Industrial automation specialist Emerson is joining the Linux Foundation’s Margo, a new open-standard initiative for edge infrastructure. Margo is intended to make edge applications, devices and orchestration software work together across multi-vendor industrial automation environments.

The Margo initiative is designed to address digitalisation challenges facing process and discrete manufacturers at the edge due to multi-vendor and multi-technology devices, apps and orchestration environments that do not easily integrate. The Margo initiative is designed to address the challenges through the creation of practical reference implementation, open standards and testing toolkits.

The approach is intended to help remove obstacles and simplify the process of building, deploying, scaling and operating complex, multi-vendor industrial edge environments, helping manufacturers of all sizes build new and better digital operations or modernise existing ones.

“The modern OT edge is the backbone of our next-generation automation architecture, enabling the availability of data and computing closest to where it is needed,” said Peter Zornio, Emerson’s chief technology officer. “Successful implementation will require open edge standards that will enable scalable, simplified and seamless interoperability among applications, edge devices and orchestration software – no matter the vendor technology.

“Emerson is pleased to join the Margo initiative to help create a unified and cohesive edge management ecosystem. Our collective progress will make it easier, faster and less costly for our customers to develop digital transformation programmes that realise the full potential of AI, machine learning and analytics at the edge.”