Siemens Smart Infrastructure Builds Cloud-Native Applications on AWS

Siemens built MindSphere, an IIoT operating system that can easily connect to as many as 80 percent of worldwide industrial automation devices to accelerate customer time to value from IIoT, on an AWS-native architecture. The global company provides systems for power generation and distribution, intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems, and automation and digitalization solutions for process and manufacturing industries. MindSphere uses many AWS services, including AWS Lambda for orchestration and Amazon Kinesis to decouple data and devices.

Siemens has deployed an IoT environment at a plant in Mexico in less than eight weeks, which will help it double efficiency. The company is Europe's largest industrial manufacturer with a global workforce of more than 377,000 and annual revenue exceeding €80 billion.

Siemens is the largest industrial manufacturer in Europe, producing technology and software for the transport, medical, and energy sectors, among many others. The business has an annual revenue of €87 billion and employs around 385,000 people worldwide. In this video, Yvonne Quacken, head of digital services research and development at Siemens, explains why the company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver its Railigent application to rail operators. The application collects data from live trains and helps operators make data-driven decisions to ensure the safety and efficiency of their rail networks. To enable this, Siemens developers needed to access and manage data efficiently across multiple business silos. Because data was not stored consistently across the organization, preparing datasets could take months, and costs were unacceptably high. Siemens built an environment for Railigent using AWS services such as Amazon Athena, AWS IoT, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This gives data scientists a self-service platform to manage data ingestion, integration, and preparation. The result is shorter development times and lower complexity, which means faster and more efficient business insights for Siemens.

Siemens surveys employees quarterly using AWS machine learning technologies to translate and analyze results in less than two weeks. Siemens provides solutions for power generation and transmission, medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, and industrial infrastructure and drive systems.