You may already know, but the widespread outbreak (again) of Covid has forced ARC Advisory Group take the safer road and wait for (hopefully) a better disease climate. Following is its press release.
To ensure the safety of our customers, partners, and employees, the ARC Industry Forum 2022, originally planned to be held in Orlando, Florida on February 14-17, will be postponed to June 6-9, 2022. We know you share our enthusiasm for this learning and networking event and hope you will be able to join us at the same venue in June.
The Forum venue will remain the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. We believe that the COVID situation will be much improved in June for us to have a more meaningful learning and networking experience. Those of you who have already registered for the Forum, your registration will be valid for the June Forum, and you do not need to register again.
Those of you who have already made your hotel reservation, it will be cancelled by the hotel. You should receive an email from the hotel regarding the room cancellation with a link to make your room reservation for the June Forum. Please let us know if the new dates do not work for you for any reason, we would be happy to refund your registration fee.
Our in-person Forum will be followed by an online Forum on June 20-23. Those of you who have registered for the online Forum, your registration will be valid for the new dates.
We will provide more details as we get closer to the Forum dates. Please contact us if we can answer any questions or provide any more details regarding the new dates. We look forward to working with you to make this Forum a successful learning and networking experience for all of us.
Remember 10-12 years ago when some worriers considered all the bad things that could happen if workers took their iPhones and other smart mobile devices into the plant? I wrote articles at Automation World about all this mobile connectivity. Companies figured out how to connect them to the HMI of machines and processes. Engineers complained to me at conferences that I was responsible for their loss of free time even on vacation because bosses expected them to be always on.
But the benefits have been tremendous. Maybe managers had to learn how to allow people to be off the grid at times, but there would have been no way to negotiate these Covid times without them. My first smart device was a Palm Pilot. I lusted for a Newton, but I just couldn’t rationalize it. With the Palm, I synced my ACT CRM, loaded documents, and took notes. When I was calling on a large engine manufacturing plant or other large facilities, I didn’t have to take a big notebook, briefcase, and lots of paper. That was mid-90s.
One of my favorite tech writers, Om Malik, blogged a retrospective of his writing on the iPhone. He wrote for Wired and Red Herring and then started the Web-based news site GigaOm. Now he blogs on his own.
I brought the Palm (later generations) with me when beginning my editorial career at Control Engineering in 1998. Once again, I could call on a company and only take that along.
Gary’s Device Collection 1995-Present
The photo shows a couple of my Palm devices then several, but not all, of my early phones. Then a couple of iPods, which were way cool. A couple of early HTC Android phones, and then five of my iPhones including my model 12 at the bottom right.
These devices have been essential to my improved productivity and effectiveness. They’ve also been a time-waster, but you can’t have everything.
Thank you to Steve Jobs and Apple for the development and evolution of the iPhone.
OPC Foundation held a virtual SPS press conference combined with annual general meeting last month. The most profound news comes from the group working on Field Level Communications. That seemed to be a bit of a political football when the idea was broached several years ago. It now has momentum. A couple of other items of interest relate to work with other associations. OPCF will take ownership of the MDIS Sub-Sea Standard. Meanwhile, John Dyck continues to be busy building relationships as CESMII and OPCF have launched a UA Cloud Library.
OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications Initiative reaches significant milestone and celebrates premiere
Three years after its launch, the OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications (FLC) initiative has completed the second release candidate of the OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) specifications and has started the review and release process for them. In addition, a multi-vendor demo with controllers and network infrastructure components of 20 companies – among them the world’s largest automation suppliers – has been realized to showcase the cross-vendor interoperability of automation components for the most diverse use cases in Factory and Process Automation.
The release candidate of the Field Level Communications Initiative consists of four specification parts (Parts 80-83) and focuses on communication between automation components to exchange process data and configuration data using OPC UA Client/Server and PubSub extensions in combination with peer-to-peer connections and basic diagnostics:
Part 80 (OPC 10000-80) provides an overview and introduces the basic concepts of using OPC UA for field level communications.
Part 81 (OPC 10000-81) specifies the base information model and the communication concepts to meet the various use cases and requirements of Factory and Process Automation.
Part 82 (OPC 10000-82) describes networking services, such as topology discovery and time synchronization.
Part 83 (OPC 10000-83) describes the data structures for sharing information required for Offline Engineering using descriptors and descriptor packages.
