by Gary Mintchell | Sep 25, 2015 | Manufacturing IT, News, Operations Management, Software
While I was attending the Inductive Automation conference this week, two other conferences were in session. Carl Henning commented briefly about the Profibus/Profinet meeting. Hopefully more later.
I didn’t hear about the Wonderware industrial software conference until the first of August, and that information was sketchy at best. Received an invitation in mid-month. Too late for planning.
The press team released a couple of press releases around the conference. The main one being an update to Wonderware Intelligence–an analytics engine essential for making the Internet of Things useful.
Aaron Hand had a report yesterday at Automation World on Sr. VP (was president before the Schneider acquisition when they put a French guy in charge, now, who knows) Ravi Gopinath’s “keynote.” Interestingly, organizers put the keynote last instead of first. And the pre-show focus was on a keynote by Terry Bradshaw.
Gopinath took 15 minutes according to Hand to try to allay fears that the pending spinoff of Wonderware (and SimSci and Avantis) into the new company run by Aveva but 51% owned by Schneider would be bad for the company and for users.
Evidently there was no Q&A time for editors (any that were there, anyway) to probe the meaning of the layoffs we’ve been picking up from LinkedIn and other sources. The editor rumor mill has it that there will be continuing high-level (and other) layoffs periodically for some time.
Gopinath continued the party line that Schneider is still investing in product development. But he acknowledged efforts continue to bring all the disparate elements of Schneider’s acquisitions together.
Meanwhile a friend who attended as an integrator told me that from the integrator point of view it was a useful conference.
A member of the Software press relations team suggested that maybe if we had cloning perfected, then I could make all these. Now that’s a scary thought!
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 8, 2015 | Automation, Operations Management, Software
I have been contemplating what is going on over the past couple of years in the business of HMI / SCADA software.
This thinking was brought to an interim conclusion by the (sort of) announcement of another last-minute Wonderware conference.
I first heard about the Wonderware conference, distinct from the SimSci conference (another Schneider software company through the Invensys acquisiton) also announced for this year, about a month ago. To date, I have not received any official communication from Schneider as a writer/blogger/analyst. They have sent several emails out to me as a result of being on a few magazine subscription lists.
Schneider announced in July a new company formed with Schneider software (unspecified companies within the division) and Aveva with Schneider being the majority owner. Two months down the road there have been no further announcements. The only media relations people listed on the Website are in France. I never heard of any of them.
Meanwhile there are rumblings on LinkedIn that make it appear that Schneider has begun cutting some really talented executive staff.
Big Three
Only a few years ago there was sort of a Big Three with Wonderware, Intellution, and Rockwell Software. Intellution went first to Emerson which took the IP it needed and sold it to GE. That company originally thought it could blend Intellution and Cimplicity, but wound up rewriting its software now called Proficy. Evidently most of its sales are internal to GE, because all competitors claim they never see it in active quotation processes.
Wonderware went to Ivensys then to Schneider then to ??? Under Invensys it lost some of the California software company panache, but was still a major player. What is going on now is anyone’s guess.
Rockwell continues to pick up little companies (and some big ones for the overall software business) and keeps plugging away.
Meanwhile, Schneider, never a software company, picked up Citect through its Australian subsidiary. Then Invensys–now Schneider–picked up Indusoft. Consolidation continues. When the Aveva thing shakes out, we’ll see what other consolidation occurs.
MOM
Each of the Big Three picked up companies in the MES or the MOM space several years ago. They took over the “old boys” club that was MESA and attempted to make the organization into more of a supplier/user collaboration organization promoting the benefits of that layer of software.
There has not been as much movement in that space as I thought there would be a couple of years ago. I thought this new business “Manufacturing Connection” might capitalize on that layer of software. Nothing really happened there.
Question
So what I throw out to you–both of my readers–is just this:
1. Has HMI/SCADA reached commotity status where the business is not as attractive unless run as a cash cow?
2 Will the MES/MOM area remain so complex (there are good reasons for that) that suppliers in the space must maintain many engineers and IT professionals to help customers rationalize their businesses in order to gain the many benefits of the software?
3. Does this situation with the larger MES/MOM companies leave an gap for inroads to the market for smaller companies to begin grabbing market share?
Let me know what you think.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 25, 2015 | Operations Management, Software
Sign up now. See you in Raleigh May 19-20 at deployCamp. Registration is now open.
I described the early thoughts about this new kind of manufacturing software conference last month. It is sounding really cool. This year, they’ll emphasize Schneider Electric Wonderware’s System Platform development. In future years, the organizers plan to expand the discussions.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 25, 2014 | Automation, Operations Management, Software
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an Open Source SCADA project for Wonderware ArchestrA developers.
Recently Toby Dials wrote to me about a project he has started somewhat along the same lines. Here is his note to me.
I read your post in the Wonderware Experience LinkedIn group about the new aaOpenSource site that Andy and Eliot have put together. As these things usually happen, I had also been developing a site with a similar idea in mind – created in April of this year.
I worked for a Wonderware distributor for the last 17 years, and decided I wanted to focus on the SCADA products as a consultant, and part of that process led me to the creation of a website that would help make SCADA developer’s lives easier. The idea is that there are so many little things that were hard for me to remember, and I’d have to spend time looking them up over and over. Now, I can store them on one site so that others can use it as a reference site too. I’m slowly adding A2 objects and graphics as well – this is the part of my site this is most similar to their idea.
It isn’t a site for open source tools necessarily, but more so tips/tools/code/graphics for developers. Since my background is all Wonderware, that is the main focus of the site, but the structure is in place for adding content from experts with other software vendors.
This is all so cool. I haven’t heard much in the line of community development since the Linux PLC project on SourceForge sort of died a long, slow death. Good work, guys.
