VDC Research: Industrial Sensing, Networking & Control Market Blog

Data Acquisition Solutions - As the World Turns

One of the first market studies I worked on when I started at VDC over 13 years ago was to co-author VDC's The U.S. Market for Data Acquisition Products: External Chassis and Modules and Plug-In Analog I/O Boards market report.

Although VDC only just recently launched our extensive web survey in support of VDC's 2011 Data Acquisition Solutions Market Intelligence Program I am already wondering if users will be telling us they want their DAQ solution packaged in a smaller foot print, with faster speeds, higher resolution, be easier to use, provide greater mobility or portability and/or will they want it connected via an Ethernet based networks and/or a wireless network. I suspect a sizable share of users may be still be using serial or parallel networks and I am sure USB will be quite popular.

I cannot lie and say that I would be surprised if users want all the above feature sets and they will want it cheaper as I recall seeing this play out in the past. For some reason I cannot help but think of a soap opera when I think of trends in data acquisition solutions, but maybe it is just me.

Although there are a myriad of applications for which users choose to invest in a data acquisition solution (DAQ) - be it a paperless recorder, a PC front end, a stand alone DAQ system or plug-in analog I/O board using PCI, CompactPCI or some other bus architecture - there are some things that almost all of these users will likely share in common.  What will be particularly interesting to learn is what are the applications in which data acquisition solutions are being utilized? What is the current level of satisfaction, or lack thereof, with current offerings? What tradeoffs do customers make if no one solution can offer it all? These, any many other perplexing, questions will be on my mind over the next several months.

I guess we will have to wait for the survey results to roll in before I can provide anything here beyond my own perceptions. Something tells me though that I will learn much more about the changing landscape that comprises this fragmented data acquisition solutions landscape, and the myriad of applications for which these various solutions were designed to serve, than I ever could have imagined.

We welcome the feedback of users, specifiers and other stakeholders that make up the diverse ecosystem of data acquisition solutions and the myriad of applications. Please click here to partake in the survey or forward the link along to others you think can share their preferences, requirements and purchase plans for their data acquisition solutions.

Data Acquisition Solutions Survey is Now Open

VDC Research is conducting an extensive market intelligence initiative into the market for data acquisition (DAQ) solution markets. Specifically we are investigating the use of external chassis/module and plug-in analog I/O board DAQ products. We are investigating specifier and user plans and expectations for:

External Chassis and Modules:
Data Loggers, Distributed/Remote I/O, Modular DAQ Systems,

Paperless Chart Recorders, PC Front Ends, Stand Alone Systems

Plug-In Analog I/O Boards:

CompactPCI, ISA, LXI, PC/104, PCI/PCI Express,

PCMCIA (PC Cards), PXI/PXI Express, VME, VPX, VXI and XMC     

Please click here to complete the survey.

This study is being conducted for leading suppliers of these products who want to understand your current and future purchase plans, problems, and expectations.  If you are involved in the use, purchase decision, or selection/specification for any of these products this may be your best chance to influence key product suppliers and provide input.

For your assistance, respondents will receive an Executive Brief on the findings, and will be entered into a drawing on 1 of 5 $100 US checks or $100 Amazon.com gift certificates (or charitable donation) to be awarded.

Please click here to complete the survey.

Please forward the link along to others whom you think can provide meaningful feedback.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

Privacy Policy: VDC will not sell, rent, or in any way provide your contact information to any 3rd party. Your individual responses are strictly confidential. The information obtained by VDC will only be used to develop market insights.

 

Is it Time for Automation and Enterprise IT Worlds to Make Nice? Part Two

As I have been fully engaged in finalizing the analysis, data and strategic insights in support of VDC's Industrial Networking Products Track 2: Competitive Analysis market studies on wireless and wireline networking products, blogging activity slipped off my radar screen.

Back in mid February I posted a blog on the the growing need for greater cooperation amongst factory floor plant operations and the Enterprise IT world. In that blog I indicated posting a follow on blog revealing the findings from over 300 respondents on who is the key decision-maker where in regards to their industrial networking infrastructure solution investment decisions.

The results were interesting and somewhat surprising given my belief that the factory floor primarily operated in the past as a siloed enclave onto its own with its own standards, processes and mandates. Users overwhelmingly indicated that Corporate IT was the key decision-maker in their industrial networking solution deployments.

 
The fact that plant and corporate level operations are playing such a key role in at least some of the user's operations was a modicum of comfort given how vital their input can be, based on their technical and operational experiences and proximity to the idiosyncracies of plant operations, in making the best decision possible for the greater corporate good. 

It is my belief that personnel from the operations world must be more proactive in learning to cooperate better with the personnel from the Enterprise IT world and try using sound logic, personal persuasion and facts to help influence the final decision that IT is apparently going to be making anyway.  In most situations not many companies are going to make a decision to invest in any technology or standards that will ultimately place the manufacturing operations at risk anyway, so much of the tension between these two worlds is as much based more on personalities and egos than logic and technology.

If you see that change is coming and that it is likely inevitable than I believe it is best to embrace the change and become a positive proponent for it so as to help shape the change for the better, rather than resist, delay the inevitable and experience frustration along the way.  Embracing change is always easier said than done, at least for me anyway.

