Industrial Automation Magazine India

Yokogawa and NTT Communications enter into business partnership agreement

Published on : Tuesday 09-11-2021

Companies agree to joint development and provision of a shared-use OT Cloud Service to support digital transformation in the manufacturing industry.

November 2021 – Yokogawa Electric Corporation and NTT Communications Corporation have recently announced they have signed a business partnership agreement for the joint development and provision of a shared-use operational technology (OT) cloud service that will support digital transformation (DX) in the manufacturing industry through the fusion of Yokogawa and NTT Com's respective strengths in OT and IT. 

 
Based on this partnership, the two companies aim to adapt production control systems and manufacturing execution systems for use in cloud-based services, and then evolve these through the development of a shared-use OT cloud service. 

 
In recent years, the manufacturing industry has faced the challenge not only of dealing with soaring resource prices, fluctuations in supply and demand, and the development of high-quality products, but has also had to swiftly deal with changes in a diversifying business environment, such as the need to manufacture products that contribute to a decarbonised society. However, manufacturing facilities and the systems that control them are built in on-premises environments where the focus is on availability and the robustness needed to maintain non-stop operations, so dealing with immediate system-related changes is a significant challenge. To handle these issues, a system configuration that supports high flexibility is required. 

 
The practice of moving systems into the cloud has become the dominant approach in the IT field. Through this partnership, the two companies will apply this practice to OT, and by providing a shared-use OT cloud service, will support DX in the manufacturing industry to drive forward improvements in manufacturing flexibility and data utilisation.

 
Hitoshi Nara, president & CEO of Yokogawa Electric Corporation said, “This partnership signifies an important collaborative relationship for the realisation of the system of systems6 concept that we are advocating. Through the provision of services that bring together both companies' IT and OT, we will be able to integrate a variety of systems and thereby achieve an overall optimisation that will contribute to solving issues faced by our society. 

 
Toru Maruoka, president & CEO of NTT Communications Corporation commented, “We will meet the high level of real-time performance, availability, and security requirements required for cloud-based plant-control systems by making use of our edge and centre distributed cloud systems as well as our low-latency networks. Through collaboration between the two companies, we will support the optimisation of the overall supply chain in the manufacturing sector and create an industrial model capable of contributing to the achievement of a sustainable society. 

Development Plans Based on this alliance, the two companies will commence an experiment in February 2022 to demonstrate the migration of production-control and manufacturing-execution systems to a cloud service, and aim to launch this service by the end of FY2022 (March 2023). Regarding the next-stage shared-use OT cloud service, joint experiments will commence in FY2022, with the aim of launching this service in FY2024.