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Top 50 Automation Companies of 2012

Dec. 19, 2013
Major acquisitions and a real shift in focus for the automation industry going forward
Authors

Walt Boyes is Control editor in chief for Spitzer & Boyes.

David Clayon is director of research, automation and safety systems, ARC Advisory Group,

Inderpreet Shoker is analyst, automation systems, ARC Advisory Group

Once again, Control and ARC Advisory Group present our Top 50 list of Automation Suppliers. We have not changed our rubric for several years now, so you can compare results year-on-year for the past few years. Our considerations are spelled out in the sidebar, "How We Do It."

Do you know who the Top 50 Automation Companies are? Find out.

The list is organized into two categories: Worldwide and North America. The Worldwide data includes the North America numbers. Some companies can be seen to have very large Worldwide presences, but very small North American footprints, and the opposite is, of course, true as well.

The Ups and Downs

As shown in the charts, there has been some movement in positions, but none in the rankings of the top three: Siemens, ABB and Emerson are tops worldwide; Emerson, Rockwell and ABB lead the pack in North America. Globally, Rockwell and Schneider traded places since last year, as did Honeywell and Danaher; and in North America, Schneider and Danaher traded slots while Cameron moved up from 10th to eighth.

At the end of the global list, there are several companies that moved to the Honorable Mention section from the main list. This is not because their sales have decreased, because most of them had sizeable increases. In fact, most of the change came with the addition of companies new to the Top 50 Worldwide list. Additions this year include Festo (21) and Harting (39), as well as the large conglomerate centered on Eaton's acquisition of Cooper (37). Magnetrol, after several years on the Honorable Mention list, makes the Top 50 for North America at number 50.

Changing Latitudes

There were many acquisitions in the past 12 months. Some of these are defining, like the acquisition of vMonitor by Rockwell. This puts Rockwell deeply in wellhead monitoring in the oil patch, and gives Rockwell a suite of essential sensors in both a proprietary wireless protocol and WirelessHART. Another defining acquisition was the purchase, just after the Schneider acquisition of Invensys was announced, by Invensys of Indusoft. This gives Invensys a slice of the controller market below the typical Wonderware HMI application set. The majors in the automation industry are filling out their portfolios with "sideways" acquisitions.

But it isn't just the majors. For example, Advantech, the powerhouse from Taiwan and Greater China that is 28th on the Worldwide list and 25th on the North America list, purchased GPEG, a British intelligent display manufacturer. This gives Advantech a smart display capability it didn't have for industrial automation, but also a strong foothold in the gaming industry. Product synergy can be wonderful.

Schneider and Invensys

In what could prove to be a resurgence in consolidation among the major automation vendors, Schneider Electric will be completing its acquisition of Invensys sometime early in the new year. The charts in this article do not reflect this acquisition, but simply adding the revenue of both companies together comes to more than $8 billion, worldwide, which may move the combined company up a slot or two in the rankings. This is the first acquisition of a major automation company by another major in quite some time.

In the past, such acquisitions have foundered on the reality—or even the perception—that there is too much overlap and not enough new capability. In this case, as Schneider CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire noted in an interview with CNN, there is very little overlap and many potential synergies.

Whether the acquisition delivers its anticipated benefits remains to be seen. Some Invensys executives, led by CEO Mike Caliel and software boss Ravi Gopinath, believe with Tricoire that the synergies will count more than any integration casualties and reorganizations will cost the combined organization.

Invensys has a huge installed base and long history, and has been engaged in an extensive and expensive revamp of its hardware and software offerings for the past five or six years. Much of this R&D effort has just come to fruition, for example, with the recent release of the Foxboro Evo combined control and safety system. Invensys also can point to a stable of industry-leading solutions through its Wonderware and Triconex brands, as well as industry-leading instrumentation, simulation and training, asset management and advanced process control capabilities. These complementary capabilities, together with new customers and distribution channels, represent clear growth possibilities for a combined company.

Changing Attitudes: Pervasive Sensing and the Internet of Things

The major automation companies that have field sensor or controller products have been talking about another sea-change that is coming to process automation technology. This is called, variously, ubiquitous data, Big Data, pervasive sensing, lick-'n-stick-sensors and the Internet of Things.

One contributor to this Big Data shift is the use of wireless (and considerably less expensive) sensors to pick up and transmit data that was not considered practical or cost-effective to collect in the past. Lots of data. Enough data so that we can use the high-definition mathematical models of process behavior in real time.

But as Emerson's Peter Zornio put it, "We have three issues to handle in order to really have pervasive sensing: First we need to do away with the wiring of the sensor, especially in hazardous areas or where the sensor is hard to get to. With WirelessHART, we've been able to do that. Second, we need to make the sensors themselves less expensive. We are beginning to do that with new types of sensors and housings. The one thing we need is to develop sensors and methods for seeing inside pipelines and vessels without the need to make more holes in them."

If Zornio is right, we have embarked on a whole new vision of how a plant is controlled and operated. This opens up a new world of applications for sensors and new ways of analyzing the data they present. And Zornio isn't alone.

Industry leaders from Cisco, Invensys, Siemens and Rockwell have talked about this very same vision in their user groups since the summer, and many have talked about it for a long time before that.

"The next few years will be the most exciting time in manufacturing in the past 50," says Invensys Vice President Peter Martin. "We are finally going to come into our own as automation professionals. We will be operating process plants with business values in real time." And we will have all the data we need to do it, too.

Top 50 National Automation Vendors

Honorable Mention - National Vendors

Top 50 Global Automation Vendors

Honorable Mention - Global Vendors

How Do We Do It?

Every year, we find more companies to add to the Top 50 list. If you spot one we haven't listed and that should be, let us know. Even though we add companies and subtract the ones that have been acquired, we haven't changed our basic methodology of analysis for the past several years.

Here's what we include in our definition of sales revenue:

  • Process automation systems and related hardware software and services
  • PLC business, as well as related hardware, software, services, I/O and bundled HMI
  • Other control hardware components, such as third-party I/O, signal conditioners, intrinsic safety barriers, networking hardware, unit controllers, and single- and multi-loop controllers
  • Process safety systems
  • SCADA systems for oil and gas, water and wastewater, and power distribution
  • AC drives
  • Motion control systems
  • Computer numerical control (CNC) systems
  • Process field instrumentation, such as temperature and pressure transmitters, flowmeters, level transmitters and associated switches
  • Analytical equipment, including process electrochemical, all types of infrared technology, gas chromatographs for industrial manufacturing and related products
  • Control valves, actuators and positioners
  • Discrete sensors and actuators
  • All kinds of automation-related software, from advanced process control, simulation and optimization to third-party HMI, plant asset management, production management (MES), ERP integration packages from the major automation suppliers and similar software
  • Other automation-related services provided by automation suppliers
  • Condition-monitoring equipment and systems
  • Ancillary systems, such as burner management systems, quality control systems for pulp and paper, etc.

What we don't include:

  • Pumps and motors
  • Robotics
  • Material-handling systems
  • Supply chain management software
  • Building automation systems
  • Fire and security systems
  • Processing equipment such as mixers, vessels, heaters, etc., as well as process design licenses from suppliers that have engineering divisions
  • Electrical equipment, such as low-voltage switchgear, etc.