Tyco Electronics is Now TE Connectivity

A few months ago I was made aware of Tyco Electronics intention to change its name to TE Connectivity. This move signifies much more than a simple name change in my humble opionion. It shows me that TE Connectivity really "gets it".

The "It" here being discussed is the trend towards greater interconnectivity within and across a broad range of IT markets which TE Connectivity serves including consumer electronics, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, transportation, aerospace, automotive and industrial communications.

For the purposes of this blog I will focus on the industrial communications and industrial automation market segments. Interconnectivity is more than just interconnect products such as cables & cordsets and connectors, TE is in top 5 of players, being covered in VDC's Global Wireline Industrial Networking Products report (coming to a PDF near you soon). It is the connectivity among devices, controllers and HMI/SCADA across and within the larger enterprise wide network which empowers people and companies to obtain real-time visibility into operations thereby providing greater agility and flexibility to meet changing customer requirements.

TE Connectivity intends to enhance their strong market position by adding greater intelligence at the physical layer and leverage its succes formula in serving the larger enterprise markets to expand its already sizable share in the industrial automation space. TE Connectivity has established aggressive growth objectives which it intends to meet (I for one will not be betting against them) by taking actions - organic and possibly strategic - which are designed to exploit opportunity from several trends which are nearing a "tipping point":

1. The increasing convergence of industrial and enterprise applications, the products (type, design, etc.) serving these applications and the technologies being deployed - think open standards and interoperability;
2. The increasing influence of enterprise IT best practices and technologies in the automation segments and the increasing level of influence from IT at the decision-making level (based on VDC's own user feedback);
3. Continued investments in connecting devices, controllers, and HMI/SCADA among and across themselves and all into the Enterprise network using Ethernet-based network protocols such as EtherNet/IP, ProfiNet, etc. and standard Ethernet TCP/IP; and,
4. Providing greater intelligence at the physical layer through product developments designed to provide greater bandwidth, faster speeds and better performance using both copper and fiber solutions. 

It may be noted that TE Connectivity is not a client of VDC's Industrial Networking Products market intelligence and I only write about and/or blog about things I believe in and can support based on our comprehensive and granular research. Bottom line is that I/we at VDC are not a "pay for hire" research firm and this is not a promotional piece.