Open season declared on automation software

Unveiling his company's much awaited strategic review last month, Invensys' CEO Rick Haythornthwaite expressed the view that no one vendor in the process and industrial automation market has as yet really grasped the implications of the industry trend towards open systems.

Given his ready acknowledgement of the success of rival Emerson Process Management with its DeltaV systems, this may raise some eyebrows. But, in his view, DeltaV's evident popularity is due more to good marketing than any outstanding leap in technology.

No doubt Emerson would take issue with this view, and be prepared to argue long into the night about the relative degrees of 'openness' of its PlantWeb architecture and that of the Invensys/ Foxboro's I/A Series. But Haythornthwaite does have a point about open systems in general.

What control vendors really mean by open systems at the moment is simply 'non-proprietary', at least in the sense of not locking their customers into products and systems that run on software which cannot be supported by anyone other than the vendors themselves. What their customers want, however, now goes far beyond that. They want to be able to integrate their plant control or factory automation systems with their business-level computing systems - and beyond their own enterprises, linking into their suppliers' and customers' systems up and down the supply chain.

Most of the major control companies would say that this is already well within their capabilities, or at least the capabilities of companies with whom they collaborate in systems development - one of whom is likely to be Microsoft, which of course is not known to be entirely open about its source codes.

Ironically, however, one Microsoft-supported development could see the industry accelerate to a much more open way of putting software systems in place. This at least is the view of Hexatec Systems' Richard Haycock. 'With the introduction of the OPC communications standard,' says Haycock, 'you can now buy industrial software from wherever you like.' OPC (formerly OLE for Process Control) is rapidly being taken up by hardware and software suppliers and, according to Haycock, could change the way in which software is distributed.

Without the complication of needing drivers for different vendors' systems, users now have the option of buying software directly over the Internet. 'If web sales of industrial software become the norm,' he says, 'distributors will have to revise their business models and offer added value in some other way.'

Practising what it preaches, Hexatec now provides free development software for its latest Scada system, Saturn. The software is instantly available over the web (www.easyscada.com) and users pay nothing until they install it into a customer site. The application can therefore be fully tested before any payment for a run-time licence.

If this catches on, the market for automation software could soon become more open than anyone imagines.