My view: Automation vendors seek pastures new

Abstract

Industrial automation is becoming an increasingly commoditised business. With the ever more widespread adoption of COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware, software and communications technologies - Windows, Intel, and Ethernet to name but three - it's becoming harder than ever for automation vendors to differentiate themselves from their competitors, to identify areas where they can seek genuine competitive advantage and, most important, to make serious money. That's not to deny that opportunities still exist to innovate in the mainstream automation business, but the fact still remains that advances in technology tend to offer only marginal improvements in performance, both over a particular vendor's previous generation of equipment and over the current offerings of its competitors. Time was when factory and process automation vendors sold instruments and control systems. They still do, but an increasing proportion of their revenues are coming from outside their traditional areas of interest.