud approach allows quick deployment, seamless management, and easy replication of high-value solutions across multiple factory sites and lines. Generative AI copilots empower manufacturers to make smarter, faster decisions, boosting throughput and efficiency while accelerating operational modernization.
• Advantech is a global market leader in hardware, IoT intelligent systems and edge software. Their solutions enable smarter machines, optimize production processes and drive digital transformation across various industries. Recognizing customer need for seamless integration of digital and physical operations, Advantech leverages Microsoft’s adaptive cloud to facilitate IT/OT convergence.  

To learn more about partners taking this approach, watch these videos from Avanade, Tata Consulting, Mesh Systems, and MaibornWolfe.

Learn how to take an adaptive cloud approach at IMTS

Speak to Azure and Manufacturing experts 

Head to the Microsoft booth and look for the demo “Intelligent factory at scale” to speak with adaptive cloud approach experts.  At the Microsoft booth you’ll see a fluid pump demonstration built with Rockwell Automation hardware and software taking an adaptive cloud approach to ensure the solution can be repeated to another line or another factory as cost effective, seamless, and quickly.

Day & Time:  September 9^th – 15^th, 10am-6pm

Where:  McCormick Place, North Building, Level 3, Booth #236205

Attend an IMTS automation stage presentation with Microsoft and DXC

This presentation provides guidance to help manufacturing companies use an underlying architecture that can apply AI across the enterprise, including the shop floor. It introduces a framework for factories around the world that adapts information technology (IT) patterns to meet manufacturing production requirements for a scalable, automated, and secure future of the factory. Learn how customers and partners benefit from a modern digitalization strategy.

Day & Time: Tuesday, September 10^th at 3:30 PM

Title: Intelligent factory at scale: one framework, many uses

Where: McCormick Place, North Building, Level 3, Booth #236008

Speakers: Jason Farmer, Microsoft Principal Program Manager, Edge and Platform, and James Miller, Chief Technologist and VP of Cloud Infrastructure and ITO Services at DXC Technology.

Join us in the Microsoft theater for a partner-led presentation

With Azure’s adaptive cloud approach and DXC’s Intelligent Boost, manufacturers can extend cloud scalability, security, and application portability to the edge to accelerate transformation from the shop floor to the boardroom. Learn how to optimize IT and OT resources and repeat solutions from line to line and factory to factory.

Day & Time: Tuesday, September 10^th at 1:00 PM

Title: Intelligent factory at scale with Azure and DXC

Where: McCormick Place, North Building, Level 3, Booth #236205

Speaker: James Miller, Chief Technologist and VP, Cloud Infrastructure and ITO Services, DXC Technology

4 ways to learn more without attending IMTS

• Watch this free webinar to see how an adaptive cloud approach can unify siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems. 
• Watch a presentation from HMI on the adaptive cloud approach and how Manufacturers are preparing their shop floor for AI.
• Read the Accelerating Industrial Transformation Report, to see the latest trends, technologies, and priorities for manufacturing companies wanting to efficiently manage their data to prepare for AI.
• For a more in-depth, hands-on experience with Azure’s adaptive cloud approach in a manufacturing scenario, explore the Jumpstart manufacturing working demo and testing environment and learn how to implement a modern cloud-to-edge strategy with Azure Arc, Azure IoT Operations, AKS hybrid, and AI services.