CONTROL CHOICES shake up market

This month's Control and Instrumentation exhibition in Birmingham (see preview from page 31 on) should help focus attention on one of the fastest changing areas affecting the process industries. Technology apart, the process control scene is a vibrant place, awash with talk of mergers and acquisition, alliances and co-operative ventures.

Take the recent announcement that Siebe parent company of Foxboro is to buy Wonderware for around $375 million in cash (see Suppliers' News on page 10). Here is a classic case of a leader in its own field deciding rather sensibly not to try to reinvent a wheel being rolled along, very nicely thank you, by a leader in another field. Set up in 1987 coincidently at about the same time that Foxboro was launching what is generally regarded as the first 'open' distributed control system in the shape of its I/A Series Wonderware was one of the first companies to bring Microsoft Windows-based software to the control marketplace, particularly with HMI (human machine interface) products.

Last year Wonderware's product line followed the familiar 'bundling' approach, adopted by business software providers like Microsoft and Lotus, with the launch of FactorySuite 1000, now superseded by FactorySuite 2000. Integrating these products with its own NT-based offerings is seen by Siebe as a way of expanding its appeal to the small to medium sized user of Windows-based controls and systems.

'The acquisiion,' says Allen Yurko, Siebe's managing director and ceo, 'will clearly complement our already strong position in batch and process applications, providing Siebe with the broadest range of both UNIX and NT software for the automation market.'

To a £3 billion-turnover giant like Siebe, the £50 million annual turnover of Wonderware might seem like small change, but there is no doubt that Siebe/Foxboro's eye was caught by the dramatic up-turn in Wonderware's profits over the last quarter of 1997 as it flowed FactorySuite out into the marketplace.

With completion expected this month, this is no hostile takeover. Wonderware's chairman and chief executive Roy Slavin said his company was 'pleased with this transaction and excited by the strategic alliance this represents going forward'. And surely just as excited by the $24/share offer, which represented a 50 per cent premium on the $16 price of the shares the day before the offer was announced.

Siebe/Foxboro's move for Wonderware follows the successful migration of the I/A Series system on to Windows NT and is fully in line with the group's expectation that process automation will be dominated by 'open' systems by the year 2000, with UNIX and Windows architectures accounting for over 70 per cent of the market, in roughly equal shares.

The 'open' debate would therefore seem to be heading towards an inevitable conclusion, at least as far as the DCS market is concerned. Further down the control hierarchy, however, the argument rages on with most attention now turning to the PLC market and the potential impact on it of 'soft logic' or PC-based control.

Although a recent report by market analyst MarketLine International suggests that the current European market for soft logic control is still at the testing and evaluation stage, it acknowledges that the market for PC-based automation products (including HMI and SCADA) is growing at a rate of over 10 per cent a year.

According to Andy Brereton of IMO Industrial Controls, 'the facts are that users now have a choice between using PLCs or adopting a flexible, open control option.' One such option was unveiled by IMO at the end of last year in the shape of a joint venture, between IMO and Houston-based SoftPLC, to develop and market SoftPLC's products throughout the EC.

In this case, however, 'open' is not simply a euphemism for Microsoft Windows. Although the IMO SoftPLC software runs on Intel-based industrial PCs, it does not do so under Windows 95 or NT, nor even DOS. It acts as a kernel, taking over the running of the PC in a reliable and deterministic manner, and is programmed like a PLC in ladder logic.

That is one response to the debate from the software side. Another from the PLC camp was unveiled at last month's Drives and Controls exhibition by Schneider Automation in the form of its new PCX card. This slots into the ISA bus of a PC and, running as a coprocessor on the bus, is said to offer 'the full reliability of a true PLC processor', with both using the same programming software. Countering the Ctrl/Alt/Del conundrum, Schneider's Peter Reeve emphasised that a key development of the PCX card is that, if the PC crashes, the PCX will remain operational allowing the automation process to carry on working without interruption. 'Whatever problems the PC may suffer,' he said, ' the PCX is as immune as a PLC networked to SCADA.'

So the debate continues. DCSs vs PC-based open NT systems? PLCs pitted against soft logic control? But what about arguably the longest running debate the DCS vs the PLC? There is clearly a middle ground where the operation of many processes calls for both continuous and discrete control. By definition, the specialist manufacturers of DCSs and PLCs cannot offer this combination alone. Some attempts have been made from inside both camps to spread their respective boundaries (Moore Products APACS or Mitsubishi's Q Series, for example), but it was perhaps inevitable that, like Foxboro and Wonderware, some of the major players would realise the benefits of collaboration, as opposed to competing for the same middle ground.

Just in time to go to press, then, comes news of a collaborative venture between two giants of the industry, Honeywell and Rockwell Automation. Recognising the way the wind is blowing throughout the control business, they are to combine Honeywell's 'process software and processor design capabilities' with Rockwell/Allen-Bradley's expertise in producing 'cost effective hardware and interfaces.' The result is ProcessLogix, about which more next month.