Invensys's Wonderware gets into hardware
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
There's a certain irony in the announcement late last year that Wonderware, a plant intelligence software vendor, will begin selling PC-based hardware. After all, the vendor rose to prominence more than a decade ago on the value proposition that manufacturers could use basic PC hardware—paired with Wonderware's low-cost, Windows-based software—to handle supervisory control tasks.
Wonderware prospered because the PC had become a reliable commodity, offering a low-cost alternative to the proprietary, bundled hardware and software solutions then available for plant automation. Along the way, Wonderware became a unit of plant automation vendor Invensys, and expanded its line-up of applications software for plant information management. But as Invensys managers explain, there are other recent changes in computing and plant management that make it the right time for Wonderware to offer PC hardware solutions to customers that want that option.
Mark Davidson, an Invensys VP, says one shift is that Wonderware's customers—especially the larger ones—are seeking to standardize the way they approach plant information solutions across sites. As part of that, they want to get back to a more standardized approach to the PC hardware that supports the software. "Managers are looking at the whole issue of plant information management much more holistically," says Davidson. "Companies have told us they want a unified experience."
The other change springs from advances in PC technology, says Davidson, such as ruggedized tablet computers that run Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC edition operating system, and touch panels running embedded XP. "The advances in the form factor, and in the operating system, are a big part of why this is the right time to do this," he says.
Beyond just pairing the industrial tablets and touch panel PCs with Wonderware's InTouch supervisory control package, Invensys also is bundling in first-year support for the software. Davidson adds that Invensys is strongly committed to the program, and is working with its PC hardware partners to roll out additional models and bundles in 2004.
