Industrial Transformation Blog

In April 2019 LNS attended the first annual IBM IoT Exchange event held in Orlando, FL. The company focused its three-day conference on how to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce costs through the application of IoT data and artificial intelligence (AI).  The conference marked the first time that users of IBM’s engineering lifecycle management (DOORS family), enterprise asset management (Maximo portfolio), facilities lifecycle management (TRIRIGA), and the Watson IoT Platform solutions all met together under the Watson IoT umbrella.

Plex Systems held its annual PowerPlex user conference in Detroit the week of May 13, 2019, with just over 1,000 attendees and a few dozen sponsors across technology partners and systems integrators. A group of high schoolers were also in attendance, demonstrating their very cool entries for the FIRST Robotics competition; during the event Plex announced a $40,000 donation to this organization that works to inspire young people's interest and participation in science and technology.

As we study Industrial Transformation (IX) at the macro level, we seek leaders among industrial companies for further insights. We recently interviewed one of those leaders, ABB’s Chief Digital Officer, Guido Jouret, who reinforced our best practices findings from the recent IX survey.

Digital Transformation has become one of the most hyped terms in business today. Google it, and you’ll get over 27 million hits in less than a second. Every tech vendor seems to have a blog about how its products or services can help a business with its Digital Transformation journey. With so many resources available, why is achieving true transformation such a struggle? To understand what’s going on, let’s go back to the basics.

At the recent ABB Customer World event, we had the opportunity to participate in a technology tour and a several meetings that gave us a good sense of ABB’s overall direction, new organization, and strategic partnerships. Further, we joined in on a detailed briefing on ABB Ability, focusing on the company’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and corporate partnership strategies.

Infor CEO, Charles Phillips, is discussing the proposed IPO that has been in the news since the beginning of the year. Serious talk of Infor’s IPO started in January, 2019 with the announcement of a $1.5 billion investment in the company by Koch Equity Development, an arm of Koch Industries and Golden Gate Capital. Of all the major enterprise application vendors, Infor is the largest that has remained a privately held firm.

Over 4,000 people attended Epicor Insights 2019 in Las Vegas the week of April 15. As in previous years, the conference showcased new products and upgrades from a leading supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for the mid-market, with users across manufacturing, distribution, service, and retail companies.

Sparta Systems is an interesting firm. Well known for its on-premise TrackWise product, it had stumbled in recent years as it faced many new cloud-based competitors. Over the past year, it brought on a new leadership team and put its considerable weight behind the development of its Force.com-based TrackWise Digital cloud product. As we look at the Summer 2019 release of TrackWise Digital, has the effort paid off?

OSIsoft held its annual PI World user conference in San Francisco the week of April 8, with 2,500 attendees and dozens of OSIsoft partner companies in the exhibition area. This vendor has continued to evolve from its origin as a data historian for process industries to an enabler of data analytics and intelligence for a broad set of industrial companies, and has moved up the stack in terms of data visualization capabilities. Even during a typically heavy industry event season, (and the world’s largest industrial trade show, Hannover Messe in Germany the week before) attendance at PI World increased year-over-year again. PI World is now widely regarded as one of the most important conferences on the calendar for process industry IT and operations technology (OT) professionals.

Understanding the vendor landscape is essential for both industrial organizations as well as solution providers that seek to understand competitors, and the process Digital Twin market is no exception. There is a broad spectrum of Digital Twin vendors across the industry, but basically, they fall into a handful of supplier categories: