CTO Vaughn says USDATA paid for mistakes, but likes the hand he's holding

When PC-based supervisory control came of age in the early 1990s, there were three leading vendors. Subsequently, Intellution and Wonderware have continued to grow, first independently and since then under the GE and Invensys corporate umbrellas respectively. Things haven't gone quite so smoothly for USDATA.

USDATA took a toolkit, multiplatform approach that differentiated it from the packaged, Microsoft-centric approach of its rivals. That approach won praise from many quarters, but it wasn't a formula for precipitous growth. Today a company with revenues of only about $10 million, USDATA was recently sold to Tecnomatix Technologies, a vendor of solutions that bridge product life-cycle management (PLM) with manufacturing process management.

Mitchell D. Vaughn has been there for it all; 26 years in total—most of it as USDATA's CTO. We caught up with Vaughn, who admits he thinks like an engineer, at the MESA conference held last month outside Chicago.

MSI: You've been with USDATA 26 years. What motivated you to stay with the company this long?

Vaughn: I know that seems like a very long time to be at the same company with basically the same title, but you have to realize that the company, as well as the industry and the technology, have changed so much that it's kept me interested. For example, the central project has changed from hardware design, to software and hardware intertwined, to today when it's at least 95 percent software.

MSI: Why did Wonderware and Intellution prosper where USDATA—although it has many satisfied customers—struggled?

Vaughn: The shift to Microsoft Windows happened quicker than we thought it would. We didn't think Windows 2.0 could be used as a shop-floor platform. Wonderware started with Windows, and Intellution switched more quickly than we did. By 1995, 80 percent of our supervisory control business was on Windows NT, but we were supporting nine different platforms.

With our toolkit approach, it also was more difficult for us to sell a packaged solution.

MSI: Why is the combination of Tecnomatix and USDATA a good one?

Vaughn: Tecnomatix owns the shop-floor side of PLM, and an execution system—such as our Xfactory—ties business and shop floor together. So there is the means to use the USDATA architecture for bringing together product, business, and shop-floor information. There also are some good opportunities for leveraging FactoryLink, our supervisory control product.

We're now part of a company that should have at least $100 million in revenues this year, with good technologies, and deep expertise in automotive, electronics, and other industries. We have a distribution channel for packaged products, and Tecnomatix has deep experience in solutions selling.