Siemens and AWS: The importance of our collaboration and what it means to you – Ep. 1 Transcript
For the readers out there, here’s the full transcript of the Cloud Talk Today podcast. In our first episode, we had the honor of Brycen Spencer of Siemens and Bob Tahmassebi of AWS joining us to talk about the importance of the Siemens/AWS collaboration. There’s a lot to cover. So let’s dive right in. (Hit the play button if you like.)
Scott Salzwedel: Hello and welcome. This is Siemens Cloud Talk Today, the podcast that touches on everything cloud and how the cloud accelerates digital transformation. Sure, we’ll be talking about the latest innovations, but the cloud can mean different things to different people, which is why we’ve gathered here today.
Welcome… I’m your host, Scott Salzwedel.
Listeners, a special thank you for joining us on this, our very first episode of Cloud Talk Today. Where to begin? Chances are if you’re listening to this podcast, you have some familiarity with the cloud. Perhaps you’re already in the cloud realizing some amazing advantages.
So, the one thing you may not know is the deep and highly productive collaboration that’s been going on between Siemens and AWS, and that’s the focus of today’s podcast. It’s to introduce you to the value-add our partnership brings to the marketplace. How we’re helping customers move to the cloud. And how we’re keeping up with the latest technologies like GenAI and the industrial metaverse. Joining me today are Brycen Spencer of Siemens and Bob Tahmassebi of AWS.
Welcome gentlemen to the inaugural episode of Cloud Talk Today.
Brycen Spencer: Thanks, Scott.
Bob Tahmassebi: Thank you, Scott.
Scott: So Brycen, let’s start with you. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at Siemens?
Brycen: Yeah, happy to. Like you’d mentioned, I’m with Siemens, and the group that I work with is called Digital Industries Software. My job is essentially to make sure that our overall collaboration goes well and we execute against some of the joint commitments we made together about three years ago when we signed what’s called the Strategic Collaboration Agreement. And that agreement really spans a number of different commitments from product development to joint marketing. Our teams are out there working with customers together, and we also both committed to some training milestones that allow our teams to gain expertise in cloud and for AWS to gain some domain expertise from Siemens, which is one of the OT leaders in our space. So that’s really what I do here at Siemens.
Scott: Wow… You definitely have your full plate of things to do, no question about it. Since it’s summer and we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, I was wondering if you might share your favorite childhood memory of summer?
Brycen: I think, as of the day we’re recording this, we’re in July, which is really one of my favorite months of the summer. I grew up in Massachusetts near Plymouth, which is lovingly known as America’s Hometown. So, July is finally when we start getting pretty consistent weather in the summer. And I’ve always just loved going to the beach. So, as a kid, and still today, I loved having a good beach day, especially on July 4th when we celebrate our Independence Day. It’s really a great time of year to be in this area of the country, with fireworks, festivities, and all kinds of stuff to really have fun. That’s one of my favorites—just enjoying the beach on July 4th in the summer.
Scott: Sounds wonderful. Do you get back to that beach as an adult?
Brycen: I do. I actually loved it so much I decided to live here permanently as an adult too. So I’m back in Massachusetts myself now.
Scott: Well, someday I’d like to see you do a cannonball in the water.
Brycen: There you go.
Scott: Okay, wonderful. Bob, welcome to the podcast. It’s an honor to have you here. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do at AWS?
Bob: Sure, yeah, thanks, Scott. I lead AWS’s largest and most strategic technology partnerships in the automotive and manufacturing industries within our partner organization. As part of our strategic collaboration with Siemens, my team supports Siemens Digital Industries Software in building, marketing and selling their software portfolio on AWS. So, we work very, very closely with Brycen and the entire Digital Industry Software team on our partnership and the value that we bring to our customers.
Scott: And now, it’s your turn. I’m going to ask you the same question I asked Brycen. What’s your favorite summertime memory as a kid?
