MiCROTEC and NetApp win Italian Project Award for Best AI Project in the Industrial Sector

MiCROTEC and NetApp have been recognized with the Italian Project Award for Best AI Project in the Industrial Sector for their joint project to develop a high-performance, scalable data infrastructure supporting MiCROTEC’s Artificial Intelligence applications. NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company, that helps customers to turn data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience, and growth. At the heart of the data infrastructure is the NetApp data platform – the unified, enterprise-grade, intelligent foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across every cloud, workload, and environment.

The project combines MiCROTEC’s expertise in AI-driven solutions for the wood processing industry with NetApp’s advanced data management and storage technologies. At its core is a fully on-premise data infrastructure with approximately 800 terabytes of storage, providing fast, reliable and flexible access to the large datasets required for AI development and operation.

The platform hosts MiCROTEC’s AI environment as well as a dataset of more than 100,000 labelled boards and logs, representing around 60 years of combined labelling work. This extensive data foundation is a key asset for training and continuously improving AI models and developing increasingly advanced solutions for the wood processing industry. “Innovation does not lie solely in data storage, but in the ability to transform decades of industrial knowledge into an AI system that continuously learns and translates this learning into tangible value for customers,” explains MiCROTEC CTO Philipp Bock.

The infrastructure was designed to provide high-speed access to data, scalability as datasets grow, and seamless integration with MiCROTEC’s AI pipelines. It also supports advanced approaches such as CT cross-training, combining data from different scanning technologies to further improve model performance.

The award recognizes the successful collaboration between MiCROTEC and NetApp and highlights the important role that purpose-built data infrastructure can play in enabling industrial AI, innovation and continuous technological development.