November 2014 www.ProcessingMagazine.com

With its acquisition of Invensys, a big chunk of todays multi-billion-dollar industrial-automation software market is in the hands of Schneider Electric including the Wonderware, SimSci and Avantis brands.

As part of Schneider Electrics global solu-tions group, its software business combines the efforts of about 3,000 employees, the company says, including in product and customer support.

It has been a little less than a year since Schneider Electric and Invensys combined, and there has been no disruption to value creation, says Ravi Gopinath, Ph.D., executive vice presi-dent of the company's software business. The integration is in its formative stages.

IT-based industrial-automation software today encompasses 1) infrastructure that allows easy sharing of data, as well as of software and computing resources, 2) a host of applications for process control and management and 3) industry solutions, with oil & gas, food & bever-age, water & wastewater and reining being the industrys most heavily marketed examples.

Only a half-dozen or fewer global suppliers can furnish near this full range of solutions. The

recent Schneider Electric 2014 Software Global Customer Conference was an opportunity to hear how that company will evolve the impor-tant assets it has assembled.

What Schneider delivers also is indicative of the state of the process industries itself. Event presentations suggest, for one, that some pro-cess industies are restructuring, i.e., reliance on in-house expertise is being replaced by third party services available in-house. Its a kind of out-sourcing, you could say, but one that keeps production capacity in place rather than exporting it.

This change in how things get done could be signiicant. How technology convergence will impact the industrial process is being decided daily. But for some years one of the major hold-ups has been, as much as anything, lack of trained human resources. This was as true 20 years ago with things like smart transmitters

as it is today. Restructuring to take best advan-tage of the talent available suggests a way around a major resource constraint.

Services storyVeteran engineer retirement is often cited

as a process industry issue, but skill sets for an advanced industrial-computing era and the eficiencies those technologies should deliver are just emerging, making much of this hitherto un-traversed territory.

On the one hand, nothing eats up cash like putting people on airplanes, having them live in hotels and eat in restaurants. In the boom years, software companies focused on selling licenses. Today its more complex. It takes scale for one thing. Process-production plants arent quite as geographically remote as oil & gas wells, but they are found in very far-lung corners of the globe.

To get an idea of the situation automation software providers faced it may help to look at a different, but related, industrial software mar-ket as an example. Enterprise-business systems evolved from a single-plant focus on materials.

Infrastructure, Services in spotlight at Schneider Electric software eventContinuing technology convergence comes from market consolidation; application of commercial technologies in industrial computing

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By Kevin Parker

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