Watch Tobias and Laurids' talk at SPS Nuremberg 2025
Today’s industrial automation environments are tightly bound to hardware and specific vendor ecosystems. This leads to long lifecycle lock-ins, poor scalability, and high maintenance costs. Software-defined approaches aim to break this dependency by decoupling automation workloads from dedicated hardware, enabling flexible deployment, scalability, and modern lifecycle management similar to IT.
This project proves that industrial automation can break free from hardware lock-in by running on a flexible, software-defined IT/OT stack.
In this talk, we explore the core of Software Defined Automation (SDA). We cover the following topics:
- Why traditional hardware silos are holding back innovation
- The “Edge Device Zoo”: The problem with proprietary digital solutions
- How to create a true ecosystem where sensors and actuators work in harmony through software
Watch this talk at SPS 2025 Nuremberg — Smart Product Solutions, hosted by the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance.
Speakers:
Tobias Schneck - Principal Software Architect at Kubermatic
Laurids Beckhoff - Process Industry Management at Beckhoff Automation
