Last November I visited TÜV Rheinland where we were briefed on its progress on cybersecurity services. It is a well known testing and service agency in Europe with the same reputation in general as UL in the US. I once served on a UL Industry Advisory Group for one of its standards where I got a good view of the value of testing and certification as a value to companies as well as consumers.
TÜV Rheinland has announced expanded Customized Services coverage to North America, now making these services available worldwide. Featuring its Supply Chain Audit, TÜV Rheinland’s customized services enable companies to demonstrate they are good corporate citizens by showing transparency and responsibility regarding their business practices and employees, while reducing risk, increasing brand value and providing a competitive advantage in the market.
TÜV Rheinland has been delivering Supply Chain Audit Services across the globe for many years, and is bringing these services to North America now as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a more important part of companies’ business strategy. Increasingly consumers are holding brands accountable for not only how they create and deliver a safe product, but also for employee conditions and overall impact on the environment. With expanded supply chains, growing international production and trade connections, supply chain audits are a critical tool for ensuring compliance on a wide range of points including labor, safety, environment, social and ethics.
“Customers have countless options for procuring their goods. And especially when a customer enters a business relationship with a company that has a global supply chain, it is hard to ensure that the products are of high quality and have been manufactured under fair working conditions,” explained Frank Dorssers, Global Field Manager for Customized Services at TÜV Rheinland. “In these instances, supply chain or social audits create transparency and compel suppliers to disclose critical information, creating trust between the business, their partners and the customer.”
Audits vary in scope based on the sector and company, but often assess a company’s responsible sourcing practices across the supply chain and analyse compliance with Labor Laws, Environmental Sustainability, Business Ethics, as well as Health & Safety Management Systems. Specific risks by industry may also be addressed, such as hazardous chemical management in the printing and dyeing industry. Audit results provide actionable insights that companies can undertake to ensure their business practices meet the CSR and HSE (Health, Safety, Environment) goals they have set for themselves as well as mandates.
Can you think of a mentor who has helped you grow either personally or professionally? Perhaps a teacher? A boss early in your career? When have you mentored someone? How did it work out?
I can remember a teacher or two who helped guide me. My first supervisor in manufacturing would put me in situations where I couldn’t help but grow. My problem then was that although I could do the work intellectually, my interpersonal skills were sadly lacking. Especially in the manufacturing environment of the time that placed a premium on strong personality. I can still remember moments when he set me up for a confrontation forcing me to be forceful. I think the other guys liked it because I was almost the only “college kid” there. The old guys loved to poke at the college kid.
Many people have begun studying mentorship. We talk often about mentoring young soccer referees as the best way to move them from the classroom to a successful career.
Before he gets to the four things, he notes that mentors he studied consistently “do everything they can to imprint their ‘goodness’ onto others in ways that make others feel like fuller versions of themselves. Put another way, the best leaders practice a form of leadership that is less about creating followers and more about creating other leaders.”
Put the relationship before the mentorship. All too often, mentorship can evolve into a “check the box” procedure instead of something authentic and relationship-based. For real mentorship to succeed, there needs to be a baseline chemistry between a mentor and a mentee. Mentoring requires rapport. At best, it propels people to break from their formal roles and titles (boss versus employee) and find common ground as people.
Focus on character rather than competency. Too many mentors see mentoring as a training program focused around the acquisition of job skills. Obviously, one element of mentorship involves mastering the necessary competencies for a given position. But the best leaders go beyond competency, focusing on helping to shape other people’s character, values, self-awareness, empathy, and capacity for respect.
Shout loudly with your optimism, and keep quiet with your cynicism. Your mentee might come to you with some off-the-wall ideas or seemingly unrealistic ambitious. You might be tempted to help them think more realistically, but mentors need to be givers of energy, not takers of it.
Be more loyal to your mentee than you are to your company. Of course, we all want to retain our best and brightest. We also want our people to be effective in our organizations. That said, the best mentors recognize that in its most noble and powerful form, leadership is a duty and service toward others, and that the best way to inspire commitment is to be fully and selflessly committed to the best interests of colleagues and employees. Don’t seek only to uncover your mentees’ strengths; look for their underlying passions, too. Help them find their calling.
And Tjan makes a couple of final points: The best mentors avoid overriding the dreams of their mentees. At its highest level, mentorship is about being “good people” and having the right “good people” around us — individuals committed to helping others become fuller versions of who they are.
