Control Industry Consolidation Accelerates.
In the last months, several large players have "thrown in their lot" with erstwhile competitors. If this trend continues, soon there will be only a few world-scale Enterprise System vendors in each country. This has already occurred with aircraft, automobiles, microprocessors, and a number of other key industries. If you had to guess who would be left standing in each country, which would you pick ? How would this effect the choice of products you select for use in your company ?
Valmet, well known for supervisory control systems in Pulp and Paper and Pipeline industries has been purchased by Nelles Automation. Our sources indicate that the Valmet trademark will gradually be retired in favour of the Nelles Automation banner.
Nelles does not appear to be closing any of the Valmet Offices which, if anything are even busier than ever.
Long time provider of process industry MRP II (Manufacturing Resource Planning) software, Marcam, has been purchased by Wonderware who have previously purchased the foremost Batch Management software vendor (product renamed On Batch ) and the premium discrete industry product tracking software (renamed On-Track).
Wonderware appear to be positioning themselves as the powerhouse in supervisory software for batch, discrete, and now process industries..