It’s a given fact: To stay ahead of the competition and keep pace with the increasing challenges of digitalization, companies in the process industries can no longer shy away from their digital transformation. Software applications and systems are already playing a crucial role in this today. They now form an ecosystem of their own with various interdependencies – and create new opportunities for the process industries.

With more than 20 years of experience in the key fields of digitalization and software engineering in process automation, I am certain of one thing: There is a tremendous demand for innovative software solutions in the process industries. Expectations with regard to the potential of software are at least as high – whether it is a matter of process optimization, retrofitting existing plants or enhancing their capacity. I think there are two reasons for this: First of all, innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) open up entirely new opportunities in today’s world. Secondly, past experience shows how quickly new software technologies become established and are deployed by users on a daily basis as soon as it becomes clear that they provide major benefits for them. I would like to mention graph databases as an example: They are simply ideal for creating and searching large data records in a highly performant and very user-friendly manner. Ten years ago, this was nothing more than a vision of the future of industry!

From best-of-breed to the ecosystem

Due to immense demand, the process industry software market is growing – and the number of software providers is increasing almost on a daily basis. Many stakeholders want to gain a foothold in this business: from start-ups to automation and technology companies to large IT enterprises. Users must now choose the best solutions from this broad spectrum of offers. In the end, this leads to the emergence of a software ecosystem consisting of various applications and solutions which target the individual niche they are designed for, and that their providers interact with others.

That is why it is particularly important that the software solutions offered are adaptable – in order to target another niche or to be compatible with new applications and types of use. I think it is essential that we develop and deploy evolvable and modular architectures for the process industries. The success of microservices, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and docker-based solutions clearly demonstrates that industry has become aware of this. Furthermore, I am convinced that open standards will gain in relevance once again in the next few years even though this topic is less “fancy” at the moment. However, they are key to being able to leverage the opportunities of software in the long term. Therefore, Siemens has, for example, developed MindSphere, an IIoT-as-a-Service solution which is explicitly open to other providers.

From IT specialist to pioneer within the ecosystem

In the future, more and more human knowledge will flow into software solutions. For this reason, I am certain of one thing: Working side by side with our customers by way of collaboration and co-creation will be crucial. In fact, this is the only way to combine process and customer knowledge and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transfer this knowledge into software together. At the same time, experts forecast that AI will become extremely easy to manage in the next two to four years, thus even allowing employees without specialist knowledge to make use of such methods. This will certainly have an impact on the type of software we work with: Rather than engaging in matters of implementation, teams will translate this knowledge into the appropriate context in order to make optimal use of it for the corresponding application. In the long term, no one – not even AI – will be able to take this away from us, and this will create free spaces in which we can develop completely new ideas.