This is all based on research as is befitting of the Harvard Business Review. It is also wise guidance.
A short blurb on a product that I didn’t know that Rockwell Automation had—a rack-mount compute platform that can be used as a virtual machine server.
The information did not come through a traditional press release. It was a New Product Spotlight with a request to run in the products section. Well, I’m not a magazine or traditional media, so I don’t have a “products section.” However, I have great empathy for PR firms these days. They really have to push to keep clients happy in a tough market with demanding client executives.
Given that I’ve been spending so much time at IT conferences and everyone speculates about what Rockwell is up to, I found this one intriguing. “The new VersaVirtual appliance from Rockwell Automation provides all the computing, networking and storage capabilities needed to deploy and maintain up to 15 virtual machines in one ready-to-use appliance.”
Two key features:
First, it avoids the potential pitfalls of a do-it-yourself virtualized architecture. This appliance is pre-engineered. It arrives as a complete product from one source.
Second, it is an Industrial Data Center with scaled down cost and complexity for smaller applications.
They even remove the objection of needing an IT department. The VersaVirtual appliance comes with one-year remote monitoring and administration so that users receive around-the-clock system monitoring to help prevent downtime. Customers will also receive support from certified IT/OT professionals who have an average response time of three minutes to help resolve technical issues.
It is a hyperconverged (compute, networking and storage) appliance for entry-level virtualization. And the benefits: Virtualization brings an average of 74% decrease in total cost of ownership, reduces downtime, adds compute capability, and comes with trusted IT/OT services and support.
Looks like an entry-level IT platform from the OT leader. Interesting.
It is great to see things mature–whether kids or adults or technologies. Or an open source project called EdgeX Foundry. Yesterday I had the pleasure of two exciting teleconferences regarding the latest release of EdgeX Foundry, named Edinburgh, from the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization. I’ve had many conversations with Jason Shepherd, LF Edge Board Member and Dell Technologies IoT and Edge Computing CTO, over the past three years. When we finally got a chance to catch up yesterday afternoon, he could not have concealed his excitement had he tried.
I have written about EdgeXFoundry here from Hannover 2017, again in 2018, and when incorporated in Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella. This IoT platform is more than a platform. During my Hannover visits of 2017 and 2018 it seemed that all God’s children need to develop their own IoT platform. Of course, when a company develops a platform the goal is to connect as many apps as possible to its main application.
I have also been involved with organizations trying to accomplish this same thing through standards. Problem is, you just can’t get technology supplier companies to sign up for a platform that forces their products to be subservient to standards. The better approach is Loosely Coupled (book by Doug Kaye).
The first conversation was with Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation, and Keith Steele, chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. They walked me through the release and its meaning.
Important takeaway–This Open Source IoT Platform/Ecosystem is now stable and ready for PrimeTime.
Highlights:
Enables IoT digital transformation for Enterprise, Industrial, Retail and Consumer
Supports complementary products and services from global open ecosystem including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs
Deployed in many end user projects; EdgeX also collaborates with IIC on AI testbeds and is the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI)
Created collaboratively by a global ecosystem, EdgeX Foundry’s new release is a key enabler of digital transformation for IoT use cases and is a platform for real-world applications both for developers and end users across many vertical markets. EdgeX community members have created a range of complementary products and services, including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs and plug-in enhancements for device connectivity, applications, data and system management and security.
Launched in April 2017, and now part of the LF Edge umbrella, EdgeX Foundry is an open source, loosely-coupled microservices framework that provides the choice to plug and play from a growing ecosystem of available third party offerings or to augment proprietary innovations. With a focus on the IoT Edge, EdgeX simplifies the process to design, develop and deploy solutions across industrial, enterprise, and consumer applications.
Thefourth release in the EdgeX roadmap, Edinburgh offers a stable API baseline for the standardization of IoT edge applications that future-proof IoT investments by fostering an ecosystem of interoperable microservice-based capabilities and decoupling investments in edge functionality in areas such as connectivity, security and management from any given backend application or cloud. The EdgeX framework is designed to facilitate the secure deployment and management of devices and applications at the edge to accelerate time-to-market and enable new data-based services and capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
“Since its launch, EdgeX Foundry has experienced significant momentum in developing an open platform that can serve as the industry framework for IoT and edge-related applications,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “EdgeX Foundry is one of the anchor projects for LF Edge and Edinburgh release is a major step in unifying open source frameworks across IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge.”
