Industrial Transformation Blog

In the world of enterprise business software, a billion-dollar-plus investment is not unusual and perhaps even ordinary. But in the Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) and Sustainability software space, a deal of that size is a watershed event. The recently announced acquisition of Sphera by Blackstone constitutes such an event. It also speeds the transition of the EHS and Sustainability (EHSS) software category to being subsumed under the nascent Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) banner.

In our December 2020 blog on AWS℠ Industrial, we noted that AWS and the other hyperscalers have always had the ambition to move up the value proposition and delivery stack. The hyperscaler’s objective is simple: to maximize the volume of dollars and services running through their platform. And, they incent their partners and their own salespeople to do so. They aim to win no matter which route one takes, directly through them or via their partners. We said that all roads lead to Rome.

AVEVA just announced that they had completed the acquisition of OSIsoft. The announcement was made in an analyst conference on Friday, March 19, 2021, with a one-hour webinar featuring AVEVA CEO Craig Hayman and OSIsoft’s Pat Kennedy, plus Rob McGreevy of AVEVA and Gregg Le Blanc of OSIsoft. AVEVA worked on the acquisition for over a year, and OSIsoft also had help from their investors and former SAP pitchman and entrepreneur, Shai Agassi. Interestingly enough, Michael Siemer, OSIsoft’s president, was not on the call.

LNS Research has been at the forefront of research on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the technologies’ impact on Industrial Transformation (IX). We all were the first to define the term. We were the first to define an IIoT Platform. With market changes and technology advances we have become convinced manufacturers should be looking beyond IIoT Platforms to a comprehensive view of an IX Reference Architectures. A recent LNS Research Spotlight details our thinking. This blog post focuses on one piece of that Spotlight: what is an IX Reference Architecture?

Every year LNS Research puts forth predictions around the key trends in the Industrial Transformation (IX) topics where we focus our research. In the case of asset performance management (APM), our 2019 forecast focused on the impact of Digital Twins on a company’s strategy, go-to-market, business models, and on the direction of process automation.

LNS Research had the pleasure to attend Rockwell Automation’s 28^th Annual Automation Fair and companion Process Solutions User Group in Chicago, IL November 18 through 21st, 2019. Rockwell Automation noted there were over 16,000 attendees at the event making it the largest Rockwell Automation Fair ever. They also hosted “Automation Perspectives” for the media and analysts on the 19^th of November.

This year’s AVEVA World 2019 North America users conference was held in Orlando with over 1100 customer and partner attendees from a diverse set of industries plus 300 from AVEVA. The conference was kicked off by Steen Lomholt-Thomsen, Chief Revenue Officer, who introduced Christine Harding, the new Head of the Americas. Lomholt-Thomsen’s opening keynote highlighted AVEVA’s renewed focus on their core industries – oil and gas, chemicals, F&B, Smart Cities – and customers are successfully expanding across the applications portfolio – starting with MES and moving to APM as highlighted on stage as well as with examples from AVEVA clients. Guest keynotes from Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink who spoke about the workplace complexity that is killing organizations' ability to be agile, fast and innovative, and Keller Rinaudo, whose company Zipline uses autonomous drones to deliver medical supplies in war-torn 3rd world countries, also set an encouraging tone for the conference.

This year’s Bentley Systems “Year in Infrastructure“ users conference was held in Singapore with over 1,400 attendees from 45 countries, including Bentley staff and about 130 media and analysts from 25 countries. This year’s theme was Advancing BIM through Digital Twins. No matter where you went, the message was digital twins, twins, and more twins across the entire asset lifecycle and every industry segment from roads, bridges, and buildings to transportation, utilities, and the process industry. BIM stands for Building Information Modeling, but isn’t just for buildings, but for all physical structures and assets as they are planned, designed, constructed, operated and maintained. Digital twins are digital representations of physical assets and their engineering information that allow users to understand and model their performance in the real world over their lifecycle. In effect, Bentley says “evergreen” digital twins advance BIM and GIS through 4D.

We recently attended Schneider Electric’s global innovation summit in Barcelona. While LNS Research is most focused on the industry division, it is very interesting to catch up with Schneider Electric’s overall strategy for efficiency and sustainability across the energy and automation solutions spaces. It is great to see a major energy company like Schneider Electric being so singularly focused on sustainability and for that attitude being driven from the top down and into industries where the emphasis on the planet has sometimes been seen as somewhat less important.

Siemens announced on September 16, 2019 that they have agreed to acquire Process Systems Enterprise (PSE) according to Eckard Eberle, CEO of Business Unit Process Automation. Siemens plans to purchase 100 percent of the share capital of PSE and to integrate its business into the Business Unit Process Automation, which is part of Siemens Digital Industries. Siemens has now followed through on their June 2018 long-term collaboration agreement to bring the power of PSE’s gPROMS APM technology to Siemens automation and digitalization offerings for the process industries. Under the original agreement, the companies promised to bring to market a new set of solutions for long-term equipment and health monitoring, soft-sensing, prediction of future process performance, real-time optimization, and operator training incorporating high-fidelity models. The agreement aimed to extend Siemens’ capabilities in the process industries and would result in the close linkage of Comos, Simatic PCS 7 and Simit with PSE’s gPROMS.