Sunday, March 18, 2007

Rockwell visit Last Tuesday I spent most of the day in Milwaukee at the headquarters of Rockwell Automation. The ever-efficient team at Padilla-Speer-Beardsley (thanks Stephanie) set up about 9 meetings for me. The first thing I should point out the apparent success of the marketing reorganization brewing since last fall. I thought I had written about it, but I can't find it. Must have been a private briefing at the time. The old organization had marketing as part of the product teams with sales reporting elsewhere. That meant marketing was product-oriented and disconnected from the sales effort. Beginning last fall, sales and marketing all report to the same senior executive. There are two senior marketing executives to whom all marketing people report. While people were being shifted among the organizations, there was the usual amount of uncertainty. But the sense of rejuvenation and purpose among the marketing people was palpable. Michael Mann came in from IBM to head up vertical market marketing. He's bringing a fresh approach to the effort--pointing especially to they latest ad for process control that never mentions a product. That, in itself, is revolutionary. In the past an occasional "outsider" would come into the Rockwell culture, then leave. But quietly under Keith Nosbusch many executives have been hired in. And they are having considerable impact. Kevin Roach got a lot of publicity coming over from GE Fanuc to head up software. But Bob Honor also came from GE to head up a life sciences vertical effort. Recently Christopher Zei came from Elau to head up the OEM effort that has been gaining traction--and I could hear pieces of his influence already in the conversations of the marketing staff. The process control group has added many people from competitors (not just one or two), the ProPack and Datasweep MES acquisitions have provided numbers of influential marketing people. The word is that Nosbusch is making real investments to make these changes stick. And Jim Pinto told me Friday that he respects the work Nosbusch has done quietly raising the market cap up to around $10 billion from around $3 billion--making it too large to be a casual takeover target. If all of these new people stick (and early indications are that they will), then you'll see a dramatic change at the company. Back to the details of the visit. The word of the day was "simplify." This was not a derivative of one of the talks at the ARC Forum, but something they have been working on for some time. The first series of meetings concerned motor control products. A new, simplified "lower-end" variable frequency drive is about to be released along with one designed for distributed control in wash down applications such as food and beverage. All the drives are designed to be configured within the overall Logix programming platform and to be found by the RSView HMI package. Rockwell is also finding ways both with drives and Kinetix (motion) platforms to make buying complete packages easier. Called accelerator programs, they even include CAD drawings, sample 4-axis cabinet design and sample code (in the case of motion control). Actually another word was "integrate" as in all of these motor control products integrated into the broader Logix platform. I was told about the Logix plan seven or eight years ago. It's great to see a company implement a plan so thoroughly. Another integrate process is the life sciences MES (former ProPack) integrating into the FactoryTalk platform so that it can join the integration party. The OEM group now has dedicated marketing (reporting to Mann). This effort has grown considerably from the point five or six years ago when Doug Burns and Aaron Frazee began almost like a skunk works operation. The group now has a VP and marketing support. Obviously a Rockwell emphasis for growth. The Safety products group gave a review of what they consider to be the broadest machine safety product lines available from anyone. Apparently there is something coming on the process automation side, but I couldn't get details, yet. So more coming. Then the maintenance and support people came in and reviewed their comprehensive offering from remote and on-site support, to training. The mission there is to make maintenance a strategic asset for a customer, not an expense. I ended the day with a conversation with CTO Sujeet Chand. He laid out the vision of the connected enterprise. This is a topic that needs a longer piece to dive into, but if you combine some of the thoughts above such as "integrate" along with Nosbusch's dictum that information is the key to manufacturing success, and add current and future technologies, then you can get a feel for the direction Rockwell's going. This is a long post, but I have one more thing to throw in. Earlier, I had written about the challenge the software group has in selling a different kind of product at a different level within the customer organization. I just happened upon a connection to someone in the sales force who also had come in from the "outside" with previous experience selling enterprise level software. So, Rockwell is quietly meeting that challenge, too. 7:41:46 AM    comment []