“Having started the EdgeX movement with a small team at Dell before contributing the code to the Linux Foundation, it’s certainly amazing to see the traction we’ve gotten through open, vendor neutral collaboration in a few short years,” said Jason Shepherd, former chair of the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board and IoT and Edge CTO, Dell Technologies. “It’s a testament to the power of the network effect in the open source community which ultimately enables developers to focus on value rather than reinvention.”
EdgeX Foundry’s community adoption continues to accelerate. Currently, there are more than 100 unique contributors to the project and code downloads are approaching 5,000 a month at a 75% month-to-month growth rate. Momentum is expected to continue with EdgeX’s Edinburgh releaseand rapidly growing commercial support in the ecosystem.
Key features for this release include:
Stability: Stable API’s protecting future investment and supporting future long term support
Connectivity:More SDKs for north and southbound connectivity and a wider range of standard connectors
New Features: Significant new features, including binary data support, database swapability and improved APIs to help facilitate management/monitoring capability
Global Support:Support from the global EdgeX Foundry ecosystem – as well as the broader LF Edge umbrella community – that offers a range of complementary products and services
“With this EdgeX Edinburgh release, we will radically change how businesses develop and deploy IoT edge solutions,” said Keith Steele, chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. “Edinburgh is a significant milestone that showcases the commercial viability of EdgeX Foundry and the impact that it will have on the global IoT edge landscape.”
Since the project inception, there have been tens of thousands of trials and pilot deployments of the EdgeX framework in the field and many of these are converting to production with the Edinburgh release. Several organizations already provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, with many others folding it into their product roadmaps. For example:
Edge Xpert:From IOTech Systems, Edge Xpert uses the latest stable release of EdgeX Foundry to create a commercially supported solution from the baseline open source technology. IOTech will also soon announce hard real-time extensions to EdgeX.
MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway: From Mainflux, the MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway based on the EdgeX Foundry framework, is an edge computing solution supported with the EdgeFlux application for gateway management. Integrated with Mainflux IoT Cloud Platform it provides comprehensive Cloud /Edge IoT System.
NetFoundry Ziti Edge: NetFoundry’s Ziti Edge provides programmable, software-only “Northbound” connectivity for EdgeX Gateway applications and services. Based on Zero Trust security principles, with integrations for HW root of trust based identity and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), Ziti Edge delivers secure “Silicon-to-Cloud” connectivity, using any Internet connection, while keeping both sides of the connection “dark” to the Internet.
VMware Supports EdgeX: Developers who deploy any combination of EdgeX Foundry and/or Project Photon OS with VMware Pulse IoT Center can receive support from VMware for both Pulse IoT Center and EdgeX open source software. When used with Pulse IoT Center’s device management capabilities, open source tools such as EdgeX offer developers increased control over how, when, and where they run their applications and manage their data.
The EdgeX framework is also being leveraged in various industry collaborations. For example, in collaboration with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) EdgeX is used as the foundation for the Optimizing Manufacturing Processes by Artificial Intelligence (OMPAI) testbed which explores the application of AI and industrial internet technologies, deployed from the edge to the cloud, to optimize automotive manufacturing processes. EdgeX is also the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI) which has the goal of facilitating open innovation within the retail/commerce space. Work for the ORI is manifested within the Commerce Working Group in the EdgeX project and initial target use cases include computer vision-assisted advanced loss prevention.
Planning Ahead
Later this summer, the first EdgeX Foundry ecosystem hackathon will be hosted in the Bay Area. This initial event will be tied to the Commerce Working Group, hosted by Intel within the EdgeX project, with various award categories for implementation of the EdgeX framework in retail use cases. The best all-around winner will get to showcase their solution at future LF Edge or EdgeX Foundry events. Details will be available in late July via the EdgeX website, email list and Slack channel.
Additionally, LF Edge will host a workshop entitled “State of the (LF) Edge” on August 20 in San Diego, Calif., co-located with Open Source Summit North America(August 21-23). More details are available here.