Peter Lutz, Director Field Level Communications of the OPC Foundation says: “We are happy about the progress that our working groups have made over the last months, despite COVID-19 and the associated restrictions. The completion of the second release candidate and an impressive multi-vendor live demo is a major achievement because the specifications are now mature so that the member review process could be started.”
Since the start of the Field Level Communications Initiative in November 2018 more than 320 experts from over 65 OPC Foundation member companies have contributed to generate the technical concepts and elaborate the specification contents for extending the OPC UA framework for field level communications, including Determinism, Motion, Instruments and Functional Safety.
The OPC Foundation Takes Ownership of the MDIS Sub-Sea Standard
The OPC Foundation (OPCF) announced that it consolidated and took over the MCS-DCS Interface Standardisation (MDIS) specification ownership. Effective immediately, as with all OPCF Companion Specifications, MDIS is freely available for adoption by all interested parties at no additional cost. The OPCF MDIS working group, co-chaired by Markus Koenig from SubSea, Tim Fortin from Honeywell, and Paul Hunkar from DS Interoperability, now oversees the ongoing maintenance and expansion of the standard. Original MDIS network group members will continue working in the OPCF working group. The OPC Foundation invites all members interested in helping shape the future of the MDIS specification to join the MDIS working group.
MDIS was formed with a vision to optimize and standardize communications between subsea Master Control Stations (MCSs) and topside Distributed Control Systems (DCSs). A standardized MCS-DCS interface simplifies the implementation of data communications and increases data quality.
The OPC Foundation and CESMII launches the UA Cloud Library
The OPC Foundation announced the launch of the globally available UA Cloud Library co-developed with the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII). With its multi-cloud architecture, the UA Cloud Library saw contributions from all major cloud vendors leveraging open interfaces and is available for sharing, finding, and collaborating on OPC UA Information Models. Today, the UA Cloud Library already contains over 65 OPC UA Information Models created by individual companies as well as international standards organizations like AutoID, DEXPI, MDIS, MTConnect, and over 30 VDMA working groups as part of their OPC UA Companion Specification work.
While shop floor (OT) components routinely discover and use data structures and services of other OPC UA components, direct access to such semantic information has not been readily available to cloud-based applications due to security considerations. The UA Cloud Library eliminates this gap by providing IT and cloud-based applications access to semantic information directly from the cloud instead of manually getting it from the OT systems
“The UA Cloud Library is the missing link that makes OPC UA information models available in the cloud on a global scale without requiring a connection to physical machines,” said Erich Barnstedt, Chief Architect Standards & Consortia, Microsoft Corporation, and chair of the UA Cloud Library working group. “It enables OPC UA Information Models – used as blueprints for industrial digital twins – to be looked up and matched against time-series machine telemetry data provided by cloud-based analytics software, which is a common requirement in Industrial IoT projects.”
“It was an honor to partner with the OPC Foundation in this strategic initiative,” said John Dyck, CEO of CESMII. “The UA Cloud Library is truly an important step on the journey to Smart Manufacturing Interoperability and will pave the way for dramatic simplification and cost savings for manufacturing systems!”
Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, said, “The value of what the OPC Foundation and CESMII joint working group created cannot be overstated because it equips us with the mechanism needed to facilitate access to all known OPC UA information models via an open, global, single-source of truth.” Mr. Hoppe continued, “Beyond the value the UA Cloud Library brings to applications, it will help with global OPC UA information model coordination and harmonization efforts by making it easy to search and cross-reference the latest OPC UA companion specifications in real-time. Finally, the UA Cloud Library will serve a crucial infrastructure role in Smart Manufacturing initiatives that depend on interoperability.”
Happy New Year. We are all hoping for a better year in 2022 than the past two. SARS-CoV-2 has evolved into a faster spreading but less lethal virus. Obviously that’s a survival tactic for it, but hopefully better survival for us. I made two trips at the end of 2021 and am planning to attend the ARC Forum in February if they let me in. We’ll see how travel goes from there.
I have a ton of news left from December. This one includes merger and acquisition news from PwC, Ethernet adapter shipments, Molex acquisition of connector technology, and finally more financial news with Claroty funding and acquisition of Mediagate. 2021 was a financially strong year in our markets. The overall market was stable, though, in the sense of market leaders and potential market disruptions. When I reviewed the ARC Advisory Group/Control Global top 50 Automation Companies, I was struck by the sameness over the years. The only real movement was a move by several companies to follow the conglomerate model of acquiring a disparate covey of companies. More on that later. This is a potpourri of that sort of news.
