I'm reading Confronting Reality by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. In the first chapter discussing what Lou Gerstner found upon starting work at IBM they state:
Gerstner was all but certain that breaking IBM into pieces was the wrong thing to do. He had been an IT customer at RJR Nabisco and American Express, and he knew other customers. All agreed that in the real world of the IT managers, not many wanted to undertake the complex job of cobbling together workable systems from an infinity of vendors. Integration, he wrote, was becoming "a gigantic problem.... I believed there was a very important role for some company to be able to integrate all of the pieces and deliver a working solution to the customer."
This is just what has been happening in the area of automation. While there are still some engineers out there who enjoy "cobbling together workable systems," in most companies the engineers who remain after the layoffs simply do not have the time. Therefore (and, I might add, fairly quietly), almost all the automation "majors" and really some smaller companies have been copying these good ideas from the master. In just the past few years, I've written about such companies as ABB, Honeywell Process Solutions, Emerson Process, Invensys Process Systems (Foxboro) and Rockwell Automation and their solutions offerings. Recently, Schneider Electric has announced plans to begin a solutions offering.
As hardware becomes more and more a commodity (with a few exceptions), helping customers put these complex systems together is the best way toward decent profitability in the industry.
7:40:18 PM 
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