The aim of the cooperation is to expand the usability of Mindsphere, the industrial IoT-as-a-Service solution from Siemens. As a result, users can operate MindSphere both "on premise" and via the cloud. While the on-premise solution ensures speed and agility in factory and plant operations, the cloud variant is the choice for end-to-end product support, updates and networking with the company.

"Today's manufacturers need agility and flexibility to meet expectations for higher quality products with shorter production cycles," says Raymond Kok, Senior Vice President Cloud Application Solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software. "MindSphere is already providing customers with data-driven insights to improve production operations using the power of Industrial IoT. Through our collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, we can now also offer our customers the flexibility to run MindSphere either on-premises or in the cloud to meet their unique operational needs, making them more efficient, adaptable and responsive."

"Most industrial data is generated outside of IT - on the shop floor, in the supply chain or via connected products. However, to leverage digital technologies, manufacturers were faced with the choice of sending the data to the enterprise cloud or bringing the technology to the point of action," says Manish Chawla, Industry General Manager, Energy, Resources and Manufacturing at IBM. "Our collaboration with Siemens leverages the hybrid cloud to offer manufacturers the best of both worlds: Autonomy, speed and control over data processed directly on the store floor, as well as end-to-end connectivity to the enterprise."

"Our collaboration with Siemens is helping to make manufacturing operations more efficient by bringing the leading Kubernetes platform and an open hybrid approach," said Darrell Jordan-Smith, Senior Vice President Industries and Global Accounts at Red Hat. "With Red Hat OpenShift as the underlying platform for MindSphere, we are reducing the complexity of legacy computing by providing a unified way for manufacturers to deploy and operate MindSphere both on-premises and in the cloud."

To support implementation and reduce IT risk, IBM Global Business Services and Global Technology Services consultants will act as managed services and IoT solutions providers for Siemens' MindSphere customers.

The collaboration with Siemens is part of IBM's ecosystem program, which promotes the accelerated adoption of hybrid cloud and open architectures in key industries such as manufacturing, energy, smart cities, telecommunications and financial services. Siemens is leveraging the IBM Cloud Engagement Fund, which was established as part of IBM's $1 billion investment in the ecosystem, to gain access to technical resources and cloud credits for services from the IBM Cloud portfolio. This is designed to help Siemens customers migrate their workloads to hybrid cloud environments.