Google Cloud and Siemens recently announced a new partnership to develop cloud services for manufacturing. The focus of the effort will be optimization of factory processes. The world is entering the fourth industrial revolution and both companies believe that data should drive decision-making. Large organizations have a fire-fighting approach to problem solving and often use artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for continuous improvement. Google Cloud and Siemens are pushing the idea that AI needs to be scaled all the way across the plant floor.
Google Cloud greets its users with the simple and straightforward ideas that we’ve come to expect. Do you want to see the big picture of cloud computing, start coding, or take your knowledge bases and transfer them into the cloud right away? After a short discussion about “the cloud” that covers terms and basic concepts, the discussion moves the user to a guide showing how a company can utilize the cloud. From here, there’s a page showing one-on-one comparisons between Google Cloud and its competitors—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and generic data center professional services.
A free tier of Google Cloud will let new customers try out the services with monthly usage limits. Google says that its service is differentiated because of the company’s long history of building up security for products like Gmail and Google Apps. Billing is calculated by the second, so customers don’t pay for data and time that isn’t used. Google Cloud can operate on the global framework that is already set up for Google products, and Google data centers are built with a commitment to sustainability and increasing their use of renewable energy.
Siemens is taking this opportunity to reestablish its idea that AI is already embedded in our society. The company’s AI page outlines the ways that industry can benefit from the technology in product design, automation and the Internet of Things (IoT). The Digital Enterprise business unit shows different methods that can be used for a company to take all of its data and activities and consider similarities and differences. Full digitization has the feel of a large enterprise-scaled design experiment, but it also looks a lot like a cloud worth of activity hosted on a company’s servers.
A robust white paper section shows the Siemens vision for AI in Industry Automation and road maps for using the technology on one chip and transferring it into systems as big as a city. Another paper discusses methods for using AI to improve product quality.
Bringing Google Cloud and Siemens AI together is a smart move for both companies because their applications already seem so closely related. The complementary relationship can only help Siemens and its automation to reliably beam the lessons learned in one cell to the rest of an organization. Finding out which methods are not transferable across manufacturing processes or locations might be just as valuable as figuring out which methods work universally. Google Cloud will be gaining the huge customer base that is already engaged with Siemens AI while acquiring valuable experience porting its digital ideas into tangible manufacturing systems.