Support from Contributing Members and Users of EdgeX Foundry
“EdgeX Foundry is the key component of Beechwoods IoT gateway solution that allows our customers to engage confidently in edge computing technology. With the Edinburgh release, this solution will be ready to transition from customer engagement to product deployment.” – Brad Kemp, President, Beechwoods Software
“The Edinburgh release of EdgeX Foundry brings much needed standardization and stability for edge computing in production environments through an open source, common framework. The availability of the EdgeX Foundry snap enables developers an easy path to getting started with EdgeX Foundry, and benefit from confinement, easy integration into their own infrastructure, and automatic updates. In addition, this release introduces new device snaps providing integration with MQTT and ModBus.”- Loic Minier, IoT Field Engineering Director, Canonical
“As EdgeX Foundry reaches maturity with the Edinburgh release, CloudPlugs is excited to also announce the integration of the CloudPlugs IIoT platform with the open EdgeX ecosystem. CloudPlugs IoT is a robust backend to deploy, orchestrate and manage EdgeX-compliant devices and micro service-based applications, as well as to manage and visualize field data. The EdgeX framework provides new levels of flexibility in field-level interoperability and the combination of EdgeX with CloudPlugs IoT delivers a powerful, end-to-end software and service stack to digitize assets and to deploy commercial and industrial IoT solutions at scale.” – Jimmy Garcia-Meza, CEO, CloudPLugs Inc.
“EdgeX Foundry provides an important software platform standardizing on the south bound IoT device connectivity and northbound data storage connectivity and allows vendors to plug-in their core IoT capabilities in between. FogHorn is aligned with this data ingestion and publication standardization and will continue to collaborate as appropriate.” – Sastry Malladi, CTO, FogHorn
“The EdgeX platform offers HMS Networks a path to quickly build Industrial IoT solutions by providing predefined set of services for I/O functionality. HMS has created a J1939 service for EdgeX platform to help simplify IoT solutions for the commercial vehicle telemetry market. Ultimately, the EdgeX platform will significantly reduce the R&D investment required to create a majority of the Industrial IoT applications required in the market today.” – Tom McKinney, Director Engineering Services and Business Development, HMS Networks
“EdgeX Foundry is an important project arriving at the right time. It promises to connect devices to capabilities, and then get out of the way so you can run containerized workloads to generate insights, run model scoring, or detect anomalies… all at the edge. IBM is collaborating with EdgeX Foundry as part of our hybrid cloud strategy to help enterprises unlock the value of data from on-premises to the cloud to the edge.” – David Boloker, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
“EdgeX Foundry’s open source platform enables the industrial software ecosystem to integrate rapidly with ioTium’s managed services converged infrastructure offering – it’s microservices framework with open APIs is a powerful driver in the fragmented Industrial Control Systems market. ioTium enables rapid scalable deployment of the EdgeX Foundry framework globally.”- Ron Victor, CEO, ioTium
“EdgeX Foundry provides an open framework for ease of design, development, & deployment at the Edge, while addressing stringent security, privacy & compliance requirements. NetFoundry added its vendor-agnostic, connectivity-as-code solution to EdgeX in order to enable developers and integrators to get similar ease of use, security and performance for their northbound application connectivity to core, clouds and service meshes. With the release of the EdgeX Edinburgh release, the EdgeX Foundry developer community has all the tools needed to deliver on market needs and ensure secure, agile innovation at the Edge” – Galeal Zino, CEO, NetFoundry Inc.
“As Digital Transformation for IoT gathers momentum, companies are demanding the same reliability, performance and security at the edge as they are used to getting from their Cloud Computing stack. With this release, EdgeX with Redis Labs RedisEdge not only delivers upon those expectations, but provides an ecosystem of open source technologies and plug-ins such as Redis Modules that help developers innovate.” – Dave Nielsen, Head of Community and Ecosystem Programs, Redis Labs
“EdgeX Foundry addresses the problem of the license stack at the IoT Edge constantly increasing in cost by providing a well architected, high performance, open source platform that can be used for industrial solutions today.” – Mike Malone, Vice President, Technotects, Inc.
“EdgeX Foundry’s global community ecosystem has experienced explosive growth, and the tangible advances delivered in the EdgeX Edinburgh release are exciting developments for edge computing. We fully support EdgeX Foundry’s goals to establish an open interoperable framework for edge computing to provide developers with increased control over how, when, where and with whom they run their applications and manage their data. We look forward to continuing our contributions to the EdgeX Foundry community and related efforts in fostering open industry-wide innovation such as the Open Retail initiative.” – Mimi Spier, Vice President, Edge and IoT Business, VMware
“As a founding member of LF Edge, Wipro is proud to have contributed to the Edinburgh release. We will continue to actively participate as it is a key platform for delivering open, microservices-based, edge IoT applications for today’s interoperable distributed enterprise world.” – Andrew Aitken, general manager and global open source practice leader, Wipro Limited.
