A few days ago, Siemens and Alibaba signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to work together to operate Siemens Mindsphere in the Alibaba Cloud.
The Alibaba Cloud is an Alibaba Group company specializing in cloud computing services. Alibaba Cloud delivers cloud services specifically for e-commerce. The Alibaba Group e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and AliExpress also use the Alibaba Cloud. The cloud service is sold as “pay-as-you-go”, so the fees only apply when used. Offerings include data storage, relational databases, big data, protection against DDoS attacks, and content delivery networks (CDNs). Alibaba Cloud is the largest Chinese cloud service with 18 data centers worldwide and availability in over 42 countries.
Siemens Mindsphere is an open cloud platform, ie an operating system that runs in the cloud and was developed especially for IOT purposes by Siemens. Mindsphere stores operational data and makes it available through applications known as (MindApps). , Mindsphere focuses on the analysis of machine data, for example to make better predictions for the future.
The signed memorandum between Alibaba and Siemens will now promote the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) in China. From 2019, the operating system will be available to Chinese customers.