June 23, 20262-minute read
Senior specialist solution architect for edge business at Red Hat
For years, the industrial world has anticipated the imminent shift toward open automation. Initiatives like OPAF, Industry 4.0, and Margo have signaled a move, but the missing ingredient has been the technical rigor required to take these concepts from slide decks to the plant floor.The journey of IT and OT convergence continues to evolve. To move from vision to reality, IT and OT teams are finding new ways to align their specialized expertise. Achieving meaningful results requires a collaborative approach that respects the rigorous demands of the factory floor while leveraging the agility of modern enterprise IT.Maturing together to meet the industrial realityThe collaboration between Red Hat and Schneider Electric, a global energy technology leader, is a joint effort to simplify complexity and increase the scalability of the next generation of industrial control systems. Schneider Electric leads with open, software-defined automation technologies, while Red Hat delivers an edge portfolio built to meet the stringent requirements of industry from shop floor and beyond. Together, this work focuses on the operational foundations required to move from pilot projects into stable, production environment including: Real-time precision: Optimizing platforms to meet demanding industrial Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) requirements with proven performance testing.Operational simplicity: Streamlining tools to remove the "noise" of standard IT solutions, making them more accessible and intuitive for OT engineers.Infrastructure automation: Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deploy and manage everything from compute to networking, reducing manual intervention and human error. Production-grade security and support: Bridging the gap between IT and OT by applying Red Hat’s robust security expertise to the edge, backed by 24x7 support that matches the mission-critical nature of the plant floor. Putting GitOps into practice at the industrial edgeRed Hat and Schneider Electric bring GitOps principles into industrial automation with a repeatable, production-ready approach. This model connects how applications are built, validated, and deployed across the plant floor.At the center is a unified workflow:Build:Use EcoStruxure Automation Expert to design control applications in an open, software-defined environment. Teams work in a structured, version-controlled system that supports collaboration across IT and OT.Automate:Export applications into a CI/CD pipeline. This introduces automated testing, validation, and versioning. It reduces manual intervention and improves consistency across releases.Deploy:Use Red Hat Edge Manager to roll out control strategies across fleets of devices. Manage deployments centrally, track system state, and apply updates at scale.This approach shifts industrial operations from fragmented, device-level changes to a centralized, code-driven model. Control logic becomes software you manage, update, and scale across sites.Key benefits:Consistency across environments with standardized deployment processesFaster time to update with automated validation and deliveryFull visibility into applications, devices, and system healthStronger security with policies applied consistently from core to edgeThis is how open, software-defined automation moves into production. It gives teams a clear way to scale operations, adapt systems over time, and maintain control across increasingly complex industrial environments.Red Hat and Schneider Electric remain committed to delivering an open, software-defined approach for manufacturing automation, built on close collaboration between Red Hat’s Global Edge team and Schneider Electric’s industrial automation innovation experts. Together, they help industrial enterprises standardize operations, scale automation across sites, and maintain control over increasingly complex, industrial operations environments.Visit our industrial edge hub to see how you can apply these modern control strategies to your own operations.
