Industrial Transformation Blog

How to do a virtual conference right? Ask SAP! TechEd 2020 ran for 48 hours with barely a moment’s pause and attracted over 60 thousand non-SAP registrants. Ten parallel technical tracks allowed everyone to find the level of detail and expertise to suit them and gave access to board level executives, particularly CTO, Juergen Mueller, who gave both day’s keynotes and sat on at least one executive Q&A panel. The stage management and organization of the event is to be heartily applauded. The target audience of technical experts and development leaders of 440,000 SAP customers is somewhat beyond the scope of LNS Research, but there were many interesting announcements about improvement to the development environment and move to the cloud.

LNS Research recently had the opportunity to listen in on Rockwell Automation’s first virtual Automation Fair. Rockwell Automation strove valiantly to replicate the massive Automation Fair virtually: they continued to have Perspective Keynotes, detailed product and technical sessions, hands-on training, a partner exhibit, and even a virtual tour of the Product and Technology showcase. Rockwell Automation is known for its partner and channel-based strategy and this event reconfirmed, yet again, how strong Rockwell Automation’s orientation to partners and channels really is.

AVEVA, the industrial software company, announced on August 25, 2020, its intention to acquire OSIsoft from Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy and OSIsoft investors, including SoftBank, for $5 billion. The acquisition is expected to close in late 2020 or early 2021. AVEVA is to finance the deal through $4.4 billion of cash plus $600 million of stock, making Dr. Kennedy AVEVA’s largest private shareholder with 4.4% of the company. Dr. Kennedy will remain connected to AVEVA through a Chairman Emeritus role. AVEVA will raise the capital through $3.5 billion of rights issues plus $900 million of cash on their balance sheet. The deal represents a multiple of roughly 10X OSIsoft’s 1H-2020 annualized revenues, a multiplier similar to AspenTech’s, one of AVEVA’s major competitors.

The COVID Pandemic has forced software vendors to recreate their customer events virtually.  Sparta Systems went the route of simplification this year with its Connection Virtual Series 2020: offering only six keynote presentation s over the course of two weeks. Sparta shared important updates despite the more abbreviated format.

LNS recently participated in Plex Systems’ annual customer event, PowerPlex 2020, which was held virtually for the first time.  Three themes emerged from the event. 

In previous blogs and articles, I have written about the new “OT Ecosystem.” Over the past few months I had a chance to observe what’s happening in the market with a number of automation and software vendors, so I thought this would be a good time to revisit the OT Ecosystem, delve deeper into what it is and what it means, and why it is important.

It should be “event season” except, as my daughter says, “everything is cancelled.”  Vendors have three choices in this era of Social Distancing: cancel their event, postpone their event, or go virtual. iBASEt has gone the “postpone” route with a goal of having their customer conference Excelerate 2020 in the fall.  In the meantime, they briefed LNS Research on their progress.

It’s been 10 months since GE Digital appointed new CEO Patrick Byrne. In our last blog, after their September 2019 User Group meeting, we said, “GE Digital has re-emerged with renewed focus led by fresh, engineering-grounded, no-nonsense leadership in Pat Byrne. We look forward to seeing if this new positive momentum is sustainable.” So what’s happened since then? Let’s take a look under the hood and see what Pat and his team have been doing. 

In December 2019, 60k attendees descended upon Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. Just like Amazon Web Services (AWS) generally, re:Invent is fast-growing and overwhelms with its sheer breadth of content. With dozens of announcements and multiple keynotes from senior executives, including an analyst-only session with AWS CEO Andy Jassy, re:Invent has quickly become a can’t miss tech event. Jassy clearly took pleasure in the success of AWS, as he should. Started in 2006, after just 13 years, the division has grown to $36B in revenue, is still growing at 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and is Amazon’s most profitable.

LNS Research recently attended Oracle OpenWorld 2019 in San Francisco. One of the mega technology events for the Golden Gate City, the conference took over all three halls at the Moscone Center and had over 60,000 attendees.

Oracle is now over $40 billion in revenue (2018) with over 137,000 employees; it positions itself as the number one supplier of business software. The company is clearly innovating in many directions. The event covers the two sides of Oracle: Oracle, the technology, and Oracle, the applications vendor. Additionally, the firm has sophisticated positioning for “emerging technologies.” So, let’s examine each, and determine if this means Oracle can finally engage deeply in the plant.