ABB and Red Hat have formed a global partnership to enable industries using ABB’s process automation and industrial software to scale rapidly and flexibly leveraging Red Hat’s enterprise platforms and application services built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The partnership enables virtualization and containerization of automation software with Red Hat OpenShift to provide flexibility in hardware deployment. It also provides efficient system orchestration, enabling real-time, data-based decision making at the edge and further processing in the cloud, the companies say.
Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its foundation, provides ABB with a single consistent application platform, from small single node systems to scaled-out hyper-converged clusters at the industrial edge, which simplifies development and management efforts for ABB’s customers.
Red Hat OpenShift increases the deployment flexibility and scalability of ABB Ability Edgenius, an edge platform for industrial software applications, together with ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite, an enterprise-grade platform and applications suite that leverages industrial artificial intelligence to drive Industry 4.0 digital business outcomes for customers. ABB’s Edgenius and Genix can be scaled across multiple deployments.
With this partnership, ABB will have access to capabilities like zero-touch provisioning (remote configuration of networks), which can increase manageability and consistency across plant environments.
“Red Hat is excited to work with ABB to bring operational and information technology closer together to form the industrial edge. Together, we intend to streamline the transition from automated to autonomous operations and address current and future manufacturing needs using open-source technologies,” said Matt Hicks, executive vice president, products and technologies, Red Hat. “As we work to break down barriers between IT and the plant level, we look to drive limitless innovation and mark a paradigm shift in operational technology based on open source.”