Bob: Well, I grew up in the Washington, DC area, and actually live in the area still today. Anyone who has spent any time in the DC area during the summer months knows that the month of July is pretty hot and humid—some would say oppressively so. When I was a kid I loved splitting my time between the tennis courts, the soccer field and playing basketball. Then jumping into the pool, topping that off by cooling off even more in the evening, enjoying a nice scoop of ice cream—something that I still enjoy doing over the summer months with my family. On the Fourth of July, given the big fireworks that happen on the National Mall, I used to go downtown and watch those fireworks and enjoy the Fourth of July celebration. That’s a tradition that myself, my wife, my family, and I try to keep even now.
Scott: Wonderful. That’s so cool that you can keep that going to this day.
Brycen let’s get after it. The first question I have for you is, how would you describe the collaboration between Siemens and AWS?
Brycen: I think it’s been a really interesting part of my career. I have been with Siemens for, I guess, going on 14 years now, and the last three have been dedicated to helping manage and lead this partnership. The catalyst to our partnership was that Siemens announced to the capital markets in 2021 that we were moving our software business to a SaaS business. Our most strategic partner on that journey was AWS. It was at that time that I took this role and really got to be part of how two big organizations—the leader in cloud, being AWS, and the leader in industrial software—come together and figure out what a partnership should look like? What is it that the two of us should do on behalf of customers to go figure out how to make their digital transformation journey better? So, that’s really what we set out to do: was transform our company to SaaS and help make our software more easy to use, more accessible, and more scalable with the help of AWS. It’s been an amazing journey. Up to this point, we’ve launched lots of solutions, and we’ve also left room together to tackle new challenges. Like you mentioned earlier, Scott, the latest buzzword is AI and GenAI. We’ve worked on things like IoT, autonomous driving solutions and low code. There have been some real focus areas around SaaS, but what’s been interesting as time’s gone on is that we’ve found new innovations to work on together and ways to make our customers’ lives easier. So, so far, it’s been really successful and exciting every day.
Scott: Definitely. Yes, GenAI is just another turning point. It’s just crazy what’s going on. I get the feeling that we’re in the first inning of a very long ballgame.
Brycen: Yeah, and I think if you’re in a customer’s shoes, it’s really crazy to think about the amount and the speed at which new technology is coming at customers while they’re trying to figure out the core mission that they’re trying to achieve. Part of what we try to do is take this new tech and make it industrial grade for our customers so that they can pick it up and use it right away.
Scott: Brycen, looking back over this past year, what would you say are the partnership’s major highlights?
Brycen: Over the past three years, you kind of build a rhythm through the different months and different seasons, and the rhythm of our partnership starts around December with the AWS’s re:Invent conference. For us, this past year, AWS awarded us the Industrial and Manufacturing Partner of the Year award and the Design Partner of the Year award for our leadership in that vertical and for our Siemens Xcelerator as a Service offering. For me personally, that was a great moment for us to be recognized within the AWS community as a global partner of the year. It was also great for us to have our CEO, Tony Hemmelgarn, for Software and the Digital Industry Factory Automation, CEO Rainer Brehm, on stage. They covered topics like SaaS and how we’re leveraging AI with AWS. On the topics of IT/OT convergence, Rainer was able to cover some of the innovative things that the Factory Automation teams are doing. December was really a highlight at re:Invent for me. Then, if you roll into the new year, at CES, we had Roland Busch, our Siemens AG CEO, on stage during the keynote. He was able to bring Matt Wood on board during his keynote and talk about the integration we had with Mendix and Bedrock. The takeaway there was that we’re democratizing AI using low code via the Mendix platform. It was just great to see those two leaders on stage showing customers the results of our collaboration together.
If we move into March and April, for me, we have a pretty significant customer event called the Innovation Leadership Summit, where we get to spend two days with some of the executives of our top customers, talking about their needs and the accomplishments and challenges they’ve had. AWS is a big sponsor there, so we get to understand intimately some of the challenges that they have and how we can help. In May, I’ll just finish off with, we launched Teamcenter X Essentials, which is really the flagship launch for our partnership, bringing our leading PLM solution to the small- and medium-sized enterprise companies so that they can take advantage of some of the power that some of the enterprise companies had access to in the past.
