Bringing in a new generation of leadership to an organization when you’ve groomed people with potential to realize that potential brings rejuvenation and excitement. The leadership at Inductive Automation is transitioning to the next generation.
I met Steve Hechtman in probably 2003 or 2004 at a trade show. A quiet software guy he told me he had started a new company with many new ways of approaching the HMI/SCADA market. The software was built from the ground up to be IT friendly. Pricing would be totally different from what was common at the time.
With much skepticism, I dived into learning about the new approach. Gotta say he moved the market forward. I met the co-developers of Inductive Automation’s Ignition Colby Clegg and Carl Gould a year or so later to interview for my new podcast called Automation Minutes. I just blew a half-hour trying to find that in the archives without success.
The reason for this reminiscing comes from notice of a leadership transition at Inductive Automation. The full story is on its blog.
After dealing with inferior software and inadequate support for 25 years in the integration business, Steve started this company in 2003 to provide a new and better user experience for industrial professionals. Ever since, we’ve worked to provide our customers with the industry’s best SCADA software and equally excellent customer service.
Together, the two of us [Steve and Wendi-Lynn Hechtman] serve as the Executive Chairmen of our Board of Directors, and we’ve both also held C-level positions since the company started.
And today, we are very excited to announce that the time has come. While we will both continue to lead the company as the Executive Chairmen of the Board of Directors, Colby Clegg will take over as the Chief Executive Officer, and Kat Robinett will assume the role of Chief Operating Officer. Kat and Colby have been preparing for this moment for years, and we have every confidence in their ability to lead the company in our mission to empower our customers with the best software and services in the industry.
And some brief bios of the new leadership team. I wish them well.
As Inductive Automation’s new CEO, Colby Clegg will oversee the company’s strategic vision and execution, ensuring that the goals set forth by the Board of Directors are achieved and maintained. Colby has been with Inductive since its very beginning, serving most recently as Vice President of Technology.
During his time here, Colby has created great strategic plans and executed practical solutions not just for technology problems but for sales, support, marketing, and organizational challenges as well. Colby has also had extensive first-hand experience working with integrators in the field and seeing the challenges our customers face. We think he is the perfect person to take on this role.
As the new COO, Kat Robinett will oversee the tactical execution of strategic goals and projects. Kat will be responsible for the company’s daily operations and facilities, as she continues to work to create a great company culture that encourages collaboration, fosters community, and provides growth opportunities.
Kat has been preparing for this new role for years. She has worked directly with both of us, learning the ins and outs of the company, learning directly from Wendi-Lynn about finding and cultivating superb talent, and working daily with leaders and contributors across the organization to carry out the executive strategies and plans that keep our operational efficiency at the highest level.
With Colby now turning his attention to the company’s strategic management as CEO, we are promoting Carl Gould to the new role of Chief Technology Officer to ensure the continued success of our technology efforts.
Serving most recently as the Director of Software Engineering, Carl has been a driving force behind the creation of Ignition, from its foundations to the most recent innovations. He is a master software engineer, a great collaborator, and a natural leader, all qualities he’s employed to make Ignition the leader in our marketplace. Like Colby, Carl has also worked in the field, learning our customers’ pain points first-hand and developing practical solutions to real problems. We’re fully confident that Carl will excel in his new role as CTO.
PwC sends industrial manufacturing market updates periodically. They focus on business level merger and acquisition activity. They report industrial manufacturing M&A was strong in the first half of 2022 but slower than in 2021, which was driven by pent-up demand.
Average deal value decreased over 30% in the first half of 2022 from the second half of 2021. Activity in the first half of 2022 was focused less on transformational megadeals (transactions exceeding $1 billion in deal value) and more on smaller, targeted acquisitions and divestitures. This was driven by buyers building out platforms and filling in strategic market gaps, sellers divesting non-core divisions or assets and broad concerns of US regulatory scrutiny.
Recognizing concerns such as inflation and war in Europe, they continue, companies, however, face ongoing market headwinds of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, including record-high inflation, which will likely continue to influence the M&A landscape into the second half of 2022.
The future looks interesting for those who are prepared.
While some expect the global economy is headed for a near-term slowdown, underlying economic fundamentals remain strong. Private equity firms with dry powder and corporations with significant cash balances are expected to drive significant M&A activity. This, coupled with a large number of carve-out divestitures being contemplated, provide supply for potential transactions.
A few nuggets of advice:
A targeted focus may be necessary to manage headwinds from global and economic uncertainty.
Given global forces are likely to continue to drive uncertainty into M&A processes, private equity and strategic buyers alike should critically evaluate individual transactions in a targeted and strategic manner.
Sellers may find setting a realistic projection plan and addressing these market risks to be a moving target. They may instead find assessing upside and downside risks to the projection plan to be a more successful approach for discussions with potential buyers.
Buyers, on the other hand, may then have the challenge of securing lending for a transaction in uncertain global market conditions. M&A success may depend on using a focused approach to acquisitions, including factoring in downside market risks.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced advances to its GreenLake flagship Software-as-a-Service platform at its Discover 2022 user conference. Below are the update summaries:
Unified experience across edge to cloud
Deepens security
Extends developer tools
Strengthens capabilities to run workloads at scale
Transformed and modern private cloud experience with automated, flexible, scalable pay-as-you-go private cloud for traditional and cloud-native workloads
Eight new cloud services including backup and recovery, block storage, compute operations management, data fabric, disaster recovery, hyperconverged infrastructure, as well as industry-vertical cloud services for customer engagement and payments
“Three years ago, at HPE Discover, HPE committed to delivering our entire portfolio as a service by 2022,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “Today, I am proud to say that not only have we delivered on that commitment, we have become a new company. HPE GreenLake has emerged as the go-to destination for hybrid cloud, and our industry-leading catalog of cloud services enables organizations to drive data-first modernization for all their workloads, across edge to cloud. The innovations unveiled today further build on our vision to provide the market with an unmatched platform to spur innovation and drive transformation.”