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Now back to the news
Industrial manufacturing resurgence powers M&A from PwC
Global economies continue to be impacted by the pandemic underscoring the need to be nimble, dynamic and digital in today’s environment. Global M&A saw a strong bounceback in 2021 from the pandemic levels experienced in 2020. Industrial manufacturing M&A followed a similar trend with deal value increasing by 50% in 2021 over 2020, while deal volume remained stable over the same period. Growth in megadeals (transactions exceeding $1 billion in deal value) were driven by the need to access capital to scale up early-stage technology-driven ventures (including from special purpose acquisition companies known as SPACs), as well as by the traditional need for M&A focus on driving scale, product portfolio and geographic expansion. In the second half of 2021, increased volume reflected the investment in strategic focus areas and product and platform expansion.
We expect 2022 deal activity to continue strong. While increasingly elevated deal multiples could potentially temper buyer’s interests, multiples have drawn out more sellers, including private equity firms looking for an earlier exit and corporates hoping to monetize non-core assets.
The pandemic prompted companies to carry out strategic reviews of their portfolios to assess not only critical acquisition needs to buildout capabilities but also divestitures of non-core assets in order to focus on — and invest in — new and existing growth areas. With ample willing buyers with substantial purchasing power, many companies took advantage of robust valuations in 2021 to execute strategic changes. The abundant inventory of assets in the market during this period led some companies to wait — building what is expected to be a full pipeline of assets preparing to come to market as we head into 2022. The rebound in M&A activity in 2021 was fueled by companies investing inorganically through M&A to drive scale, expand product portfolios and extend into new markets. These trends are expected to remain critical as behavior shifts accelerated by COVID-19 are sustained beyond the pandemic.
Ethernet Adapter Shipments Stalled by Supply Constraints in 3Q 2021
In a report by Dell’Oro Group, Ethernet adapter shipments were stalled by supply constraints in 3Q. Ethernet adapter shipments are forecast to return to double-digit growth in 2022, as supply restrictions ease, and as Smart NICs create growth opportunities.
“Ethernet adapter port shipments declined seven percent year-over-year in 3Q 2021, as vendors faced various component sourcing challenges, with lead-times extending beyond 52 weeks in some extreme cases,” said Baron Fung, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “In contrast, Ethernet controller shipments have approached record levels, as we believe server vendors are increasing their inventories of controllers in anticipation of stronger cloud and enterprise demand ahead,” added Fung.
Molex has acquired core technology and intellectual property (IP) from Keyssa Inc., a pioneer in high-speed contactless connectors. The acquisition of this unique wireless chip-to-chip technology, including over 350 filed patent applications, will accelerate Molex’s strategy to further expand and diversify its micro connector portfolio with highly flexible, cable-free connectors for near-field, device-to-device applications.
“Keyssa’s wireless chip-to-chip technology complements Molex’s developments in mmWave antenna connectivity to meet the growing demands for high data rate transmissions,” said Justin Kerr, vice president and general manager, Micro Solutions Business Unit, Molex.
The acquired technology operates at data rates up to 6 Gbps on the 60 GHz band with no WiFi or Bluetooth interference. The tiny, low-power, low-latency, solid-state contactless connectors can solve critical data transmission needs with minimal overhead. Molex plans to advance these current capabilities by supporting exponentially higher data rates and full-duplex communications. Additionally, Molex will leverage its longstanding signal integrity expertise and mmWave antenna capabilities to speed the commercialization of new contactless connectors while complementing its existing portfolio of products.
Claroty Announces $400 Million Funding and Acquisition of Medigate
Claroty announced raising $400 million in Series E funding and entering an agreement to acquire Medigate Tech Ltd., the leading healthcare IoT security company. The round brings the company’s total funding to $635 million, making it the most well-funded cybersecurity company in the industrial (OT), healthcare (IoMT), and enterprise IoT sectors.
“While connectivity between the cyber and physical systems in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and other industries is driving significant competitive advantages via increased operational agility and resilience, it also creates greater exposure to risks with serious consequences for patient safety, public safety, and the environment,” said Yaniv Vardi, CEO of Claroty. “By combining Claroty and Medigate’s deep domain expertise and specialized technologies into a single platform, we will take a giant leap forward on our mission to secure the ever-expanding universe of XIoT for every connected organization. We envision a future where cyber and physical worlds safely connect to support our lives, and with such strong financial backing from the most prestigious firms in the world, we have the resources we need to make this vision a reality.”
