The Mannheim-based company can now look back on close partnerships with the two largest cloud providers, AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as system integrators such as Capgemini, BearingPoint, Bechtle and others. Customers such as the Safran Group, NSG and Amazon use Cloudrail to implement IIoT projects much faster and operate them securely. Previously, this was achieved by combining an edge gateway (the 'Cloudrail.Box'), which is distributed by ifm and others, with a central management cloud (the 'Cloudrail.DMC') and the customer's respective cloud, such as AWS or Azure.

A new product called 'Cloudrail.OS' is now coming onto the market, which no longer necessarily requires the Cloudrail Edge Gateway. Instead, customers can use suitable hardware from any edge gateway provider or run Cloudrail virtualized in their own data center.

"Cloudrail.box has changed the entire industry with its simplicity. Instead of taking weeks or months to connect a machine, our customers can do it in just a few hours," says CEO Felix Kollmar. "However, with the increasing relevance of edge computing, especially in connection with machine learning, our hardware reached its limits. With Cloudrail.OS, we are solving this dependency and enabling customers to freely select suitable hardware resources."

With Cloudrail.OS, customers can not only rely on high-performance hardware, but also on devices that are suitable for their use case, for example with mobile communications interfaces or a higher protection class. Central, virtual instances in the data center that provide the connectivity of an entire factory without dedicated edge hardware are also conceivable.

However, the Cloudrail.box will of course continue to be offered - the device is particularly suitable for pure data acquisition and simple pre-processing, as Kollmar explains.

A pre-version of 'Cloudrail.OS' is already being tested by several customers in real environments. The company is planning general availability in the first quarter of 2022.