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AWARDS
All contents copyright © 2006 Readout Publications
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Measurement, Control and Automation Resources throughout the World
"Wonderware has now enjoyed sixteen
successive quarters of double digit growth,"
Wonderware president Mike Bradley told
journalists gathered in Daventry, UK on
the eve of the latest event in the
WonderWorld 2006 global conference series.
Organized in conjunction with
Wonderware UK & Ireland distributor
Pantek, the event attracted some 160
delegates to hear presentations over two
days from Wonderware, Pantek and end
user speakers as well as keynotes from
Professor Tom Cannon, the former head
of Manchester Business School, and Peter
van Vliet, director of business development
for manufacturing with SAP.
According to Bradley, speaking on a
video link from Wonderware’s Tennessee
office, the single most important factor
underlying Wonderware’s current success,
and its ability to grow faster than the
market and thus to continue to add market share, is ArchestrA. "We have the only
scalable architecture platform in the industry
while our competitors are having
to glue other architectures together," he
claimed, adding that it was in the process
of deploying what is claimed to be the first
one million I/O system. By way of comparison,
"The largest DCS I know of has
about 400,000 I/O," he said.
Plant model
It’s hard to avoid the impression that the Wonderware tail is now wagging the Invensys dog. Moreover it seems as if that’s just the way Bradley likes it. Although Wonderware is consolidated with Invensys Process Systems (IPS) for accounting purposes, it leads a largely separate existence with Bradley himself reporting direct to Invensys CEO Ulf Henriksson. Some idea of Wonderware’s importance to IPS can be gained from the fact that, boosted by the launch earlier this year of IPS’ InFusion (INSIDER, May 2006, page 1) "IPS is one of Wonderware’s largest OEM customers." That’s because, according to Bradley, "InFusion is 90% ArchestrA and, at the higher levels, 100% ArchestrA." Asked by INSIDER about the hopes expressed some years back by, among others, then IPS COO Leo Quinn, that ArchestrA would eventually be adopted by other major vendors, Bradley conceded that "External adoption has been slower than we’d have liked," although he pointed to its widespread adoption by second tier vendors including, for example, MTL MOST. However he remained adamant that "There is still a real possibility that other SCADA/HMI/MES vendors might adopt ArchestrA in the future." Asked whether the OPC unified architecture didn’t offer competitors an ArchestrA alternative, Bradley pointed out that Wonderware were themselves major supporters of and participants in the OPC Foundation. And while he conceded that OPC UA would go some way to addressing connectivity issues, its users would still lack the plant model which, he argued, was key to ArchestrA’s functionality. With so much emphasis currently focused on bridging the gap between the plant level and the enterprise, is there in fact such a thing as MES? Yes, suggests Bradley, but MES is primarily about execution and there are many issues it doesn’t address. "That’s why we prefer to use the broader term Production & Performance management."
Real time
Next milestone on the Wonderware road is likely to be Microsoft’s release of the forthcoming Vista and Wonderware’s subsequent release of InTouch 10, the Vista enabled version of its flagship SCADA/ HMI application. Vista, says Bradley, will offer a number of key improvements including dramatically enhanced graphic capabilities. Moreover, because Wonderware has consistently maintained compatibility between successive versions, users of the original InTouch running on Windows 2.0 would still be able to upgrade their application all the way to InTouch 10 under Vista. Wonderware, claims Bradley, now has its software in some 100,000 manufacturing plants around the world or a third of all the plants in the world with more than 20 employees. "That provides us with enormous marketing leverage to upgrade to InTouch 10 with ArchestrA."
One beneficiary of that leverage will
undoubtedly be Pantek whose MD, John
Bailey, was presented - or, to be strictly
accurate, re-presented - with yet another
award from Wonderware for outstanding
performance as a distributor - all the
more remarkable since, as Bradley explained,
"Pantek is growing rapidly. Indeed
it’s growing faster than many other
distributors in economies which are growing
much faster than the UK."
This article appeared in the November 2006 issue of Industrial Automation Insider. |
 Keynote speaker Professor Tom Cannon talked about "Leadership through Change" in an era of
rapid technological change and technology adoption. As he pointed out, whereas the radio had taken
30 years to achieve almost universal adoption, the iPod took just three years. In today’s
business environment, "Good enough isn’t good enough. Great is good enough." One of the key
challenges today is the need to manage ambiguity, making decisions in situations where two possible
courses of action seem to be equally right. Another is the paradox posed by the need for people to
be both entrepreneurs and team workers. "The rate of change creates massive opportunities but also
massive barriers to success" he argued. In such a world, the traditional divide between managers and
leaders is dead. Everyone has to aspire to be a transformational leader. There is no option to stay
with the status quo since no business model will last for ever. "The greatest driver of change is
the cult of the customer," said Cannon who concluded by telling delegates that, "If you want to get
there faster, you need a complete culture change in your organization." Intriguingly, Manicardi predicted that, whereas today manufacturing industry deploys separate platforms for business management and production management, within a decade there will be a single environment embracing both, suggesting, at least to this member of the audience, that business will become an entirely real time environment.
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