Bechtle and CloudRail Announce Strategic Partnership

Bonn / Mannheim – Germany’s largest system house Bechtle (https://bechtle.com) and IIoT expert CloudRail (https://cloudrail.com) today announced a strategic partnership. In the future, Bechtle will use CloudRail solutions to position itself in the rapidly growing market for the digitalization of factories (IIoT).

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has been making life easier in the private sphere for many years, e.g. with the smart home, it is still in its infancy in the industrial environment. Nevertheless, the trend towards digitization is also unstoppable there and is often referred to as Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In most cases, it is about collecting data from a machine or the entire factory and visualizing it with the help of cloud applications or, for example, using machine learning to draw conclusions about quality or maintenance intervals.
In the future, Bechtle will rely on the solutions of the Mannheim-based company CloudRail to obtain data from industrial applications. CloudRail, with its associated products CloudRail.Box and CloudRail.DMC, enables data to be collected both in modern factories (greenfield) and in old existing environments (brownfield). The solution relies on common industry protocols on the one hand, but also on additional sensor technology that can easily be added to machines, so-called retrofitting. This data is then processed and securely encrypted by CloudRail and sent to any cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and many others, or to local systems. On the one hand, Bechtle contributes its know-how in the area of infrastructure in order to connect the components to the Internet in a fail-safe manner. On the other hand, the system house also takes care of the corresponding application in the cloud. This can be, for example, the visualization of data or the analysis by means of complex algorithms.
“Thanks to CloudRail, we can access data from production very easily and quickly. This allows us to focus on the actual goal, which is to create concrete added value for the customer,” says Raphael Mintgen, Head of IoT at Bechtle.

“With Bechtle, we have found an extremely strong partner for the DACH region. Together with Bechtle and strong joint cloud partners such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, we are looking forward to bringing IIoT to the industry on a large scale in Germany,” said Felix Kollmar, CEO of CloudRail.
However, many companies are still hesitant of IIoT in Germany. Concerns about data protection or high initial investments are often raised. Raphael Mintgen explains that this is completely unfounded. “Our solutions are 100% data protection compliant and with the help of CloudRail technology, we can implement initial pilot installations within a week. These pilots deliver tangible results with minimal investment and, based on the same technology, can be rolled out on a large scale at any time.”