KEB Automation is a successful supplier of automation technology. Karl Ernst Brinkmann founded the company in 1972 with six employees to develop, produce and sell brakes and clutches. Today, KEB Automation is a globally active company with 1,400 employees, 1,000 of them in Germany. The product range covers all elements of automation, including drives, motors and control technology.
With its headquarters in Barntrup, KEB Automation is one of the 27 core companies in the leading-edge cluster it’s OWL – Intelligent Technical Systems OstWestfalenLippe. And for almost two years, KEB Automation has also been offering its own open, Linux-based automation platform NOA (Next Open Automation), with which the manufacturer is represented in the Smart Automation market overview.
In an in-depth interview, Markus Weissensteiner, CEO of KEB Automation in Austria, and Uwe Huber, Head of HMI and IIoT Development, KEB Automation, explained the strategy behind the platform and the positioning of NOA.
Interview with Markus Weissensteiner and Uwe Huber
Ulrich Sendler: When did KEB Automation start developing NOA? And what was the trigger?
Uwe Huber: We started in August 2022. Our customers were increasingly struggling with the limitations of the traditional automation architecture, which only had two relevant components – real-time runtime and visualization.
In the end, the runtime also included more and more software for which there were no real-time requirements at all, such as tool management, recipe management or message management. As a result, the real-time system grew and became increasingly complex and difficult to maintain. And thus, of course, more unstable.
But the software world has changed. Service-oriented and open source approaches, such as in the cloud, offer completely different possibilities. With NOA, we have created a toolbox with such technology that, in addition to our portfolio, offers our customers more freedom and more modern options for developing their own systems.
(Photo: Uwe Huber, Head of HMI and IIoT at KEB Automation)
Markus Weissensteiner, CEO KEB Automation Austria (Photo: Markus Weissensteiner)
Markus Weissensteiner: There is a clear trend towards open automation systems. Proprietary systems are downright frowned upon. This was reinforced after the pandemic, when the market picked up again and supply chain disruptions became apparent. The more tightly a machine manufacturer was tied to a system, the more problems it had, some of which really threatened its existence. In the meantime, there is less and less demand for closed systems. Open market standards such as EatherCAT have prevailed. And now there is also the geopolitical concern: Can I get my control system anywhere in the world?
“The market expects openness and the use of open standards”
Uwe Huber: A Blackberry with fully integrated functionality, but closed, or a Nokia – that basically no longer exists. Openness and a focus on open standards are what the market expects from us.
Ulrich Sendler: Who is the NOA offering aimed at? Is it more for machine builders? Or is it also aimed at the process industry?
Uwe Huber: We have no restrictions in terms of industries. But in terms of the cloud and modern architecture, our offering is aimed in particular at small and medium-sized companies. Not all of them have the opportunity to develop their own platform for their customers or want to spend so much money and build up the corresponding expertise. We can now offer a platform as a service. NOA allows them to white-label. So it’s a component that even small machine builders can use to offer their customers a platform. The large corporations can do this themselves.
Ulrich Sendler: Have you already won new customers with NOA?
Markus Weissensteiner: Our Helio visualization platform can run on competitor devices and on KEB devices in conjunction with NOA. We have actually been winning new customers with it for a year and a half. If a machine manufacturer has our visualization software in a Docker container, we offer the option of using apps to interact with a Siemens, Beckhoff or Rockwell controller via NOA. This gives customers flexibility and is a tangible added value for them. We have already acquired eight or nine new customers. We are currently in the middle of a massive test phase. Every KEB device we sell has NOA, Helio runs on it, and now we also have an app for condition monitoring. We can have a broader presence in the industry.
New customers are joining us in areas such as energy technology. The companies there have high-level language developers who program with Python or similar, and now they are interested in a control system with NOA. Docker containers take us into a completely different world than before.
Ulrich Sendler: Which programming languages do you support?
Uwe Huber: We focus on the programming languages that we use to create our apps. We use Go as our main programming language, a very modern, compiled programming language that is fast and not resource-hungry.
We use Python for machine learning topics. For connections to proprietary control protocols, for example via Codesys, we rely on the manufacturer’s libraries and use C++, for example.
Customers can also use standard products such as Visual Studio / Visual Studio Code for their own NOA apps and work in their familiar world.
Ulrich Sendler: Does KEB Automation support the monetization of apps on NOA? And do you offer your own app store?
NOA offers customers an app manager for their own apps (image KEB Automation)
NOA: The freedom to add your own apps
Uwe Huber: We do not have a public app store like some other providers. We supply apps from KEB Automation and a currently still relatively limited number of partner apps. We support the fact that every customer can integrate their own apps or third-party apps. For example, with Xentara from Embedded Ocean, we supply an app for a real-time C++ runtime.
