Today, industrial enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges. According to a recent report from Manpower Group, up to 75% of industrial companies are already suffering from talent shortages. At the same time, in the face of an increasingly competitive environment, changing customer needs, supply chain challenges, and the urgent pursuit of high quality, high productivity and overall efficiency, the industry is placing a higher demand on the availability of data and its analytical and management capabilities. What’s more, industry is the world’s largest carbon emitter, and it is increasingly urgent to promote sustainable development in the industrial sector.

VMIVME-4150 In this context, it is vital to help industrial enterprises improve performance and flexibility through automation systems.

At the heart of operational technology, automated systems capture the data needed to generate insights that drive process sustainability, efficiency and profitability. However, most automation systems today are closed and highly dependent on the manufacturer. As a result, when customers choose a hardware platform, they are essentially locked into a specific programming environment, making it very difficult and costly to automate applications across platforms. This, in turn, makes it harder to drive intelligence across architectures.

VMIVME-4150

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, continuous optimization is critical to success. To ensure optimal performance, improve data collection and management from the source: machines, production lines, and shop floors. This is where a new generation of edge computing applications comes into play.

VMIVME-4150 Build a cross-domain, scalable, and secure edge application ecosystem

In Schneider Electric’s view, automated systems should help the business grow, not hinder it. Users should be free to choose the technology that best suits their operational needs, allowing them to deploy the right combination of edge computing technologies based on their individual process characteristics.

Schneider Electric fully supports flexible, interoperable, hardware – and software-independent edge architectures that enable the broad utilization of data through edge computing and artificial intelligence technologies.

These principles are at the heart of Schneider Electric’s long-held industrial automation strategy. To this end, Schneider Electric, as a founding member, has joined with industry peers and the Linux Foundation to launch the MARGO initiative to help drive the long-awaited edge interoperability.