Siemens Innovation Day 2023: Accelerating the Xcelerator
Published on : Tuesday 31-10-2023
Siemens outlines the latest global technology trends and how they impact businesses.
Siemens Innovation Day 2023, held in early October in Mumbai, brought together all the stakeholders – partners, system integrators and customers – amidst the Ideas Marketplace, a display of several digital use cases the company has achieved on the Xcelerator platform that was launched a year ago in India. The fourth in the series of Innovation Days, Siemens used the occasion to outline the latest global technology trends and how they impact businesses, but more importantly, how Siemens can help businesses achieve their goals. In his opening address, Sunil Mathur, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens Limited, referred to a recent CEO Survey on Digital Transformation while offering the Indian perspective. From the successful moon landing to the highly fruitful 2023 G20 New Delhi Summit, India has a lot of positives to offer as the world’s 5th largest economy marching resolutely to the 3rd spot, its population having recently surpassed that of China, and the demographic dividend now a much sought after technology base for the world.
“We have achieved a milestone of 100 India-relevant digital use cases, which are now available on Siemens Xcelerator platform. Together with our Siemens Xcelerator Ecosystem Partners, we will be able to support the increasing demand for digitalisation and decarbonisation solutions in India,” said Sunil Mathur. He also had an announcement to make: four new companies – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Koncept Engineers, Safex Technologies and Sonicbolt Technologies – joining as Siemens Xcelerator Ecosystem Partners – a crucial component with a far-reaching impact on the digital transformation of organisations.
As a Siemens Xcelerator partner, TCS will engage with customers through a consultative process to provide holistic solutions for a Connected Digital Enterprise. These solutions will be based on the expertise of TCS in areas such as simulation, industrial automation, IoT, industrial edge, 5G, cybersecurity, product and application lifecycle management, manufacturing execution systems, enterprise resource planning, enterprise asset management and low-code application development. Koncept Engineers, Safex Technologies and Sonicbolt Technologies will provide integrated building management solutions and integration services of HVAC, fire safety and security systems. These include energy optimisation, building information modeling integration, digitalisation, cloud-based offerings and building automation as well as for Building X.
Delivering the keynote on the theme of Industrial Metaverse – Hype or Hope, Peter Koerte, Chief Technology Officer and Strategy Officer at Siemens AG, stunned the audience with a statement, as outlined in a recent Business Insider article, that the metaverse is dead – in fact it was dead on arrival. However, he was quick to add that the industrial metaverse is here to stay! In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, it is the largest and the fastest growing technology trend, not yet as visible as the consumer metaverse – inspired mainly by the gaming industry – but nevertheless with a lot of potential and early use cases. Another aspect is that the metaverse is just the next step in the evolution of digital technologies that started with modelling and simulation, progressed with PLM – plant lifecycle management, matured with the Digital Twin technology before ending in the metaverse. The reason for rapid growth of industrial metaverse is, first, the value it brings, and second, the key enabling technologies or the building blocks that already exist – Internet of Things, Digital Twins, Edge and Cloud Computing, AI & ML, VR/AR, Network connectivity (5G/6G) and Blockchain. Of these building blocks, the digital twin is the most important. Examples of use cases already exist, e.g., in the medical field where prostheses cost as much as 90% less today, and in the industrial world where factories are 20% more productive and 40% more flexible, thanks to digital twins.
More interesting was the example Peter gave of the use of digital twin is solving critical environmental challenges, in this case the habitat restoration of the coral reefs. Siemens, in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and a host of other multi-sector partners is developing the first coral-reef digital twin to manage and conserve coral reefs around the world. This is a fragile ecosystem threatened by climate change and other factors, yet nearly one billion people around the world rely on coral reefs for their livelihood and community health. The idea is not just to support the stakeholders with actionable data and tools and foster collaboration among them, but to create an interconnected global network of digital reefs that supports management, conservation, and restoration efforts.
Another area of application is battery production and the challenges associated with it of time, scale and efficiency. The world is going to need a humongous amount of batteries in the wake of electrification of mobility and decarbonisation of electricity, and the solution – faster time to market – is not possible without harnessing the power of digitalisation. Factories today are built twice, he emphasised – digital and real – and that is the game changer. India, he believes, has a unique opportunity here to leverage the opportunities by combining the real and digital worlds.
“We have made significant progress over the past year with Siemens Xcelerator and growing a powerful ecosystem. With India’s economy continuing its high growth momentum aiming to double its GDP in the next 7-8 years, Indian companies have a unique opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation with Siemens Xcelerator portfolio which includes latest technologies such as industrial AI, industrial edge, digital twin and 5G,” said Peter Koerte.
Next, it was Carina Brehm, VP Strategy Grid Technologies, Siemens Energy AG, who delivered an expert talk on Decarbonising Energy through Technology. Energy is the foundation of development, the base of entrepreneurial activities; energy facilitates digitalisation and all the fancy things we are talking about. Energy is the blood in the veins of our society, she said, and then added that climate change and the consequences of it are on our daily agenda. Floods, heat waves – even in the northern hemisphere, unseasonal rains and the dramatic consequences that now lead to all the global leaders talking about it, and hence the importance of decarbonising energy through technology. Quoting the high sums spent by the Indian and German governments to mitigate the consequences of natural calamities like floods, it is not a question of how much time we have but a matter for accelerating decarbonisation, the fight to climate change and sticking to the 1.5 degree C target, she said. Lauding the Indian efforts on the solar power generation front where the cost has been reduced to a fifth, Carina said it is not just a matter of scale but also technological progress that made this possible. The simple fact is, decarbonisation must happen across all sectors to achieve 50% reduction by 2030 to close the gap, which as of now looks uncertain. Massive investment in renewables is the key to achieve this and technology will be the main driver for decarbonisation. More importantly, data shows that 50% of the technology requirements for decarbonisation already exist.
“Solar energy is the key to make the decarbonisation of the energy system work. The charming thing is that wind and sunshine are for free all over the world, something not true of fossil resources. So it is reasonable to expect that every government has plans for increasing the amount of renewable energy as part of the mix. So we can expect it to be half of the renewable energy sources by 2050,” Carina Brehm concluded.
The full recording of the presentations is available at: https://bitly.ws/XIyT