You have to give Neri credit. I was in the crowd three years ago when he made this audacious commitment to turn the entire company in a new direction. Not only has that goal been accomplished, but also customers have accepted it. The results reported have been outstanding.
In Q2 2022, HPE reported Annualized Revenue Run-Rate (ARR) of $829 million and triple digit as-a-service orders growth for the third consecutive quarter.
What if the time has come to rethink all these specific silos and strategies that we build software solutions around?
Folk/rock group The Byrds popularized a Pete Seeger tune in the 1960s, “To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn) and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
The time has come to rethink all the departmental silos manufacturing executives constructed over the years with vendors targeting their applications to fit. This era of the Internet of Things (IoT), sensor-driven real-time data, innovative unstructured databases, powerful analytics engines, and visualization provide us with new ways of thinking about organizing manufacturing.
HMI/SCADA can become IoT enabling software expanding beyond the normal visualization role. Types of MES software break the bounds of traditional silos. Not just quality metrics, OEE calculators, or maintenance schedulers, what if we thought of MES as operational intelligence bringing disparate parts together? These can provide managers of all levels the kind of information needed for better, faster decision making.
I have worked with a number of maintenance and reliability media companies. They have all been embroiled in discussions of the comparative value of maintenance strategies: Reactive (run-to-failure), Preventive, Predictive, Reliability-centered. These are presented as a continuum progressing from the Stone Age to StarTrek. With them are always discussion about which is best.
The IT companies I have worked with fixated on predictive. They had powerful predictive analytics to combine with their database and compute capabilities and saw that as the Next Big Thing. They were wrong.
I was taught early in my career that Preventive was also known as scheduled maintenance. Management sends technicians out on rounds on a regular basis with lube equipment and meters to check out and lubricate and adjust. As often as not, these adjustments would disturb the Force and something would break down.
What if? What if we use all the sensor data from equipment sent to the cloud to a powerful database? What if we use that data to intelligently dispatch technicians to the necessary equipment with the appropriate tools to fix before breaking and at an appropriate collaborative time?
A company called Matics recently was introduced to me via a long-time marketing contact. They wanted to talk about the second definition of preventive maintenance. Not just unscheduled rounds but using sensor-driven data, or IoT, to feed its Central Data Repository with the goal of providing Real-time Operational Intelligence (RtOI) to its customers.
According to Matics, its RtOI system has provided customers with:
25% increased machine availability
30% decrease in rejects
10% reduction in energy consumption
Smarter preventive maintenance leverages continuous condition monitoring targeting as-needed maintenance resulting in fewer unnecessary checks and less machine stoppage for repair.
I am not trying to write a marketing piece for Matics, although the company does compensate me for some content development. But their software provides me a way to riff into a new way of thinking.
Usually product engineers and marketing people will show me a new product. I’ll become enthused. “Wow, this is cool. Now if you could just do this and this…” I drive product people crazy in those meetings. I think the same here. I like the approach. Now, if customers can take the ball and run with it thinking about manufacturing in a a new way, that would be cool—and beneficial and profitable. I think innovative managers and engineers could find new ways to bring engineering, production, and maintenance together in a more collaborative way around real-time information.
The power of industry consortia lies in the number of companies and the market reach of the companies who gather to develop standards for technology and use. This guidance from the Industry IoT Consortium (IIC, formerly Industrial Internet Consortium) helps organizations drive better business outcomes using data from resource-constrained edge devices. That is digital transformation.
From the news:
The Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) announced updates to its Industrial IoT Internet Connectivity Framework (IICF), a foundation document that guides the building of an Industrial IoT (IIoT) connectivity architecture. The latest version of the IICF expands the connectivity guidance to include lightweight, resource-constrained machine-to-machine (M2M) devices often found at the edge of networks. The IICF defines an IIoT communications stack and a connectivity assessment template. It applies the assessment template to evaluate IIoT connectivity standards and provides guidance on selecting the right connectivity standard based on system requirements. The IICF connectivity reference architecture enables data sharing and interoperability across a diverse range of IIoT systems.
“Five years ago, the IICF laid the foundation for ubiquitous data sharing across the rich but often confusing landscape of IIoT applications. Today’s important updates and new assessments cater to the communication requirements of resource-constrained devices,” said Dr. Rajive Joshi, lead author, co-chair of the IIC Connectivity Task Group, and Principal Solutions Architect at Real-Time Innovations (RTI). “IIoT architects can use this document confidently to review up-to-date requirements, technologies, standards, and solutions that enable rapid, open information exchange across their systems.”
“Sharing data is essential for organizations to create new value streams and unleash the potential of a global IIoT marketplace,” said Stephen Mellor, CTO, IIC. “The latest version of the IICF helps organizations use IoT connected M2M devices to drive better business outcomes.”
The IICF is a fact-based, consensus-developed document that provides a stable long-term foundation for IIoT interoperability. It offers helpful, practical, tangible guidance for requirements assessment, technology evaluation, and selection.
IICF authors include Rajive Joshi from RTI, Paul Didier from Cisco, Christer Holmberg and Jaime Jimenez from Ericsson, and Timothy Carey from Nokia. The Industry IoT Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG).
