Manufacturing Solution
Unifying IT/OT for the AI-Driven Factory
Situation
The AI Surge vs. Legacy IT/OT Realities
The manufacturing sector is entering a massive technology supercycle.
To deliver these outcomes, 86% of manufacturing enterprises are surging investments in AI and Generative AI, while 82% are prioritizing cybersecurity upgrades.
The Challenge: CIOs cannot execute this AI and security mandate on legacy infrastructure.
- The IT/OT Divide: Shop floors are restricted by “piecemeal integrations” between modern IT and legacy Operational Technology (OT). This lack of a cohesive digital thread blocks data visibility.
- The Cost of Legacy Virtualization: Factories are burdened by expensive, proprietary hypervisor licenses required to run legacy Windows-based applications.
- The Fragile Industrial Edge: Pushing high-performance AI models to the assembly line requires local processing. Relying on continuous connectivity to a central cloud introduces unacceptable latency and risks catastrophic production halts if the network drops.
How we help
The Kubermatic Platform Engine and the Autonomous Edge
Kubermatic bridges the gap between the corporate data center and the factory floor. The Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform acts as the technical engine for the industrial edge, providing a unified, hardware-agnostic foundation that manages both modern AI containers and legacy virtual machines across thousands of global plants.
Powered by a unique “Kubernetes-in-Kubernetes” architecture, we deliver the autonomous factory. By leveraging our Seed Cluster technology, we guarantee that critical shop-floor applications continue to run and process AI locally even when the connection to the central cloud is severed.
The Resilient Industrial Architecture
Global Control Plane
We deploy the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform in your central data center or preferred public cloud. This acts as your single pane of glass, establishing global cybersecurity policies across the entire digital thread and deploying standardized software to all plants simultaneously.
Industrial Edge (Autonomous Shop Floor)
Deployed on industrial servers within the plant, the platform orchestrates Seed Clusters that handle local IT/OT operations. If the plant loses internet connectivity, the Seed Cluster autonomously manages local workloads, ensuring the production line never stops.
Device Edge (Industrial IoT & AI)
The platform pushes containerized AI models and lightweight workloads directly to assembly line sensors, robotic arms, and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for real-time, low-latency processing.
Use Cases
Legacy IT/OT Convergence & Cost Reduction
- The Mission: Modernizing the factory floor and reducing infrastructure overhead without refactoring decades-old operational software.
- The Application: Using Kubermatic Virtualization (KubeV), legacy Windows-based OT applications and traditional VMs are run natively alongside modern containers within the same Kubernetes platform. This allows manufacturers to retire expensive legacy hypervisor licenses (like VMware), directly answering the CEO mandate for cost reduction.
Deploying Edge AI for Production Quality
- The Mission: Executing the CIO’s AI strategy by running computer vision and GenAI models on the assembly line to detect product defects in real-time.
- The Application: The Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform acts as the centralized ModelOps pipeline. It seamlessly pushes updated machine learning models to the factory floor, processing massive amounts of visual data locally for millisecond decision-making without saturating enterprise bandwidth.
Autonomous Shop Floor Operations (Resilience)
- The Mission: Ensuring manufacturing execution systems (MES) and local databases remain operational during network outages to prevent costly production halts.
- The Application: Utilizing the platform’s Seed Cluster architecture, individual factories run fully autonomous edge environments. If the WAN connection to the central enterprise cloud drops, local orchestration continues uninterrupted, synchronizing data securely only when the connection is restored.
Outcome
Productivity, Cost Efficiency, and Security
By standardizing on the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform, industrial organizations eliminate the friction between IT and the shop floor, turning legacy factories into agile innovation hubs.
Radical Cost Reduction
Break down silos by unifying VMs and containers. KubeV allows you to modernize at your own pace, drastically reducing licensing costs from legacy virtualization vendors.
Zero-Downtime Productivity
Achieve continuous operations at the factory level. Autonomous edge architecture ensures that network failures never translate into costly production line stoppages.
Enterprise-Grade Cybersecurity
Answer the top IT funding priority by replacing fragmented integrations with a unified, Zero-Trust Kubernetes architecture that secures the entire digital thread from the core data center to the OT edge.
Global Scalability with 1 FTE
Leverage unparalleled architectural density to manage thousands of distributed factory clusters worldwide from a single, centralized dashboard.
Why Kubermatic?
Proven Leadership
Recognized by Gartner®, Forrester, GigaOM, SPARK Matrix™ and a top contributor to the CNCF.
Flexibility
Supports Bare Metal, vSphere, OpenStack, and all major public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Sovereignty
Germany-based company offering 100% sovereign infrastructure and secure, private cloud stacks.
Expert Support
Implementation, managed services, and 24×7 mission support from Kubernetes experts.