Rockwell strengthens links with IBM WebSphere
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Leveraging several years of working with IBM in serving the automotive and life sciences industries, Rockwell Automation—a global provider of industrial automation, power, control, and information solutions—recently announced a new relationship that would integrate its plantwide manufacturing execution system around IBM's WebSphere MQ Series messaging backbone.
Rockwell's supervisory and human-machine interface solutions have been closely associated with Windows technology. However, its relationship with IBM at the plant application level, such as scheduling, has been well established for more than three years, according to Beth Parkinson, a product manager with Rockwell.
"Our customers wanted a single solution from the plant floor to business applications, to leverage WebSphere to connect to their ERP systems," says Parkinson, also citing one early installation at International Truck and Engine, in which plant-floor scheduling was linked with a Baan ERP system.
With the new agreement, Rockwell will resell several IBM WebSphere components, including WebSphere Business Integration Adoption Model as an integration broker, WebSphere MQ for transactional integration, and WebSphere Portal for user interface integration.
Rockwell also says it is using IBM's Business Integration Adoption Model and WebSphere to implement a service-oriented architecture, the goal being "to help manufacturers turn information into knowledge for better business performance."
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