Scott: It’s just amazing that Teamcenter is now on the cloud. It was such a powerful piece of software before. Just imagine what it must do today. It’s crazy. You’re touching on all these shows, and it’s great. We’re going to dive into the shows a little bit more later on in the podcast, but I want to get Bob in here on AWS and his side of the story. So, Bob, what has the Siemens and AWS collaboration meant to you and the folks at AWS? I mean, what stands out the most so far this year?
Bob: It’s really an exciting time in our partnership and in the industry. Just building off some of the comments that Brycen mentioned earlier, through our strategic collaboration, we’ve supported Siemens’ SaaS transformation and their journey to develop a full suite of industrial software applications on AWS under the Siemens Xcelerator brand. These SaaS solutions are being adopted by customers across a variety of different industries who are leveraging these technologies on AWS to innovate faster, increase productivity, be more sustainable and ultimately serve their customers better. As Brycen also touched on, we’re not stopping there. Jointly, AWS and Siemens continue to look for areas for expanded collaboration and innovation. Some examples include AI, the industrial metaverse, IoT, low code, edge and electronic design automation, or EDA. We’ve also executed a successful awareness campaign called “create without limits” which has accelerated awareness of our partnership benefits to target personas from 18 percent to 73 percent. It’s just an absolute amazing accomplishment by the teams.
Scott: Yes… that’s been very successful, for sure.
Bob: We’ve touched on the global events that we do annually. This past year, I think we did over 30 global events together to drive demand for our joint products and solutions. Typically, at these events, we talk about some of our latest innovations to bring IT and OT together for the benefit of our customers. We also highlight customer stories who have realized sizable benefits from adopting Siemens solutions on AWS, which is really exciting. Finally, speaking of solutions, we’ve worked together to bring 36 Siemens solutions available in the AWS Marketplace – simplifying procurement and deployment of these solutions on AWS. This has been really exciting. We’re seeing more and more customers actually buy Siemens solutions through AWS Marketplace, which has been a great addition to our partnership and how we go to market together.
Scott: We’ve been talking about some of the shows that we’ve done together. The partnership in action is just something to behold. It’s pretty amazing, the technology that’s on display. So, let’s revisit some of those bigger shows Brycen had kind of alluded to, but Bob, I want to get your take on re:Invent 2024 because that is an annual AWS show. What was your takeaway at this year’s re:Invent?
Bob: re:Invent is really AWS’s marquee conference. We have new products, partnerships, and customer success stories that get announced. It’s really the ideal venue for Siemens and Mendix to meet with customers and discuss the benefits of our strong collaboration.
During re:Invent 2023, which happened at the end of November and early December 2023, Siemens had a really strong presence in the industry pavilion as one of our top manufacturing partners. Brycen touched on Tony Hemmelgarn and the Siemens DI Software CEO, presenting at our automotive and manufacturing breakout session on the collaboration, what we’re bringing to market together, and what customers are seeing in terms of benefits from those solutions.
With GenAI, there were some announcements and excitement around the Amazon Bedrock connector for Mendix. re:Invent is also a platform for AWS C-level keynotes and AWS announcements. In previous years, Siemens has been on the AWS CEO keynote stage showcasing Space Perspective, for example, and how Siemens technologies on AWS have accelerated the design and testing of their unique space tourism experience onboard their spaceship, Neptune. So, it’s really been a great venue again for elevating awareness of the partnership, the solutions that are being built, customers that are adopting these solutions and the benefits that we’re truly bringing to various industries. It’s been really exciting.
Scott: This is so cool that you mentioned Space Perspective because we have done a lot with them, and it’s just amazing what they offer. The tourism into space is just a powerful thing for all of us to launch into space and get a different perspective. So, very cool. So, yeah, there was re:Invent—that was a big show in Las Vegas. And then there was another big show in Las Vegas, and that was the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. I know we had a huge presence. So, Brycen, do you want to take that one?
