The corporate giants say they will provide jointly conceived industry solutions that integrate OT (operational technology) and IT (information technology), and accelerate data processing in industrial plants to improve enterprise-level asset management.

Traditionally, OT and IT rarely overlapped, but business demands and economics have changed this and by facilitating convergence ABB and HPE expect to turn industrial data into insights and faster business optimisation.

ABB group vice president and head of global data centre solutions Ciaran Flanagan said ABB served a lot of industries and after talking with customers on barriers to effective IT/OT integration the company saw a need for a partner due to the scale and range of challenges.

Flanagan said OT and IT systems were often siloed. Companies lacked the ability to analyse and unlock business value because automation systems were not connected and not monitored continuously.

In a three-pronged approach, the ABB/HPE partnership would integrate ABB's platform with a hybrid IT/OT platform; take hybrid IT "to the customer"; and establish a secure edge, ‘ruggedised' data centre. The all-in-one data centre for remote industrial environments would also be fast and secure to avoid latency, bandwidth and security issues of data transfer to remote data-centres, as well as scalable and economic.

HPE global manufacturing industries vice president Volkhard Bregulla said the company's mining customers already had IT/OT capacity, but the ABB partnership would aim to create new value through more efficient data use.