With “Integrated Industry – Creating Value"  as its official lead theme, Hannover Messe 2017 drew nearly 225,000 people from around the world to showcase innovative applications of Industry 4.0 technologies and digitally controlled energy systems.

As one of the 350 exhibitors at the world’s leading industrial fair, Siemens Industry Software presented their cloud-based, open IoT operating system MindSphere and ideas around creating an ecosystem of applications and API services.

With “Integrated Industry – Creating Value"  as its official lead theme, Hannover Messe 2017 drew nearly 225,000 people from around the world to showcase innovative applications of Industry 4.0 technologies and digitally controlled energy systems.

As one of the 350 exhibitors at the world’s leading industrial fair, Siemens Industry Software presented their cloud-based, open IoT operating system MindSphere and ideas around creating an ecosystem of applications and API services.

In partnership with large industry partners, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and smaller players like {Insert Smaller Players}, the MindSphere Lounge became an open space of exchange of ideas and discussions around IoT and digitalization. The new platform is expected to launch this summer, allowing developers to interact with the Siemens APIs.

Manufacturing giants are taking more proactive leadership roles in the digital space. Already, there are  many practical examples and applications to be released including GE with predix.io, Siemens with MindSphere, and Bosch is planning the launch of an open Marketplace.

The evolution of the digital space presents a great opportunity for developers, as they can expect to tap into more data and services that are traditionally blocked by the firewalls of large enterprises. From cars to factory systems, developers will begin tapping into once exclusive machinery as they become more active resources for the products built by startups.

Challenges remain here around the two worlds that are clashing -  on the one hand strong, stable IT systems that were built decades ago with a different user in mind, during a time where webservices served a very specific use case ; on the other hand, developers which are used to work with modern, RESTful JSON APIs - a world of opportunity with new use cases constantly emerging.

Those developers are often times challenged to fight through loads of documentation and overcome process delays to fully get access to the level of data which is required for them to create value to the fullest. Creating this link between web services that were built with a use case in mind to much broader services which don’t directly guide developers into a specific application, this is what XapiX is focused on with its data transformation engine.