#SiemensXcelerator ... My personal takeaways from the launch

It's been a week now since the #Siemens Xcelerator launch ... Now for transparency, I attended the launch as I am a member of the Siemens Influencer Community, #SIEx.

Now just in case you have not heard about it ??, Siemens Xcelerator is all about accelerating Digital Transformation, Faster, easier and at scale. It's an open digital business platform, with three elements;

• A curated portfolio of IoT connected hardware and software
• A powerful ecosystem of partners
• And a marketplace.

So here are my three personal takeaways from the launch;

1. "Digital Business Platform"

I'm an electronic engineer. When someone said platform to me, I'm thinking it's a piece of hardware, it's a piece of software ... it's a 'thing'. When you want to create a Digital Business Platform, it's not just a 'thing'.

It's about how you can take lots of different modular elements, mix and match these to solve different industry challenges while having a flexible business model with the ecosystem partners that supports all of this ...

So when you hear the word 'platform', don't think it's a 'thing' like I initially assumed. It's way more.

2. Technical Design Principles

In my opinion, one of the key things unveiled last week were the 'Technical Design Principles'. As Siemens add more and more items to the curated portfolio, such as "Building X" that they announced last week or the "Grid Software Suite" that Smart Infrastructure announced a few weeks back, all will have to adhere to the Technical Design Principles.

These are; Interoperable, Flexible, Open. As a service, Cybersecurity. But there are not just 'words' with tick boxes. Each of these will require changes to what you design, what you develop and how you work...

For example, if you have a piece of software today, say traditional software that you buy and install. In order to turn that into a true 'As a Service' offering, there's a lot of changes that you have to do in terms of the software code, it's architecture, how you update, maintain, patch it, sell it etc, etc ... It's not trivial to do.

Same for Interoperable, Open ... How do you expose different APIs? Do you have APIs? Do you use third party APIs? If you use third party APIs, you have to trust them ...

So for me, these design principles signify a fundamental difference in the way Siemens will design and bring software and hardware to market. This is a big change. It's a very different way of doing things ...

3. Training your #AI in the #IndustrialMetaverse.

This was announced with Nvidia. And in my opinion the key thing here, it's not about simply taking Siemens digital twin data from say Siemens NX or Teamcenter and putting it into Nvidia's Omniverse so you get a nice photorealistic video in a virtual world. It's about being able to train your AI inside this virtual world.

How? Well Omniverse enables you to create a virtual world taking digital twin data from tools like NX or Teamcenter. A virtual world that's as close to the real world as is possible. It's photo realistic and also physics based.

So what would you use this for? Well today we take an industrial robot and we have it literally, physically go around inside in a factory, training it's AI in the real world so that it learns how to avoid things, but this all takes time and you will never encounter all potential scenarios.

Now suppose you put a digital twin of your industrial robot into a photorealistic, physics based virtual world that is identical to a physical factory, By using NVIDIA's simulation tools you can train the AI inside of that industrial metaverse. You will be able to simulate all sorts of scenarios, run endless iterations in faster than real time, training the AI. That's really different. Imagine the possibilities ??

Anyway, these were the 3 things that really stood out for me personally at the launch.

I'm sure many other folks have different ones... Let me know.

Kev.

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Here's my 'video' version of this blog ...

For more info on Siemens Xcelerator ??

NVIDIA's blog on their partnership with Siemens enabling the Industrial Metaverse ??

For transparency, I attended the launch as I am a member of the Siemens Influencer Community, #SIEx.