If there is one word to describe the kickoff to Emerson Exchange EMEA 2024, it would be Boundless. Attendees have a front row seat to Emerson’s Boundless Automation™ vision and actionable strategy for a modern industrial computing environment – and boundless opportunities to hear case studies, engage with colleagues and explore the latest automation technologies from Emerson.
Emerson President and CEO Lal Karsanbhai opened Emerson Exchange with a nod toward the challenges facing every industry, from the drive to balance sustainability and profitability to the constantly evolving economic landscape. He noted that every industrial sector is rethinking operations – and that Boundless Automation is a consistent approach for success.
Emerson is also transforming itself and reimagining the automation technologies and architecture of the future. Karsanbhai noted over the past several years, Emerson has made several strategic acquisitions for growth, expanded its software investments and has evolved into a global automation leader with new capabilities and expertise to drive substantial performance returns for its customers.
As part of this focus, Karsanbhai explained the traditional automation architecture, developed decades ago, is not designed to support the data-intensive and limitless software demands industry has today. Digital transformation programs have provided infinite data, but the fragmented nature of the data limits the value companies are gaining from it. To address this challenge, Emerson is developing a new software-defined architecture that will tackle the islands of disparate data.
“The proliferation of data and the development of advanced software are moving us to an era of unprecedented productivity,” Karsanbhai said. “Rich data and advanced software computing are converging to form the next major inflection point in the industry.”
That inflection point is now – and it is focused on the next generation of automation Emerson calls “Boundless Automation.” Boundless Automation is not only Emerson’s vision for the future of automation, but also an actionable strategy that liberates data to unleash the power of software.
Emerson’s software-defined Boundless Automation architecture will break down physical technology layers to integrate intelligent field, edge and cloud data in a hyper-converged platform to unlock the promise of digital transformation. Companies will be able to seamlessly move and leverage data across production, reliability, safety and sustainability functions and provide much-improved enterprise-wide decision-making and operations management.
Boundless Automation not only bridges data from the intelligent field, edge and cloud, but also builds the very important bridge between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). OT brings deep domain expertise on operations while IT brings its expertise on technology scalability, enterprise connectivity and security.
“We have been working toward this moment, together with many of our customers, for quite some time,” Karsanbhai said. “We have a clear path forward to make Boundless Automation a reality and help our customers reach new levels of performance.”
