Vendors lost in MES space

LAST MONTH'S NEWS THAT FISHER-ROSEMOUNT was changing its name to Emerson Process Management certainly marked some kind of milestone in the evolution of the industrial and process automation sector, not least because it broke one of the last tenuous links with the once proud British process control industry.

In the almost biblical genealogy of modern automation conglomerates, the Fisher Controls which Emerson acquired from Monsanto in the early '90s and merged with its earlier Rosemount acquisition had itself been formed by a pooling of Monsanto's Fisher, then best known for its control valve activities, with GEC's process control and automation interests. Those included GEC Elliott Process Automation in Leicester - hence the current Fisher-Rosemount/Emerson facility at Leicester - GEC Elliott Process Instruments in Lewisham and the GEC-Fisher control valve joint venture in Rochester. Some of these businesses really did go back into the mists of time. Elliott Brothers had started life as an 18th Century scientific instrument maker and another GEC acquisition, Avery, was until quite recently building weighbridges in James Watt's original foundry in Smethwick!

Leaving aside the sentimental implications of the name change, however, by far the most significant aspect of the Emerson rebranding exercise was the much less widely publicised decision to bring Intellution, Emerson's wholly owned SCADA/HMI software subsidiary, within the former Fisher-Rosemount structure. Intellution had until now been allowed proudly to maintain almost total autonomy within the Emerson organisation. As such it pursued its own strategy as a high volume software vendor while at the same time making a major contribution to Fisher-Rosemount's software development requirements. Much the same can be said of arch rival and fellow PC-based SCADA pioneer Wonderware, acquired by Invensys but allowed to continue to pursue a West Coast, jeans and open neck shirt existence while contributing its expertise to, among others, Foxboro and APV. Both Intellution and Wonderware now pose significant challenges for their respective adoptive parents however. As a recent ARC study* highlights, independent HMI vendors (by which is meant independent from a PLC vendor) are finding life increasingly tough because more and more end users want a one-stop-shop for their PLC and HMI requirements. At the same time OEMs are discovering just how easy it is to put together readily available software components precisely to meet their specific HMI requirements.

That, and the ever increasing pressure on margins in the SCADA/HMI market, has led both Intellution and Wonderware to seek their salvation in the so called 'MES space', the no man's land between shop floor automation and enterprise level IT. By presenting SCADA/HMI as the enabler for MES, rather than an end in itself, both Intellution and Wonderware are seeking to sell a raft of higher added value products, together with integration and consulting services, into such sectors as pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals and food and beverages.

It's a plausible strategy and it may well work. But there is a snag. Its also the strategy of their bigger siblings - Emerson Process Management aka Fisher-Rosemount on the one hand and Invensys Software Systems aka Foxboro and APV on the other. With their original core product making an ever smaller contribution to their overall 'value add', it's difficult to see a longer term justification for their separate existence. It's worth noting that when Invensys acquired the Marcam process ERP and asset management business in late 1999, it was entrusted to Wonderware and formed part of the much vaunted 'Bottoms Up' strategy. Less widely announced has been the recent transfer of Marcam to the more recently acquired and rapidly turned round Baan.

PC-based SCADA/HMI was an enormously influential technology and profoundly altered the industrial automation scene in the 1990s, but it now seems set to disappear as a definable market segment. Recent history suggests that it will not be long before names like Intellution and Wonderware go the same way, soon to be as dimly recalled as Elliott or, for that matter, GEC.

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Andrew Bond is the Editor of the monthly subscription newsletter Industrial Automation INSIDER. You can contact him by email at scada@abpubs.demon.co.uk. And if you mention INOC, Andrew will send you a complimentary copy of the latest issue of Industrial Automation INSIDER

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