In terms of billing, there is a license for everything on the edge and a subscription model for everything in the cloud. We don’t use a subscription on the edge because we have found that the mechanical engineering industry does not yet accept this model directly on the machine.
With NOA, the customer has the functionality to integrate their own apps on the Edge without us noticing anything. They don’t have to pay anything for this. We offer them metrics on the number of connected devices and data traffic. They can base their own business model on this. What they in turn demand from their customers is up to them.
Ulrich Sendler: What role does the ecosystem around NOA play for KEB Automation? Do you organize this?
Uwe Huber: We are following the strategy of networking other marketplaces with our platform. Like us, most of them use Linux and Docker. The customer can build what they need. We are completely open.
Markus Weissensteiner: We don’t see offering our own marketplace as a customer requirement. We focus more on partnerships.
Ulrich Sendler: Is AI now also an issue for you, especially in connection with NOA?
Uwe Huber: Yes, there are such requests and we have already implemented several solutions for customers. As a rule, these are still very individual solutions, not generally applicable apps that we offer to the market. We train the machine learning models at the edge, for example for engines and transmissions, using data from the plant. We have experts for this who help customers to combine different data sources. For example, data from the inverter or process data in addition to the data from the vibration sensor on the motor.
The components of the NOA (Next Open Automation) platform (image KEB Automation)
Ulrich Sendler: How open is NOA to other platforms, for example those from the market overview?
Uwe Huber: From our point of view, we are very open. There are several aspects of openness: one concerns the possibility of using an app written for NOA on other platforms. We make sure that NOA apps can also run on other platforms. Including our own. For example, HELIO also runs in ctrlX and can be downloaded via the ctrlX store, or as one of the apps in the Flecs marketplace.
Another aspect of openness is the technology under NOA. With Linux and Docker containers, we have the same technology as most other platforms. Ultimately, it is then a question of how far the manufacturers allow the customer to mix and match. We have already had discussions with various manufacturers about such partnerships, and we are just as open here.
Markus Weissensteiner: Even if it’s not always good for KEB as a manufacturer, because we enter into partnerships with competitors: It is a trend that can no longer be denied. And at the same time, openness offers so many possibilities that we didn’t have before that it is very worthwhile to follow this trend. With the development of container-based systems on Linux, not only is the entire open source world and its components available, but we also have a noticeable simplification of development and deployment because it can be increasingly automated.
Quickly use what is available instead of reinventing the wheel
Uwe Huber: Linux, Docker and open source allow our software developers to quickly integrate existing functionality. You no longer have to do everything yourself. An individual can’t keep up with the huge developer communities. Not even the large corporations.
Intelligent alarming as a NOA service (image KEB Automation)
Ulrich Sendler: What role does NOA software play strategically for KEB?
Uwe Huber: The infrastructure and services we are building around NOA are exactly what the entire mechanical engineering industry needs right now. Developing, distributing and updating applications, packaging applications, remote service, and now the Cyber Resilience Act and, even before that, IEC 62443-2 certification: Over the entire lifecycle, updates must be delivered, vulnerabilities monitored, reported and their remediation delivered. And NOA’s infrastructure offers solutions for all of this, which are of strategic importance for SMEs in particular. And that’s why NOA is also strategically relevant for KEB and is absolutely the focus of the management and owners.
Markus Weissensteiner: Compared to the control manufacturers, we are in a good position because our main product, drive and motor, is to a certain extent the muscle of automation. The inverter used to play a subordinate role. But with the shift towards software, this is changing. The muscle will never run in the cloud. For us, turnover with the control system is new. We are freer and can run our business model much faster in the direction of diversification via software.
Ulrich Sendler: You mentioned the CRA. What role does cybersecurity play for you?
“Cybersecurity is now our daily business”
Uwe Huber: This is now day-to-day business for us. Security workshops, security roadmap, web security – if our customers want to deliver a machine in January 2028, then development will start much earlier and of course they also need assurance from us earlier that we meet the legal requirements.
Ulrich Sendler: What does the NOA roadmap say about what the market can expect from KEB Automation in the near future?
Uwe Huber: Advanced analysis apps for motors and inverters will be a focus for us as a drive manufacturer with our expertise. The inverter as a sensor that sees a lot of what comes from the drive or the application – this is where we will use our knowledge for machine learning-based analysis. Normal analytics is the monitoring of limit values. With NOA, we can now also use the possibilities of machine learning.
Another point will be the completion of the service options as solutions integrated into NOA. We will also use customer projects to connect different control systems via proprietary protocols in order to talk natively with Siemens, Beckhoff and Codesys, for example. And Ethernet/IP will certainly be coming for the American market. If required, we will integrate other proprietary protocols and support our partners in developing communication or connector apps. We have big plans, and with the architecture we’ve chosen, it’s very feasible.