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Automakers are investing heavily in technology to ensure that they are not excluded from the next generation of transportation and auto manufacturing. This is the latest development in this trend today.
The BMW Group and Microsoft have announced their willingness to partner with a new initiative called Open Manufacturing Platform, aimed at developing and encouraging more cooperative development of IoT in the manufacturing sector, focusing on on smart factory solutions and building standards to develop them in areas such as machine connectivity. and system integration on site.
The two companies did not reveal the amount of their investment projects. We sent a message about it. The plan will consist of calling on more manufacturers and suppliers – the goal, they say, is to have between four and six others with them, working on 15 cases of use. Here is the end of the year – working with open source components, open industry standards and open data to develop both hardware and software running on them.
Both say that future partners do not necessarily have to come from the auto industry.
The OMP will be based on Microsoft's industrial IoT platform, which is part of its Azure cloud business. But that's a natural evolution of how Microsoft and BMW were already working together. BMW already has 3,000 machines running on Azure Cloud, IoT and AI services in its robots and standalone factory transport systems. She added that she would bring some of the technology that she had already developed, for example around her automatic driving. systems – in the group as part of the effort.
"Microsoft is partnering with the BMW group to transform the efficiency of digital production across the industry," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud + AI Group, at the ############################################################################ 39, a presentation given today in Germany. "Our commitment to creating an open community will create new opportunities for collaboration across the entire manufacturing value chain."
"Mastering the complex task of creating high-end, individualized products requires innovative software and software solutions," said Oliver Zipse, member of the executive board of BMW AG, Production. "The interconnection of sites and production systems as well as the secure integration of partners and suppliers are particularly important. We have been using the cloud since 2016 and are constantly developing new approaches. With the Open Manufacturing platform as the next step, we want to make our solutions available to other companies and jointly exploit their potential to strengthen our strong position in the market in the long term. "
The problem that Microsoft and BMW are looking for here is a long-standing problem. A large part of computer science in the computer world is based on open standards or, in any case, on very widely used proprietary platforms, capable of interfacing. This is not the case in the manufacturing world, where proprietary systems are specific to each manufacturer, making them difficult to modify and often impossible to use with other proprietary systems.
Ultimately, it slows down the way things have evolved and means that the implementation of new generations of technologies will become expensive or impossible in some cases. And given the speed with which things are evolving and the increasing sophistication of machines under construction (cars as "hardware"), something had to be changed.
That's what BMW and Microsoft are for. For BMW, this will help define the development of standards and, for Microsoft, this will give it a potential window on the development of its activities in this sector of business.
The collaborative approach has been a major badet for technology companies hoping to find a common path for the future of computing. Microsoft can own many proprietary platforms that are do not open source, but it strives to collaborate more in different ways. It works with SAP, Adobe, WPP and others on the Open Data Initiative; with Intel, Google and others, he's working on an open standard for connecting data centers; this is part of an open standard initiative for software licensing; and this is part of the new cross-licensing database.
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