The Cloud-Ready Infrastructure for Industrial AI

Aspen AIoT Hub™: The Cloud-Ready Infrastructure for Industrial AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are two of the most prominent technological forces driving digital transformation for capital-intensive industries today. Based on a popular paradigm by Maciej Kranz, a leading technologist, these technologies become transformational when they integrate, interconnect and interwork – with intelligence – to solve complex industry problems. Collectively, they’re like the body and brain of industrial digital transformation: IIoT is the body, creating and transmitting data from a variety sources that is sometimes acted upon, while AI is the brain, turning data into intelligence for smarter decisions and enabling the digital future of industrial organisations.

The confluence of these technological forces gives rise to a new digital solution category – the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) – that centers on unlocking the hidden business value in industrial data. This category describes the combination of AI technologies with the IIoT to enable the next generation of Industrial AI infrastructure, allowing organisations to achieve more efficient IIoT operations, enable seamless human-machine workflows, harmonise industrial data management, and rapidly transform raw data into tangible business outcomes.

An AIoT Strategy: The 3 Key Drivers for A New Business Imperative 

Impact of IT-OT Convergence: Sharp market volatility means that capital-intensive industries have to be more agile than ever before to survive and thrive in every cycle – an area that has thwarted the OT-side of industrial organisations in the past. Enterprises are looking to exploit the rapid convergence of IT and OT to significantly reduce the technological implementation risk and the time-to-market risk for introducing AI-rich, real-time applications to complex industrial operations. The rise of the digital executive, i.e. the CTO/CDO/CIO, in driving the digital transformation strategy of industrial organisations is a key influencer of this trend.

Unlock Industrial Data Value: There is a critical (and growing) need for access to industrial analytics and actionable insights in making business decisions – across all levels of the enterprise. Efforts to mine pools (silos) of data across the enterprise are often stalled by the challenges of data collection and integration, with promised business insights and agility never materialising. Organisations are switching their focus from mass data accumulation to strategic industrial data management, specifically homing in on data integration, data mobility and data accessibility across the organisation – with the goal of using AI-enabled technologies to unlock the hidden value in these previously unoptimised and undiscovered sets of industrial data.

Lowering the Digitalisation Barrier: Industrial organisations are increasing investment in lowering the barriers to AI adoption by deploying fit-for-purpose Industrial AI applications that combine data science and AI with software and domain expertise. This will be the key to overcome a lack of in-house skills and drastically reduce the need for an army of data scientists. To scale this effort, many enterprises are adopting new measures to reduce complexity in interoperability, overcome information silos and harmonise towards a cloud-ready infrastructure that bridges legacy systems with next-generation solutions.

The Aspen AIoT Hub™ – Cloud-Ready Industrial AI Infrastructure

Earlier this fall, Aspen Technology announced the Aspen AIoT Hub™ – a fit-for-purpose, cloud-ready and built-for-industry Industrial AI infrastructure solution – to unlock the immense value from industrial data assets, across the enterprise, and deliver actionable outcomes faster than ever before.

The AIoT Hub provides the integrated data management, edge and cloud infrastructure and production-grade AI environment to build, deploy and host Industrial AI applications at enterprise speed and scale. It also serves as the foundational infrastructure to realize the transformative vision for the Self-Optimizing Plant. In fact, as part of our recent aspenONE® V12 release, the AIoT Hub provides the underlying cloud-ready, enterprise-scale infrastructure that powers V12 Industrial AI applications such as Aspen AI Model Builder™ and Aspen Event Analytics™.