Mr. Neuer, what does Talend's involvement with AWS look like?
Neuer: Talend is a technology partner of Amazon Web Services and a global advanced partner for big data. We offer software solutions that we have developed to suit the application with AWS. Through joint activities in the area of market development, both benefit from this commitment. We also work closely with the Amazon team on a regional basis for our key accounts.

One major advantage of the Amazon cloud is its widespread use. Various studies see the AWS market share as higher than that of the next providers Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce combined.

Which AWS products are particularly interesting for manufacturing?
Neuer: Amazon offers many different basic services relating to computers, storage and networks. There are also more specialized services that are relevant to the manufacturing sector. Kinesis, for example, is a tool for streaming and messaging data. Redshift, a fully managed data warehouse service, is also suitable for analytical platforms in the area of big data. Amazon also offers EMR, a Hadoop framework in which large volumes of data can be processed efficiently and dynamically in a scalable manner.

Talend offers components and connectors for all of these services that can be seamlessly connected to on-premise IT or other cloud solutions such as Salesforce.

How does the data get from production to the cloud?
Neuer: New IoT-compatible devices can often communicate directly with the cloud via protocols such as MQTT, http or Websocket. In addition, an IoT device gateway is often used in the cloud to manage the end devices and communication patterns. However, many machines and manufacturing applications are not yet cloud-ready. As an integration specialist, Talend can collect and transform data from manufacturing systems and equipment and then upload it to any target systems or directly to the cloud. In addition to the connectors, powerful transformation, mapping and data quality components are also available for this purpose, so that the data can be easily transferred to the cloud and converted into the desired format.

How fast is the data exchange with the cloud?
Neuer: IT is responsible for checking the bandwidth and availability of the network based on the new requirements. In
many areas, it is possible to work with cloud-only. This means that data is streamed from sensors or IoT end devices to the cloud and processed directly there. The data exchange is then as fast as LAN, usually even faster, as AWS offers optimized and ultra-performant systems. The application scenarios today mostly revolve around predictive maintenance and remote monitoring.

What should manufacturing companies bear in mind when realigning their strategies?
Neuer: It is important to pursue a holistic data management strategy that takes future and massive data growth into account. Manufacturing companies should focus on hybrid architectures, which means still having some IT in the data center and some in the cloud. Nevertheless, the focus should be on cloud-only in the long term, as the demands on industrial companies to make processes and products more efficient and sustainable are constantly increasing. This requires well thought-out networking of machines, sensors and other components as well as suitable IT structures. Open source platforms in particular offer sufficient freedom to integrate the entire value and supply chain into company processes in a meaningful way, which ensures an optimized operating result.