“ZEDEDA’s vision is to free cloud-native and legacy apps to run on any edge device anywhere in the world. This vision drives our support for EdgeX Foundry and its mission of promoting open interoperability between edge devices. We’ve made our virtualization solutions compatible with EdgeX releases because we believe they will have a central role in our industry’s future.” – Joel Vincent, VP Marketing, ZEDEDA
Everyone worries about manufacturing jobs. The topic comprises talking points for politicians. Economists can’t figure out jobs and wages (but they can’t figure out much with all their differential equations and such but never actually working anywhere). Manufacturing management is worried about filling all the openings caused by retirements.
Oh, and young people wonder about whether manufacturing is a good career that will pay off financially in the future.
As coincidence would happen–I just received news of two research reports on this very topic. The first is from an interesting organization called Leading2Lean (L2L). If you are sick of hearing about Millennials like my Gen Y son is, then this survey about Gen Z will get you going. Following this survey is research by McKinsey that I saw reported in my Axios newsletter.
We do need to be mindful of recruiting talented young people into manufacturing. People in general know the importance of manufacturing to the economy, but few consider it while making individual career decisions.
“Generation Z to The Rescue as Manufacturing Faces a ‘Silver Tsunami’ “
A new survey conducted by Leading2Lean (L2L)reveals that there is an unlikely hope for a new generation of workers that will spur industry-wide innovation.
The 2019 L2L Manufacturing Index, an annual measurement of the American public’s perceptions of U.S. manufacturing, found that adults in Generation Z (those aged 18-22) are 19% more likely to have had a counselor, teacher or mentor suggest they look into manufacturing as a viable career option when compared to the general population. One-third (32%) of Generation Z has had manufacturing suggested to them as a career option, as compared to only 18% of Millennials and 13% of the general population.
Better still, the survey also found that Generation Z is intrigued by careers in manufacturing. They are 7% more likely to consider working in the manufacturing industry and 12% less likely to view the manufacturing industry as being in decline, both compared against the general population. These findings may be in relation to Generation Z having a larger exposure to the industry compared to previous generations with one-third (32%) having family members or friends working in the manufacturing industry, compared to 19% for Millennials and 15% for the general population.
“For many years, manufacturing has struggled to introduce and entice new workers to the industry,” said Keith Barr, President and CEO of L2L, the lean manufacturing software company behind the survey. “The industry has failed to compete with technology for their interest. Unfortunately, the industry hasn’t fully explained the dynamic, technology-driven environment of the modern plant floor. With Gen Z just moving into the workforce, we need to encourage their participation in modern manufacturing. If we don’t, I’m afraid the industry will be hit with the negative effects of the Silver Tsunami.”
According to the latest government data, there are now 522,000 open manufacturing jobs in the United States (an all-time high), and a recent report from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute (the National Association of Manufacturer’s social-impact arm) projects that 2.4 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled over the next decade.
Unfortunately, vast misconceptions about the industry persist. For example, the 2019 L2L Manufacturing Index revealed that over half (53%) of the general population assumes the average salary of a mid-level manufacturing manager is under $60,000. In reality, the average salary for a manufacturing manager in 2018 was $118,500, according to IndustryWeek.
Leading2Lean though has reason to believe that the industry is making positive moves towards a better-informed public. Last year’s 2018 Leading2Lean Manufacturing Index measured that 70% of people believed that the American manufacturing industry was in decline. When the same question was asked in this year’s survey, only 54% of people believed the industry is in decline, showcasing a surprisingly better understanding of the present state of the industry.
Education is the key, and it is an area that manufacturing continues to struggle in. When surveyed about alternative types of education, the 2019 L2L Manufacturing Index found that a vast 75% of people have never had a counselor, teacher or mentor suggest they look into attending trade or vocational school as a viable career option. The number was slightly lower with Generation Z (59%) and Millennials (67%), but still showcases an extreme disconnect in consideration of alternatives outside of traditional 4-year institutions.
