Independent no more: Schneider buys Citect

"...and another one bites the dust!"

The Australian-headquartered HMI/SCADA/MES vendor Citect announced on Wednesday that they have accepted a merger offer from the Australian subsidiary of Schneider for a deal worth approximately $80 million. Where this leaves the US crew is suddenly up in the air. After a period of severe retrenchment, two years ago Citect got their US operation started again with the appointment of Darren Trumeter as US president. What Schneider will do now is up to the French. This is not wholly unexpected, at least by me, since it has been obvious for about a year that Citect and Schneider have been sniffing around each other, and in fact have done quite a bit of integration already between Schneider systems and Citect software. Citect, who had billed themselves as the "world's largest independent supplier of industrial automation, real-time intelligence and next generation Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)," was at the point where they needed to either acquire somebody or be acquired in order to make any more reasonable growth. The same thing happened to Wonderware when it sold itself to Invensys. This pretty much leaves Iconics alone as the "world's largest independent" now. I wonder how long before somebody snaps them up? Walt