Brycen: Yeah, I touched on it earlier, but part of what our overall partnership with AWS is really about is taking enterprise capabilities and making them easier for enterprises—more accessible and scalable through the use of cloud—but also bringing them into the medium enterprise customers who previously didn’t have access to some of these toolsets. And that’s also applicable for Mendix. What we’re trying to do is democratize application development and through the integration with Amazon Bedrock, democratize the use of AI in applications. I think that was the major message here: is that AI becomes accessible for the OT audience and folks who may not have coding expertise using low-code tools like Mendix. It was great to see not only what we’re doing together, but there was an example with the customer Vivix, who’s the largest glass manufacturer in Brazil, using it to infuse AI into applications for the shop floor persona. They saw a great increase in productivity and a pretty significant reduction in the time to resolve production issues as well. So, I encourage our listeners to go look that use case up, and we’ve—I know, Scott, with your help—published a number of blogs about the activity there.
Scott: Yes, there’s plenty of blogs, for sure. It’s interesting—the Mendix and AWS collaboration together has really opened the door for AI and for users to really get a good grip on what AI can do for them with the partnership and the capabilities that we provide. So, yeah, CES was really amazing this year. We had Siemens’ own Roland Busch. He gave a keynote at CES, and I just want our listeners to know that they can watch Roland Busch on a YouTube channel, and Roland Busch, that’s “B-U-S-C-H” of Siemens. But I also want to move forward. In Germany, we had the Hannover Messe fair, and that’s a huge international show that highlights industry and manufacturing. So, Brycen, you touched on it but what was your takeaway with this year’s Hannover Messe?
Brycen: I have to credit you with a really powerful blog that captures the whole event. To me, year three of our collaboration, we have gone broad and deep in lots of topics. A couple of examples from Hannover this year that I’m particularly excited is the world’s moving towards more sustainable industry. One of those areas we’re partnered on is battery and tackling problems for our customers around battery design and manufacturing. This year, our industry battery lead, Puneet, had worked with AWS and his manager, Dale, and our AWS lead, Maria, were on stage talking about what we’re doing together in battery to help increase innovation in the next generation of battery design but also accelerate customers that are adopting smart manufacturing principles. And how together, Siemens solutions and AWS services are making it easier for battery manufacturers. That came together beautifully in a discussion we had with Toyota on stage, where we talked about their use of our MES software, Opcenter, on AWS’s Outposts, which is an edge device that AWS has a service for. The customer came to us and said that they wanted Opcenter on Outposts. We were able to work together as partners to certify it to run there, enabling the customer to design a cloud-first strategy for their new battery manufacturing plant. It’s great to see not only the topics we’re working on, but also proof points in the market with customers like Toyota.
Scott: It’s great that we had something going on with Toyota, for sure. Bob, do you want to jump in here on Hannover Messe? What’s your take?
Bob: It was a great show, and I think it was a great event for both Siemens and AWS. My main takeaway was that customers from different industries are really looking at industry leaders like Siemens and AWS to show them the way in terms of digitization, sustainability, how to become more productive, etc. The ability for AWS and Siemens to cross-demo our joint solutions in each other’s booths, which we did at Hannover Messe this year and focus on areas that are really relevant to their business was great. Brycen touched on a couple of different areas that were highlights for both of us. Certainly, Mendix low code was an area of focus. We also touched on our work with the factory automation side of Siemens and showcased several factory automation solutions. Back to the GenAI topic, we showed where we’re leading together in GenAI with both Mendix and the Amazon Bedrock Connector, as well as the Vivix story, but also with Teamcenter using Amazon Bedrock. As Brycen mentioned, there were customer presentations from Toyota, leveraging Siemens Opcenter on AWS, and also Vivix, Brazil’s largest glass manufacturer, using Mendix and Amazon Bedrock capabilities to reduce operational costs, increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction. So, folks that went to Hannover Messe got to see the demos and presentations really got a sense of what AWS and Siemens are doing together and what are different areas that our solutions can really help impact their business in a positive way, whether it’s a challenge they’re facing or a new opportunity that they are going after.
Scott: Yeah, really powerful stuff.
Let’s take a minute and discuss how Siemens and AWS are working together to bring some of the latest technologies to our customers. I know we’ve touched on it already, but let’s really get into this whole GenAI thing and GenAI-enabled SaaS. Bob, from an AWS perspective, how is the Gen AI SaaS movement going? What can our customers expect from the Siemens AWS collaboration at this time?
