Honeywell Expands Its Forge Software Capabilities

The trend toward cloud-based industrial software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues with Honeywell’s enhancements of its Honeywell Forge software, including the release of the Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse. David Trice, chief product officer at Honeywell Connected Enterprise, says Honeywell started focusing on true SaaS, not containerized legacy solutions, in 2018. He explains Honeywell’s shift toward SaaS as a response to every manufacturing, processing, and warehouse facility being built “as a snowflake” to address specific needs and demands. The unique requirements of these facilities create complexity for running operations at the executive level and with the operations technology (OT) systems used to run the plant—which are largely still deployed as on-premises implementations. Honeywell Forge virtualizes OT systems in the cloud to lower the cost of ownership and increase speed of operations [through a focus] on personas and industry use cases. There’s a huge need to solve specific operations issues today, and that’s what we’re focusing on first.”