Case Study: Rockwell Automation achieves up to 90% cost reductions and scalable big-data analytics with Microsoft Azure

Industrial Automation Firm Cuts Costs up to 90 Percent with Big Data Solutions

Rockwell Automation, a global industrial-automation leader, faced a surge of machine- and sensor-generated “big data” as its business grew, overwhelming on‑premises data centers and creating a complex integration challenge across on‑site and cloud systems, batch and streaming feeds, and disparate customer environments. The company needed a scalable, holistic way to collect, orchestrate, and analyze time‑series data to support monitoring, maintenance, and customer visibility.

Rockwell implemented a Microsoft Azure–based data strategy—using HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, Power BI, Azure SQL and Blob Storage—to automate pipelines, interpolate sensor data, enable predictive maintenance, and deliver interactive dashboards. The approach cut development time by about 80%, reduced operational costs by as much as 90%, produced faster reporting and full pipeline visibility, and in a pump-efficiency proof‑of‑concept delivered a 1% energy improvement with large potential savings at scale.

Rockwell Automation

Doug Weber

Business Manager, Remote Application Monitoring