Matthias Rebellius, Member of the Managing Board Siemens AG; CEO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure

It is in electric grids that use AI to balance fluctuating input from renewable wind turbines and solar panels. It is also in accelerated vaccine production to protect people from the pandemic, as well as in railway networks that can handle 30 per cent more trains without the need to lay any new tracks.

The changes brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution are nothing short of amazing. Digital technology saves lives, enables teams to collaborate remotely from anywhere, and gives companies a competitive advantage by making everything more efficient.

Yet for all its promise, digital transformation can be complex. Deploying digital technologies and integrating them into existing systems can be difficult. And it can be hard to scale them up once you have proof of concept. The investment costs in the hardware and software can be prohibitive, and engineers often spend many months planning and executing one-off, tailor-made solutions.

The rewards once these problems are overcome can be huge. Factories become more resilient and versatile. Buildings become more energy and resource efficient, safer, and more comfortable. Grids become more reliable and stable. Transportation systems are less prone to equipment failures and better integrated with one another. Efficiency results in competitiveness and increased sustainability.

For customers, the challenge is how to thrive in a fiercely efficient, globalised world. They need to focus on their products and services. They do not need or want months of disruption while they reinvent their processes. They want digital transformation to be faster, easier, and available at a lower cost.

That’s why we at Siemens have made a fundamental change in the way we do business. We want to make the digital transformation as easy as possible and at scale. We want our customers to have better access to the technology that is changing our world – by creating a new digital business platform that is easy, flexible, and open.

Siemens Xcelerator opens up potential for customers to experiment with new digital solutions

Siemens Xcelerator takes out the complexity of digital transformation as it combines the real and the digital worlds. It is a portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software. It is a growing ecosystem of developers and partners, and it is a marketplace for technology solutions that will evolve over time.

Above all, it is a commitment to openness, simplicity, and collaboration. All the solutions offered on Siemens Xcelerator are plug-and-play, interoperable, and modular, and all work with standard APIs. And because they are all in the cloud, they are easy to update and easy to scale.

Siemens Xcelerator makes it easier for customers to experiment with digital solutions, for a low investment cost, pay as you go for what you need, when you need it, with software as a service.

This is a big deal. We launched it only a few weeks ago together with Building X – our new smart building suite. This is the first next-generation offering built on the design principles of Siemens Xcelerator and it could not come at a better time.

Humanity is building like crazy. According to one estimate, cities need to add 13,000 buildings every day through 2050 to keep up with global population growth. A sad fact is that only a tiny minority are modern, digitalised, and carbon neutral. At the current rate, it will take almost a century to decarbonise them all.

Building X is how we accelerate that process. Its digital operations twin provides data-based outcomes for all stakeholders. It creates one data lake for all the systems in a building, breaking down silos. It is fully cloud-based and scalable, with AI-enabled apps and cybersecurity built in. And it provides a single source of truth for all customers, which can be managed on a single pane of glass.

Siemens is driving digital transformation with vigour – not just with Siemens Xcelerator and Building X, but also with acquisitions. Earlier in June, we agreed to buy Brightly Solutions, a US-based software leader in asset and maintenance management. Brightly is the perfect addition at exactly the right time. It catapults Siemens into a leading position in the software market for building operations and accelerates the expansion of our existing software-as-a-service business.

It is a win-win. Brightly lets Siemens leapfrog to the next level of performance for buildings. In turn, our global footprint will drive Brightly’s expansion. Customers will benefit through enhanced efficiency, lower downtimes and maintenance costs, shorter lifecycles, better data-driven decisions, and more satisfied tenants.

Customers want an easy way to roll out digital solutions that are tailored to their needs. They do not need those solutions solely for buildings. They need them for electric grids, on the grid edge, for charging infrastructure, and for a decentralised energy supply. They need them for industry and for mobility.

As Siemens, our mission is to meet that need. Our mission is to make digital transformation easier, faster, and at scale, to serve our customers and help them accelerate the IoT transformation in all their endeavours. We make access to technology that changes the everyday easy, flexible and open.