Peter Sorowka is the founder and CEO of Cybus. Their software Cybus Connectware is so interesting, at least for Porsche, that the manufacturer has connected around 5,000 machines via it. A surprising meeting in Hall 4 at the Hannover Messe.
While quite a few old hands in industrial software have disappeared from Hall 4, either because they are not exhibiting at all or because their offerings are being integrated at the parent stand in other halls, there is a new, small stand with good prospects for the future.
Anyone who talks about the digitalization of industry means the use of product and production data. Peter Sorowka (photo Sendler) was all the more surprised to discover that in most factories, not even the question of whether a machine is in operation or not can be answered at the push of a button. Not to mention more precise data from the plant or about the condition of the machine and its components. After all, every machine manufacturer provides all this data in its own way, in its own system language. And almost every company uses a whole range of machines from different manufacturers.
“The compelling thing about the Internet,” says Peter Sorowka, “is the fact that every provider who wants to offer an application via the network has to provide an API, an application programming interface, for this purpose. That way, everyone can communicate with each other. A factory API, on the other hand, does not exist. And it is precisely this gap that we want to close with Cybus Connectware. For a data highway in production as well.”
There is something refreshing about talking to him about the possibilities of digitalization. There emerges a confidence lost in many areas of IT that, in addition to the high costs of huge system landscapes and the accompanying shackling by proprietary technologies, there is still the unheard-of freedom to build solely on the benefits that data communication offers manufacturers and users of digital services alike.
Porsche was so convinced by this that around 5,000 production machines in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen and Leipzig are already connected via Cybus Connectware. The solution based on the cloud connectivity of the Cybus Manufacturing Data Platform also allows cross-plant analyses and optimization measures. Scaling to other VW Group locations does not appear to be out of the question.
According to Cybus, Connectware runs 24 hours without downtime in three-shift operation of the production facilities on Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes is an open source system for automating the deployment, scaling and management of container applications.