Dive Brief:

• Siemens has invested about $1 billion each year in U.S. software companies since 2007, according to a company press release, having acquired companies including UGS, eMeter, Camstar, Polarion, Mentor Graphics and CD-adapco.  

• Siemens is also increasing its global investments in research and development by $300 million to about $5.4 billion this fiscal year. Siemens says a significant portion of these funds are "earmarked for automation, digitalization and decentralized energy systems."

• Siemens said its businesses with software and digital services produced about $4.6 billion last year, or 12% more than in the prior year.

Dive Insight:

Europe's largest electronics and electrical engineering company is more than 100 years old, but it saw the digital transformation trend coming. While tech is not the company's primary focus, the company has been preparing to go digital for the last decade and, sees its role as a link between its customers raising performance and being more flexible.

Siemens is putting a lot of stock in its cloud-based IoT operating system, MindSphere, to fuel its future growth. That means it will compete with GE, another 100-plus-year-old company transforming through technology. In the U.S., GE is betting big on Predix, its cloud-based platform that connects devices on the industrial internet.