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Monday, February 20, 2006 |
I went to the ActivPlant Summit users conference this morning. My main objective was to probe a little deeper into the company's products and discover their relationship to MES, HMI/SCADA and ERP software applications. ActivPlant's offering seems to be a real-time historian that offers contextualized visualization. Toyota, for instance, finds multiple uses for it in kanban and other visualization and scheduling applications with no HMI/SCADA or MES used. A Coca-Cola person from Austrialia told me that he uses Citect HMI/SCADA, but uses the ActivPlant offering for its real-time visualization.
At any rate, executives acknowledged that they have run a "stealth" company, but that they intend to change that. In the past four months a vice president of marketing and a PR agency have been added. You will be hearing more from this company.
10:09:11 PM 
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Today, I'm in Orlando specifically for the ARC Forum. I'm stopping off this morning at the ActivPlant users conference (thankfully next door to my hotel) and a promised interview with CEO Dennis Cocco and someone from Toyota. I first heard about ActivPlant at a conference from a Toyota engineer. Other than that, don't know a lot about it. Should know more in the next 6 hours.
I'll visit my son and daughter-in-law tonight (is golf a possibility?) and then prepare for the conference. ARC has been aggressively pursuing corporate sponsors. This year it rented a salon specifically for press conferences. Of course, I go to hear real users talk about real problems and solutions. This year, I could spend part of Tuesday and all day Wednesday in press conferences listening to CEOs and CTOs talk with no real agenda. Hint: Editors like real news. Vision of the market and product roadmaps are not real news. It's background information. ARC draws a large number of trade editors, so it's easy to see that we become a selling point for ARC to its sponsors. But, please, give us some meat. Don't waste our time.
5:58:30 AM
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Part of my visit to Atlanta last week was with the instrumentation product people at Yokogawa. It's the first time I've been with the assembled group. Very interesting discussion about how they are prepared to support CEO Uchida-san's vision of making the company number 1 in process systems by 2010.
My main message as I try to "sell" the vision of Automation World is the breakdown of "silos" of automation. When people say I don't cover certain parts of automation (Yokogawa wonders if I cover instrumentation, meanwhile there's an ERP software company also in Atlanta who wonders if I cover the plant floor too much and not software ), I go back to my original message from the start of our magazine 3 years ago. That is the breakdown of these silos. It's all about integration through standards. Each part of the automation system must (and is) integrate with the rest of the automation systems as well as with the business system. They all fit. And buyers no longer buy bits and pieces. They also expect things to work together.
Back to Yokogawa, they have their work cut out for them. Uchida expects some market share growth in North America as part of his plan. His team in Atlanta is working to do their part. It'll be tough--but the struggle should be interesting for readers and beneficial for customers.
5:48:41 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Gary Mintchell.
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