en.Wedoany.com Reported - Siemens, in partnership with data and AI company Databricks and its long-term automation partner FFT Produktionssysteme, has launched a new edge-to-cloud integration solution. This solution directly connects production data to enterprise AI systems, eliminating the need for complex IoT middleware, helping industrial customers transform production data into actionable insights and scale industrial AI across global operations.
Through this integration, customers can transfer contextualized shop floor and factory data obtained from Siemens Industrial Edge directly to the Databricks platform via FFT DataBridge. This data is then analyzed and used to centrally train AI models, which can subsequently be deployed back to the edge to execute tasks on the production floor. This approach helps industrial enterprises optimize operations, reduce costs, and increase productivity, enabling low-latency, data-driven decision-making and laying the foundation for physical AI and future autonomous operations.
Rainer Brehm, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Digital Industries Automation, noted that industrial AI only unlocks its value when data, context, and execution are combined. With the collaboration of Databricks and FFT, customers can scale industrial AI applications at the factory and shop floor level, achieving AI-driven production.
Siemens Industrial Edge and the Industrial Information Hub form a secure, scalable, low-maintenance edge platform specifically designed to bridge isolated industrial data and run intelligent applications close to the production site. These applications encompass advanced local analytics, physical AI, and closed-loop AI workflows requiring low latency, high availability, and strict security compliance. Databricks, based on a cloud-agnostic, governed environment with minimal infrastructure overhead, provides advanced analytics, machine learning, and agentic AI capabilities for industrial data, supporting advanced use cases such as predictive maintenance, quality optimization, energy management, supply chain optimization, and agentic AI.
Shiv Trisal, Global Head of Industrial GTM at Databricks, stated that integrating Siemens' expertise in industrial automation and edge computing with the Databricks platform helps industrial enterprises bridge the gap between production data and scalable business impact across the industrial network. In his view, this collaboration is a foundational step towards enabling human-agent collaboration in industrial operations.
FFT Produktionssysteme plays a key role in operationalizing the combined Siemens and Databricks architecture. As a long-term partner of Siemens, FFT provides the DataBridge application, which securely and efficiently connects Siemens Industrial Edge with the Databricks platform. FFT DataBridge streams contextualized, AI-ready production data from the edge to the cloud, facilitating subsequent merging with other IT and OT data sources.
Volker Stark, Chief Operating Officer of FFT Produktionssysteme, explained that in collaboration with Databricks and Siemens, FFT DataBridge offers a simple yet powerful cloud gateway for over 30,000 potential customers. It eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming data transformation processes, natively bridges the gap between IT and OT, removes reliance on complex IoT layers, and significantly simplifies the industrial connection process for Databricks customers.