I applaud these efforts to improve and increase digital interoperability through industry or formal standards and open source. These efforts over many years, and even ones that pre-date digital, have provided progress not only in technology but in the lives of users. This announcement comes from the Digital Twin Consortium, a project of The Object Management Group (OMG).
“Interoperability is critical to enable digital twins to process information from heterogeneous systems. The Digital Twin System Interoperability Framework seeks to address this challenge by facilitating complex system of systems interactions. Examples include scaling a smart building to a smart city to an entire country, or an assembly line to a factory to a global supply chain network,” said Dan Isaacs, CTO, Digital Twin Consortium.
The seven key concepts of the DTC Digital Twin System Interoperability Framework are:
1 System-Centric Design – enables collaboration across and within disciplines—mechanical, electronic, and software—creating systems of systems within a domain and across multiple domains.
2 Model-Based Approach – with millions and billions of interconnections implemented daily, designers can codify, standardize, identify, and reuse models in various use cases in the field.
3 Holistic Information Flow – facilitates an understanding of the real world for optimal decision-making, where the “world” can be a building, utility, city, country, or other dynamic environment.
4 State-Based Interactions – the state of an entity (system) encompasses all the entity’s static and dynamic attribute values at a point in time.
5 Federated Repositories – optimal decision-making requires accessing and correlating distributed, heterogeneous information across multiple dimensions of a digital twin, spanning time and lifecycle.
6 Actionable Information – ensures that information exchanged between constituent systems enables effective action.
7 Scalable Mechanisms – ensures interoperability mechanism(s) are inherently scalable from the simplest interoperation of two systems to the interoperability of a dynamic coalition of distributed, autonomous, and heterogeneous systems within a complex and global ecosystem.
“The Digital Twin System Interoperability Framework enables USB-type compatibility and ease for all systems connected to the Internet and private networks, which until now, has been the domain of system integrators,” said Anto Budiardjo, CEO, Padi.io. “This means system integrators can concentrate on designing applications rather than point-to-point integrations.”
The process control automation (Distributed Control Systems or DCS) market was ripe for consolidation. A few companies began to grow, most were candidates for acquisition. No company had a more voracious acquisition appetite than ABB. Part of its genius was the development of the 800xA platform designed as a way of bringing the newly formed empire together. It is now announced by ARC Advisory Group that ABB is the market leader for the 22nd consecutive year with about a 20% share of a $14 billion dollar market.
During 2020 ABB saw growth across key regions, despite the impact of the pandemic on the DCS market across industry. Energy transition and sustainability, as well as an upturn in DCS segments across the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology markets were key growth drivers for ABB.
The DCS market analysis and forecast report by ARC Advisory Group has been published annually for the past 40 years, with ABB consistently in the lead for more than half that time.
“ABB leads the field in DCS thanks to its domain knowledge in multiple industries, extensive service network, a continued investment in developing technology, loyal customers and digital solutions that meet rapidly changing customer requirements,” said Bernhard Eschermann, Chief Technology Officer, ABB Process Automation. “Much of our development is focused on advancing technology such as modular automation, select I/O and secure Edge integrated solutions which address new process and business challenges while protecting investments. We believe these type of solutions to be some of the catalysts needed for the successful implementation of industrial IoT and agile navigation within Industry 4.0.”
The recent launch of the latest version of ABB Ability System 800xA represents an evolution for automated control and plant operations of tomorrow. It is a process control system, an electrical control system and a safety system and a collaboration enabler, allowing further improvement of engineering efficiency, operator performance and asset utilization. In addition, ABB Ability Symphony Plus, is an industry leading DCS in the power, water and waste water markets and ABB’s Freelance offering is a DCS tailor-made for hybrid markets.
ARC’s report also highlights ABB Ability, ABB’s unified, cross-industry portfolio of digital solutions, which includes more than 170 Industrial Internet solutions and an Industrial Internet technology platform and cloud infrastructure. Drawing on insights across over 20 industries and more than 40 years of experience in digital technology, ABB Ability helps customers to develop new processes and advance existing ones by providing insights and optimizing planning and controls for real-time operations. These insights can then be fed into control systems like ABB Ability System 800xA and ABB Ability Symphony Plus to improve key performance metrics of plants and assets. With an installed base of 35,000 DCS systems across more than 100 countries ABB is a trusted leader in creating digital solutions for customers in the industrial space.
