Venture links production data to enterprise AI without IoT middleware
17 June 2026 
Siemens has announced a collaborative edge-to-cloud initiative with the US data and AI specialist, Databricks, and the German automation company, FFT Produktionssysteme. It will allow industrial users to connect their production data directly to enterprise AI, without needing complex IoT middleware. Siemens says this will help them to transform their data into actionable insights and to scale industrial AI across their operations, thus cutting costs and boosting productivity.
Users will be able to stream contextualised shopfloor and plant data directly from Siemens’ Industrial Edge via FFT’s DataBridge to the Databricks Platform, where it can be analysed and used to train AI models centrally for implementation across global production networks. These models can then be deployed back to the edge for execution at the point of production.
Siemens says that this approach will help industrial companies to optimise their operations, cut costs and boost productivity with low‑latency, data‑driven decision‑making. It lays the foundation for future physical AI and autonomous operations.
“Industrial AI only delivers value when data, context and execution come together,” explains Siemens Digital Industries’ CTO and COO of automation, Rainer Brehm. “With Databricks and FFT, we enable our customers to scale industrial AI across factories and plants and make AI-powered production real.”
The combination of the industrial edge and industrial information hub (the integration layer for industrial data), offers users a secure, scalable and low-maintenance edge platform designed to unlock siloed industrial data and execute intelligent applications close to production processes. This includes local analytics, physical AI and closed-loop AI workflows that require low latency, high availability and strict security compliance.
Databricks complements this with its advanced analytics, machine learning and agentic AI for industrial data in a cloud-agnostic environment with a low infrastructure overhead. This supports advanced applications such as predictive maintenance, quality optimisation, energy management, supply chain optimisation and agentic AI applications.
“By uniting Siemens’ industrial automation and edge expertise with the Databricks platform, we help industrial companies to close the gap between industrial data and scalable business impact across their industrial networks,” says Shiv Trisal, Databricks’ global industrials go-to-market leader. “This partnership is a foundational step in making human-agent collaboration a reality for industrial operations.”
FFT Produktionssysteme is providing its DataBridge application that connects Siemens’ Industrial Edge with the Databricks platform securely and efficiently. The application streams contextualised, AI-ready production data from the edge to the cloud, where it can be combined with additional IT and OT data sources.
“DataBridge provides a simple, powerful gateway to the cloud for more than 30,000 potential customers,” says FFT’s COO, Volker Stark. “It is ready to use and does not require expensive and time-intensive transformation of data. By natively bridging the gap between IT and OT, we eliminate the need for complex IoT layers and significantly simplify industrial connectivity for customers of Databricks.”