Bob: It’s a great time both for Siemens AWS and the industry, and it’s also true with respect to generative AI. It burst onto the scene a little over a year ago and is already starting to have a huge impact. What we see is that we have organizations of all sizes and from different industries are getting started with the technology. They certainly want to capitalize on it, and they’re trying to figure out how they transition and translate momentum from proof of concepts, prototypes and demos to real-world innovations and productivity gains. We hear all the time from customers and partners of AWS that they need security and privacy, scale and price performance, and, most importantly, relevant solutions to business problems and opportunities. We really focus on providing enterprise-grade security and privacy, a choice of leading foundational models, a data-first approach, and the most performant, low-cost infrastructure. We work with partners like Siemens to deliver everything the need to accelerate generative AI-powered innovation. One example we talked about earlier was the Mendix-Amazon Bedrock Connector, and we talked about Vivix. Just double-clicking on Vivix a little bit more. They have built 17 applications in one year with Mendix and AWS. They have saved 6,000 hours of manual work and reduced customer resolution times from five days to less than a day. A chatbot they developed, dubbed the “Virtual Engineer” gathers product, production and process data and offers tailored suggestions to the quality and production teams, enabling them to proactively address customer complaints, leading to a five-hour reduction in time to resolve production issues. These are real-world examples where Siemens, Mendix and AWS technologies come together to make a huge impact in terms of productivity, resolution of customer complaints and even safety and training issues. Finally, customers can now use AWS’s generative AI assistant capabilities in Teamcenter X, Siemens’ flagship product lifecycle management solution. This new capability enhances how customers can interact with Teamcenter X using natural language processing. There’s more innovation coming there, but it’s a really exciting announcement and something that just got launched into the market this summer.
Scott: Brycen, it’s your turn. We hear more and more about this immersive engineering and the industrial metaverse. We’ve touched on it already, but can you define these two terms? And then what are Siemens and AWS doing along those lines? I know the industrial metaverse was a huge hit at Hannover Messe.
Brycen: People have probably more commonly heard the term “metaverse,” but the industrial metaverse for us in the industrial space is really about creating a virtual world that allows people to bring digital and real assets together so they can collaborate and integrate new sets of data to find problems before they happen in the real world. For this to work, the virtual world has to match and act just like the real world. Siemens has been investing for decades now in providing customers with the most comprehensive digital twin. This digital twin goes beyond what people might see in the market as animation because the Siemens digital twin brings real-world physics to these digital assets so that they perform in the virtual space just like they would in the real world. You could almost say that the digital twin is the heart of the industrial metaverse. It’s about letting you fail where it’s really inexpensive – in the cloud, in an industrial metaverse—before you try to make it in real life so that it’s optimized before you invest bigger sums of money in making an asset, building a factory, or constructing a building. The industrial metaverse scales up a digital twin like never before, with access to almost unlimited compute power, new sources of IoT data coming from the cloud, and the ability to give access to users all around the globe via the cloud. Our collaboration with AWS is about taking world-leading solutions that we’ve been providing from Siemens’ portfolio and leveraging all the power that comes from the cloud. Every day, you hear from the market and AWS that there’s a new, more powerful, more sustainable and more efficient chipset available. It’s really hard for customers to keep up with that in the physical world, but AWS shines in making the latest and greatest technology available in the cloud for customers to use on-demand as they need it. So we try to take those services and leverage them in our applications to provide customers with a virtual space that brings together the real world and virtual world so they can optimize before they bring it to the real space.
Scott: Yes, definitely. The chips keep getting more and more powerful. I also would think the infrastructure to support the industrial metaverse is key. So, AWS and their infrastructure must be pretty solid. It must be a pretty powerful infrastructure to handle the industrial metaverse. I just wanted to get Bob’s take on AWS, the infrastructure, and how it all comes together. Any thoughts on that, Bob?
