Siemens has launched its new digital business platform Xcelerator designed to make digital transformation ‘easier, faster and scalable’. The company also announced a partnership with Nvidia that aims to transform the manufacturing industry by integrating its Xcelerator platform with Nvidia Omniverse to deliver immersive experiences across the lifecycle from design through operation.
The Siemens Xcelerator platform is designed to connect mechanical, electrical and software domains across the product and production processes, and enable the convergence of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT).
Siemens said Xcelerator includes a curated portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled hardware, software, and digital services from across Siemens and certified third parties, a growing ecosystem of partners, and an evolving marketplace to facilitate interactions and transactions between customers, partners and developers.
“Siemens Xcelerator will make it easier than ever before for companies to navigate digital transformation, faster and at scale,” said Siemens president and CEO Roland Busch.
“Our leading portfolio is transformed towards more open applications, with more cloud-based and as-a-service solutions and IoT-enabled hardware that can be constantly upgraded. At the same time, the collaboration will reach a new level with a growing ecosystem of partners,” he added.
The industrial metaverse Nvidia Omniverse is an AI-enabled, physically simulated and industrial-scale virtual world engine that aims to enable full-fidelity live digital twins.
Nvidia said the platform is the ideal computation engine to represent the comprehensive digital twin from Siemens Xcelerator.
The union between Xcelerator and Omniverse is designed to enable an ‘industrial metaverse’ with physics-based digital models from Siemens and real-time AI from Nvidia to help companies make decisions faster and with increased confidence.
“Photorealistic, physics-based digital twins embedded in the industrial metaverse offer enormous potential to transform our economies and industries by providing a virtual world where people can interact and collaborate to solve real-world problems,” said Busch.
Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens Industry Software gave an example of how Omniverse could be used for the design of a large yacht. He explained how it allows design teams to collaborate together using very high-end graphics. “If I’m doing the shipbuilding of this design, I see the structural part but then I want to see the interior design, the flooring, the benches, the seats, the scene of the background, the scene of the ocean in the background.
“I can do all of this stuff and overlay it and collaborate together and see it real time as I’m working. What that means for our customers is quicker approval [from their customers] as they talk about what they’re trying to position with them.”
Siemens said it intends to expand its partner ecosystem with small, medium and large companies. It will also commit to joining forces with other companies and build on existing strategic partnerships including Accenture, Atos, AWS, Bentley, Microsoft and SAP.
Siemens has announced the first SaaS offering as part of Siemens Xcelerator: Building X is a new building suite to create a single source of truth (SSOT) that aims to take the complexity out of digitalisation and support customers to achieve their net-zero goals.
As part of the launch, Siemens has also confirmed its growth targets for digital business announced at the last year’s capital market day, of a compound annual growth rate of 10 per cent over the business cycle.
The industrial manufacturing company said that the digital revenue in the fiscal year 2021 stood at £4.8 billion and that the launch of the business platform will bolster the aim of increasing annual recurring revenue.
“This is the logical next step in the implementation of our digitalisation strategy to enable even faster innovation and value creation,” added Busch.