When surveyed about the likeability and availability of work, 54% of Generation Z respondents agreed that there is a shortage of skilled manufacturing workers in the U.S., and 43% agreed that manufacturing jobs are an attractive option to younger workers and the next generation of workers. A majority (59%) of Generation Z also agreed that trade schools offer promising career opportunities for high school students graduating in 2019.
Generation Z grew up in the midst of the Great Recession, watched their older peers accumulate student debt, then struggle to pay it off with low-paying jobs right out of college. They are seeking higher paid jobs in a more transparent and open learning environment, and they’re increasingly open to alternative types of education and training. Barr believes manufacturing jobs can meet their needs and provide the diverse and rewarding work experience they crave.
Buckle up: Axios’ Kim Hart writes that big cities are poised to get bigger, richer and more powerful — at the expense of the rest of America, a report out later today from McKinsey Global Institute will show.
Why it matters: Automation may end up adding more jobs than it destroys, but the McKinsey analysis of 315 cities and more than 3,000 counties shows that only the healthiest local economies will be able to adapt to the coming disruption.
Wide swaths of the country, especially already-distressed rural regions, are in danger of shedding more jobs.
The 25 most prosperous cities, which have led the recovery from the Great Recession, are poised to get stronger.
Those megacities could claim at least 60% of job growth through 2030.
The big picture: The labor market will become more polarized, according to McKinsey’s 113-page “The future of work in America.”
On one end of the spectrum are a few dozen successful cities with diversified economies and a lot of young, highly educated workers.
On the other end are“trailing” cities and rural regions with aging workforces, lower education levels and jobs that are highly susceptible to automation.
Between those extremes is a group of thriving niche cities, such as Sunbelt cities popular with retiring baby boomers and college towns.
There’s also a broader “mixed middle,” including stable cities like St. Louis and unique economies like Lancaster, Pa.
When I was as-a-service offerings in the wake of my trip to HPE Discover 2019, I mentioned Inductive Automation as an example in the industrial market. There is actually another company. I’ve never heard about it—bad on my part. It’s called Zedi Solutions. I didn’t know if it was just the Canadian way of pronouncing “z” (we Americans say “zee” and there rest of the English-speaking world says “zed”) or a play on “Jedi”. Well, there’s a rocket with a window on its Web page.
Zedi Solutions is a company no more. Emerson’s methodically growing digital transformation presence was just enhanced through the acquisition of its cloud-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform.
Emerson states that the acquisition of Zedi’s software will enable it to help oil and gas producers increase production and lower operating costs through cloud-based monitoring, control and optimization.
“As world energy demand continues to grow, helping our vital oil and gas market customers maximize their resources is a top priority,” said Lal Karsanbhai, executive president of Emerson’s Automation Solutions business. “Through our vast portfolio of automation technologies, we are helping the industry navigate ever-changing market dynamics and operational challenges. The addition of Zedi strengthens our ability to help customers leverage the latest advances from the field to the refinery.”
Zedi’s technology is currently enabling customers to monitor more than 2 million sensors and thousands of devices and applications. By combining Zedi’s scalable cloud platform and applications expertise with Emerson’s extensive applications, controller, instrumentation and flow metering portfolio, this acquisition expands opportunities for Emerson across the global oil and gas production market.
“Oil and gas producers today are challenged to meet production targets while controlling costs, and they are looking for opportunities to transform operations and make their teams more effective through digital solutions like analytics and mobility,” said Jim Nyquist, group president of Emerson’s systems and solutions business. “This important investment bolsters our portfolio and ability to help Emerson’s customers achieve Top Quartile performance through emerging Industrial Internet of Things technologies.”
Emerson and Zedi’s software and automation businesses share a common vision of automating the production process through edge and cloud analytics and machine learning. The combined software and expertise of the two companies will provide producers with scalable and easily deployable end-to-end connected solutions to optimize and manage their operations.
Zedi’s software and automation businesses are based in Calgary, Canada, with approximately 155 employees in North America.
Emerson tried the SCADA acquisition route many years ago with the acquisition of Intellution. It subsequently sold that company to GE and it became a foundation for GE Digital. The company just wasn’t a fit at the time. Even though I don’t know Zedi, I have a feel that this will work out far better for Emerson. For one thing, times and markets have changed. For another, Emerson is already more advanced in software than it was 20 years ago.
