IT in Manufacturing


Siemens and HighByte partner to scale industrial AI

July 2026 IT in Manufacturing Fieldbus & Industrial Networking

Siemens is expanding the capabilities of its Industrial Edge ecosystem through a partnership with industrial software company, HighByte. The collaboration enables customers to connect, contextualise and transform data from both operational technology and information technology sources, helping them extract value from industrial data.

HighByte Intelligence Hub is an industrial data operations software solution designed for data modelling, orchestration and governance. It is now available as an official application on the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace. Customers can consume and reuse industrial data sets from HighByte to build AI models, agents and applications at scale, using Siemens’ Intelligence Center X software.

“The partnership solves a core challenge to make AI-powered industrial production a reality, making data from diverse sources accessible, understandable and actionable across the enterprise,” says Rainer Brehm, chief operations manager for Automation, and chief technology officer at Siemens Digital Industries. “By bringing together Industrial Edge’s robust OT connectivity with HighByte’s DataOps capabilities and Intelligence Center X, we bridge the gap between shop floor operations and IT systems.”

Integrated solution for data access and contextualisation

HighByte Intelligence Hub runs natively on Industrial Edge, where application and configuration management is handled. The solution integrates directly with the Industrial Edge Connectivity Suite, enabling users to connect to a wide variety of OT data sources including PLCs, SCADA systems and industrial protocols. HighByte’s DataOps functionalities extend this connectivity to IT data sources, creating a unified data infrastructure that spans the entire production operation.

A key capability of the integrated solution is data contextualisation and pipelining. Using HighByte Intelligence Hub, users can apply flexible and scalable transformation rules to process data from multiple IT and OT sources, adding business context and converting raw operational data into meaningful information. These contextualised datasets can then be made available to IT services in a scalable manner, with HighByte serving as a unified namespace provider that standardises data access across the organisation. HighByte Intelligence Hub can also be used to adjust machine setpoints by sending commands from IT data sources such as manufacturing execution systems back to PLCs via Industrial Edge’s Connectivity Suite.

“Industrial organisations have long struggled with fragmented data across IT and OT systems,” says Tony Paine, chief executive officer at HighByte. “By directly integrating HighByte Intelligence Hub with Industrial Information Hub on Industrial Edge, we give customers a direct path to contextualised and standardised data. This is the foundation needed to build data products and leverage AI at scale with Siemens’ Intelligence Center X.”

Maximising the value of industrial data at Vivix Vidros Planos

Vivix Vidros Planos, one of Brazil’s leading flat glass manufacturers, used the combination of Siemens Industrial Edge, HighByte and Intelligence Center X to digitalise its core production process with 30 industrial applications. It built a smart application to predict and prevent degradation of its most valuable asset, a $120 million glass furnace, to maximise utilisation and economic lifetime.

“HighByte on Siemens Industrial Edge enables us to feed highly contextualised industrial data into Intelligence Center X so that our developers can build industrial AI models, agents and applications at speed and scale, with very little support from our limited pool of OT experts. This combination is driving OT, IT and AI convergence and accelerating our industrial agentic transformation,” says Aristóteles Terceiro Neto, industrial transformation manager at Vivix Vidros Planos.

For more information contact Siemens South Africa, [email protected], www.siemens.co.za


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