The German technology company Beckhoff Automation has been designing innovative and groundbreaking automation systems since its inception in 1980. Their PC-based software tool TwinCAT has been used by engineers for 25 years worldwide to develop and build machine services.

Now the company is simplifying the use of the software tool by making TwinCAT cloud-based. The software’s new feature extension goes by the name TwinCAT Cloud Engineering and will help users transition to a flexible machine building process.

Beckhoff Automation is a driving force in the development

– Creating cloud-based tools is a strong trend in the IT world and more and more functionalities are being moved to the cloud, and now also in automation, says Håkan Brandt, CEO of Beckhoff Automation Sweden, and continues:

– We at Beckhoff Automation have come a long way in the work of moving automation software to the cloud and through our launch of TwinCAT Could Engineering, we are driving development.

The basic concept of TwinCAT has not changed and the software still consists of the previous tools, but the packaging of the program has been modernized and become platform independent.

Learn more about TwinCAT Cloud Engineering here.

– The background for the tool being moved to the cloud is to make the work easier, more cost-effective and smarter. It simplifies the IT infrastructure, user management and accessibility, says Håkan Brandt.

With TwinCAT Cloud Engineering, a powerful computer is not required and the software does not even need to be installed. All that is needed to use the development tool is a web browser. Through the cloud-based solution, a central and open control is constructed with TwinCAT, which practically means that the users of the software tool can scale up and scale down their work more quickly and set up development environments more easily.

The benefits of cloud-based automation products are many

– There are several cost and efficiency gains from working with cloud-based solutions. With Cloud Engineering, you build your solutions in the cloud instead of buying your own hardware, which needs to be administered. Users can decide and control who should have access to the project files and if you need several developers in the same project, it is easy to collaborate. This can otherwise be complicated if you work with a local hardware, says Rickard Andersson, sales manager at Beckhoff Automation in Sweden and responsible for industrial sales.

TwinCAT Cloud Engineering was presented to the industry in the autumn of 2019 at the SPS trade fair in Germany. Subsequently, the tool has been evaluated together with Beckhoff Automation’s customers and given increased functionality. TwinCAT Cloud Engineering is planned to be launched in the near future.