Cybus is a leading software specialist for secure and governance focused IIoT edge solutions to drive industry towards smart factory architectures. Cybus actively contributes to data sharing work groups of the World Economic Forum, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, and in 2017, it published the first secure industry connector for machine data according to modern IDSA standards. Industry analyst Gartner named Cybus a worldwide “Cool Vendor” and Volkswagen chose Cybus as an official OT-IT Gateway Partner for their Industrial Cloud.
Today, the company counts medium-sized and large enterprises from numerous industrial sectors among its customers.
Interview with Peter Sorowka, CEO of Cybus.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Peter Sorowka: Cybus helps manufacturing companies to shape their factories IT architecture towards a scalable and future proof data backbone. Together with our customers we define development roadmaps starting from early pilots to covering multi-use case smart factory scenarios combining machine data, legacy IT, classical automation pyramid as well as cloud based IoT platforms and data science technology.
E.E: What’s the news for 2021 about new products?
P.S: 2021 is the breakthrough for Cybus, because with our Cybus Connectware 1.0 we can finally bring Smart Factory to the market – more than solely shop floor connectivity. With this version, our clients can of course count on new protocols and features, as we will still upgrade and maintain the Cybus Connectware. But what really simplifies the entry to use case implementation for our clients is our Service Catalogue. We are really proud to offer such a user-friendly installation platform, which provides pre-built services and applications. For example, our partners can upload their services such as predictive maintenance or dashboard applications and make them available to all users. In addition, our clients can deploy self-created programs internally within their company and even exchange it with their partners.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
P.S: We offer one product: the Cybus Connectware. Because that’s all you need to digitize your factory.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
P.S: Although there are already several IIoT solutions and products, we are still in the very beginning. Competitors often focus mainly on the immediate industrial pain-points: connectivity. But in this process, they often lose sight of the big picture. Because the only reliable approach of a holistic digitization requires completely different corporate structures. For these new structures, industries need supportive tools which enable cross-departmental and cross-project digitization and work toward a long-term goal: the smart factory.
Peter Sorowka, CEO of Cybus
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
P.S: We see a clear consolidation of technologies and a backflip towards prioritizing edge computing over cloud computing again. As data driven use cases and projects are growing, the amount and frequency of data grows exponentially. The edge has big advantages regarding cost, bandwidth and latency for many use cases, but at least for pre-processing and filtering data before delivering it to the cloud.
Besides that, we still see very different digitization maturity depending on the vertical market. While the tooling machine market is still struggling with the connectivity basis, protocol heterogeneity and pure data access, the processing industry is still far ahead and much more involved with data processing and prediction.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2021?
P.S: We assume that 2021 will finally get the industry out of the proof of concept phase. We see rollouts of big digitization initiatives that span whole organizations at many customers. What we would have called a lighthouse factory last year will by next year be already the average. On the other hand, we are still waiting for the “digital business model” breakthrough for machine builders. But we assume this will still take two or three more years.