With ten concurrent trade shows HANNOVER MESSE 2015 enables exhibitors to make contact easily with important buying sectors. The relationship between Motion, Drive and Automation (MDA) and Industrial Automation is especially close since there is little movement in automation without electric and mechanical drive mechanisms, hydraulic systems and pneumatics. For that reason, major drive and fluid technology providers such as FESTO, Lenze, Siemens and Wittenstein exhibit at Industrial Automation. The two trade shows even share space in Halls 15, 16 and 17.

One element that increasingly links automation and drive technology is Industry 4.0. "As an important building block of industry, MDA networks drive technology with neighboring disciplines and places it in relation to global megatrends," says Robert Schullan, Chairman of the MDA Executive Committee and Member of the Board of Schaeffler AG. "At present we are working hard to equip drive components with miniaturized sensors and to integrate plants and machinery into centralized information systems, thus creating the basis for high-volume data communication," says Schullan. "Such smart components and modules are a prerequisite for controlling autonomous processes in our customers' value chains."

"Power transmission and fluid technologies have an integral part to play in Industry 4.0," confirms Hartmut Rauen, Member of the VDMA Executive Board. The intelligence of these key components based on modern IT make remote maintenance, condition monitoring and predictive maintenance possible in the first place. The increasing integration of previously separate components, plants and systems demand that "a vigilant eye be kept on IT security, and more precisely industrial security." According to Rauen, components of power transmission control technologies are "the source of the big data that will be mined in the Industry 4.0 process." The data capital created here must be protected. It is therefore extremely important to focus on security and protect know-how during both development and throughout the entire life cycle. Rauen continues, "What we need it security by design."