Siemens, AWS or Azure in the factory: FDEs should ask about the 101st gateway and the 73rd hour offline first

FDE Times published a factory-focused tools guide for forward deployed engineers choosing among Siemens Industrial Copilot, AWS IoT SiteWise and Azure IoT Operations. The piece's point is that the three products often appear in the same customer meeting but sit on different layers: Copilot helps automation and maintenance engineers, while SiteWise and Azure IoT Operations move equipment data from the shop floor to the cloud.

Two hard limits drive the discovery questions. Each SiteWise Edge gateway can connect to at most 100 OPC UA servers, so a plant with 140 servers needs at least two gateways before hardware is ordered. Azure IoT Operations can run offline for at most 72 hours (with possible degradation), which means a weekend WAN outage may fit but a four-day holiday outage will not — so outage history belongs in the first discovery meeting, not at go-live.

For FDEs, the article is a practical checklist: locate whether the customer's problem is automation code, the equipment data model, or the edge data path before pitching a platform; treat Siemens' pilot efficiency claims as a hypothesis to baseline; and ask who will operate Kubernetes if Azure Arc is on the table. Reading product docs is easy — customers pay FDEs to know where the system breaks when the 101st gateway or the 73rd offline hour arrives.