INDUSTRY 4.0/IIOT FEATURE
SOFTWARE EATS WORLD: Disrupting industrial markets
because proprietary hardware and software systems, and partner programmes that lock out any potential competition, are the norm in the automation industry with its vertically- integrated offerings. There is a reason that ExxonMobil invested in Lockheed to drive an open control system initiatives: systems aren’t open today! What else does disruption mean? Price
competition associated with data creation, collection, storage and computing achieved in consumer and IT markets, is now coming to industrial markets. As an example, Amazon has claimed
their announced, but not delivered, Timestream time series data services offering will be one-tenth the price of existing offerings. And their pricing will be visible to all customers, bringing transparency as well as price competition to the industrial automation market. Finally, disruption will impact the model
Michael Risse, from Seeq, says software is finally starting to disrupt the industrial marketplace, which he says, is good news for customers, who will benefit from ‘co-opetition’ between vendors
M
arc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape (the first commercial
venture dedicated to selling an internet browser) and of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in Aug 2011 titled “Why software is eating the world.” As context, Andreessen-Horowitz was an investor in Facebook, Slack and GoodStory Data, so the firm knows more than a little about software and disruption. Here is the thesis of the article: ‘More and more major businesses and
industries are being run on software and delivered as online services — from movies to agriculture to national defence. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley- style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.’ However, in the intervening nine years
the industrial world—contrary to Andreessen’s expectation—has largely missed out on the software-eats-the- world model. There hasn’t been a major disruption in the industrial software market like Blockbuster losing to Netflix, not yet, anyway. Beginning last summer, as reported in
the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and The Economist, software disrupting established vendors is coming to the industrial market. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have each announced their
intention to provide data storage and related services to the oil & gas and other process industries. To be clear, I’m not referring to cloud-
based DCS implementations for real-time control or other futuristic visions. Instead I am referring to cloud-based data storage, analytics and management services for manufacturing data. Cloud vendors claim aggregating data on the cloud will make it more accessible to enable digital transformation and cross-plant analytics, unlocking improved outcomes in production. And manufacturing data is an important business, as it generates twice as much data as the next largest industry vertical (government)*. In addition to the news articles, one can
see the focus of the large software vendors on industrial data at industry trade shows. For example, for the first time in 2019 Google, Amazon and Microsoft all had a presence at IHS’s CERA Week event, and they are hiring employees with oil & gas expertise. So what will happen as software eats the
industrial world? What the software platform companies want is to provide cloud-based storage for manufacturing data. Whoever stores data is then able to provide ancillary services such as data management, security, and business intelligence services. Therefore, automation vendors who hold customer data hostage and try to keep it away from other vendors and analytics solutions will be put under pressure to change their business practices. This is less strange than it sounds
Disruption will impact the model for automation vendors with respect to expectations for interoperability and openness among systems
for automation vendors with respect to expectations for interoperability and openness among systems. The software world thrives on “co-opetition”. Consider that AWS claims to run many more Microsoft Windows Servers on AWS virtual machines than Microsoft does on Azure. So, despite the fact Amazon AWS competes with Azure, AWS supports Microsoft customers. As an example of the difference between
the industrial automation and software markets when it comes to co-opetition, consider single-vendor user conferences. The last thing you’d expect to see at a Rockwell event is an AVEVA product booth, or a Rockwell booth at an AVEVA user conference, after all they compete. But when you visit the Apple App Store,
*McKinsey & Company’s 2011 report on big data
you’ll find Apple competitors everywhere: Google’s Maps competes with Apple’s Map application, Spotify’s music service competes with iTunes, and so on. That is co-opetition, with software
companies deciding it’s better to hold some of the business than lose all of it when a customer goes elsewhere for a better experience. And again, this isn’t a hardware or manufacturing application issue at this point, it’s a software company proposal to move data to the cloud for improved access and insights. Automation vendors have enjoyed an
advantage for years in the data storage business because their components, sensors and software applications generated the data. Today we are in the early stages of software-led disruption, with software companies bringing a new set of expectations for cost and interoperability to the market for cloud storage and analytics.
Seeq
www.seeq.com
PROCESS & CONTROL | DECEMBER 2019/JANUARY 2020 15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