Bob: AWS really provides that infrastructure and set of services that power the industrial metaverse Brycen just spoke about. We’re working closely with Siemens to enable digital twins in environments using rendering solutions from key industry leaders, including folks like NVIDIA, to show how these digital twins can interact with real-world scenarios. We continue to invest in our infrastructure and set of services bringing new instances to the market. The applications that Brycen spoke about are really GPU-heavy workloads. We continue to innovate with Siemens on that front, and I’d say stay tuned. There are going to be more announcements and innovations in this space later this year. I’d encourage the listeners to keep abreast of all that’s happening in this space.
Scott: Thanks, Bob. Gentlemen, I hate to say it, but we’re nearing the end, and I have one final question, and that’s about the partnership and where you see it going next? Brycen, I’ll start with you. What’s your take?
Brycen: Fortune telling has never been one of my skill sets. I won’t pretend to know what lies ahead, but I’m definitely willing to bet — there’s a quote out there that says, “The only thing that remains constant is change.” That’s really what the partnership between Siemens and AWS to me is about. It’s establishing this framework for the number one in cloud and the number one in industrial software to work together on some of the toughest challenges that our customers face in the industry. New technologies will come and go, but ultimately, what remains constant is that customers just want to focus on accomplishing their mission. That’s true for big enterprises, and it’s true for small- to medium-sized enterprises. What we want to do together is make sure we can put those technologies to work in applications so that companies that are small delivering customized prosthetics, like Unlimited Tomorrow, at 80 percent of the cost can continue to do that for customers and patients without worrying about what tech needs to be strung together. The day we’re recording this, we’re all reeling from an IT failure that impacted air travel. Some of our customers are trying to design sustainable air travel and they’re doing that today in the industrial metaverse, optimizing before they build real planes. Some customers, like we talked about earlier with Vivix, are trying to unlock the next wave of productivity for their employees, and some of that’s low code, some of it’s AI. I’m sure new technologies will come together. Today, we’re bringing things like Mendix, low code, and AI together to help unlock the next level of human performance and productivity. So, for me, that’s personally the mission I’m focused on—to bring amazing technology and applications together so that our customers can accomplish their goals.
Scott: These are exciting and dynamic times for sure. Bob, your turn. How do you see the partnership evolving?
Bob: Much like Brycen, I’m not sure that I have a clear crystal ball in my hands, either. If I did, I’d probably fumble it and break it on the floor. But I think Siemens and AWS work across a wide variety of dynamic industries and customers and as Brycen mentioned there’s constant change. One thing that will stay constant, and one thing I certainly expect, is our customers will continue to rely on Siemens and AWS to solve some of their biggest challenges, and they’ll want us to do that for them in a simple, scalable and secure manner. We at AWS are squarely focused on doing that with partners like Siemens. We’re incredibly proud of our partnership with Siemens and the cloud-based innovations we’ve built together. We’ll continue to invest in multiple areas we touched on a couple today, like AI and the industrial metaverse, so that we can continually enhance these solutions enabled by our partnership with new capabilities that continue to allow our customers to capture the biggest opportunities they see in front of them. That’s what’s really exciting for me personally—working as close as we are with Siemens Digital Industries Software is the innovations and the impact we’re having with our customers and the industry. I think that will continue to happen moving forward.
Scott: Thank you, Bob. It’s such a wonderful relationship we have going on here. Just stay tuned. There’s so much on the horizon, for sure. So thank you both, you and Brycen, for joining. I really appreciate the time. You guys were great.
Brycen: Thanks, Scott. It was a pleasure to join your podcast, and I really look forward to the next few episodes in this series.
Bob: And I’d like to add my thanks to both of you, Scott and Brycen. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk about our partnership today and what we have coming down the pike. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Scott: All I can say is, let’s do more. Let’s do more podcasts. At the top of the show, I mentioned we’re planning future episodes of Cloud Talk Today. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to listen to upcoming episodes, please subscribe to Cloud Talk Today on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you go to get your favorite podcasts. You can also check out the links in this podcast description.
My name is Scott Salzwedel, and this has been Siemens Cloud Talk Today. I hope you enjoyed the show and that you’ll join me again for our next podcast. Until then, keep your head in the cloud and your feet on the ground.