Rockwell Automation has formed a strategic alliance with the connections specialist Panduit, aimed at helping their customers to simplify, optimise and accelerate the deployment of industrial networks based on EtherNet/IP.

The two companies will provide optimised physical network infrastructures, support collaboration between automation and IT, and offer integrated solutions and services. They also plan to work with other companies, including Cisco, to help users integrate logical architectures with physical deployment, from initial design to eventual operation and maintenance across an enterprise.

“Our mutual customers need a robust, secure and future-ready Ethernet physical infrastructure for their industrial environments,” says John McDermott, senior vice-president for global sales and marketing at Rockwell. “Together, we can now offer comprehensive logical-to-physical plantwide infrastructure solutions and architectures leveraging EtherNet/IP to provide the level of performance, manageability and security required for today’s industrial networks.”

The two companies have produced a video explaining their alliance.