“The question is on the top of everybody’s mind, especially among our customers,” began Brian Shepherd, senior vice president of software and control at Rockwell Automation. “Is now the tipping point for cloud and manufacturing?”
Where manufacturing has traditionally been a laggard to adopting digital technology, Shepherd said at a media brief at this week’s Automation Fair, manufacturing’s lag with respect to cloud adoption is changing rapidly in the current market, as the benefits are hard to ignore.
Rockwell Automation believes so strongly in the movement to cloud and the development of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that it acquired two companies over the past year to facilitate it. First, Rockwell Automation acquired Fiix in December 2020, and two months ago the acquisition of Plex was the single largest acquisition in the company’s history. Plex is a leader in cloud-native smart manufacturing solutions, operating in 2,400 plants in 37 different countries and processing around 8.5 billion transactions per day. Fiix provides a cloud-native computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