Industrial Networks ... Not Just Protocol (Alphabet) Soup

The best approach to industrial networks will devote less time to protocols.  The alphabet soup that is the current collection of protocols deployed in factories and plants will become a secondary strategic imperative.  And not '5 years from now'.

Did I just write that for a community of technical marketing, product management and operations engineering professionals?  Sure I did. 

Why you ask?  Because our best and most challenging clients working with us on our 2010 Industrial Networking Service know that while protocol support, migration, translation and negotiation are critical value propositions for the current industrial networking market, greater market share and margin will accrue to companies that focus on something else. 

What else?  The connections that the network supports, the data that those connections produce, and the accurate/ timely application of that data as a decision support tool for process control and factory floor managers and a broad range of executives across the enterprise.  These messages have come out loud and clear in every one of nearly quarterly surveys of process control engineers and factory floor managers during the past 18 months.  They are laser focused on driving agility in their operations. 

For these operators, agility is much more than JIT (just in time inventory), or CO (change order) support.  It is a broader set of capabilities that enables:

1.  Inventory managers to balance lowest reasonable inventory commit with zero (0) out of stock events

2.  Quality control managers to balance the tightest possible tolerances with maximum yield

3.  Logistics managers to balance customer demand for real time visibility at 3 nines or better shipment date, location and configuration accuracy. 

For these operators, the path to agility is illuminated by having access not to all information, at any time, but key information at the right time.  We are learning this from the operators themselves, from leading ISIs and certain suppliers of industrial networking products and solutions.  Pursuit of agility is driving operators to shift more of their network ROI analysis away from what the network IS to what the network DOES. 

And that, leads them to focusing on network connections. 

One theme that we are hearing more often in our studies is that as network standards aggregate around a limited number of legacy protocols, and especially around fewer instantiations of 'Industrial Ethernet', cost per connection is going down.  Broad availability of data is going up.  But, ROI remains uneven. 

The culprit most often cited is data overload.  Too much data -- some inaccurate, other ill-timed -- can drive real risk in operations planning and performance.  Operators want only what they need, only when it is actionable, only at the point of decision.  In a nutshell. 

And that requires focus far afield in many cases from network protocols.  Sure, protocol requirements will divine for operators, integrators and suppliers what information might be available, and how to extract it, at what cost.  However, it will say nothing about the value or relevance of even that most accurate information. 

Whereas, the right information -- at the right time, to the right person, etc. -- is priceless.

I am linking to an article about a team of network researchers that we have been reading about for some time.  They focus not only on information networks, but cellular and social as well.  The attachment is a sidebar look at network connection costs and benefits.  I think there might be some ideas in there for us, the industrial network community.

Some aspects of the article are not exactly germane to industrial networks, unless, of course, you are thinking more about what the network DOES than what the networking IS.  Perhaps you are already thinking this way because you have experienced how a successful industrial network deployment delivered to spec, on budget, on time can still miss the mark.  The installation provided the data that the customer was looking for.  Except, that data was not the information the customer ultimately needed. 

Winners in the industrial networking markets know this.  They have already begun to change the way that they consider their business, products, people.  There are too many too name here, and it would be unfair to leave any out, but, we will be reporting on all of them in our 2010 Industrial Networking Market Intelligence Service. 

Question is:  Can they continue to dive deeper into their customers' operations to help them define, access, distribute and apply the key information that will enable the next great advancement in industrial agility?  Can they consistently meet customers where they live -- at the intersection of data and decision?  And if they can, will we see that evidenced in the next generation of hardware offerings, software products and services businesses? 

Our 2010 Industrial Networking Service should provide a good start to objectively answering those questions.

 

 

Functional Safety Solutions Market Expanding on Multiple Dimensions

Yesterday we held a webcast discussing summary results from our 2010 survey of users of functional safety solutions.

As the recent spate of industrial disasters continue to occupy headlines in business, technology and general interest media, the implementation of functional safety solutions has been highlighted as a critical operational, technical and financial management tool.

The benefits of investing in a functional safety program extend beyond simply satisfying regulations; functional safety also serves as a strategic tool—lowering costs, enhancing productivity and of course, improving safety.

Our data shows the market for functional safety solutions is rebounding as functional safety budgets grow and compliance requirements continue to develop. But the market is also faced with challenges, including cost barriers and lack of internal resources to implement or deploy these solutions.

To learn more about our findings, we encourage you to listen to the webcast recording and scroll through the slides below.

Functional Safety Solutions: Protecting Assets and Preventing Disasters

View more presentations from VDC Research Group.

What Powers UPS and Surge Suppressor End Users?

In yesterday's webcast, we discussed our most recent findings from our UPS and Surge Suppressor study, in which we surveyed both enterprise and consumer users of power protection technologies.

Until 2008, nearly all products and markets with the power protection industry were growing with strong CAGRs ranging from 5-12%. Then the recession hit. However, we expect the UPS market to improve over the next several years, although it is not likely to occur at the same growth CAGRs seen before 2008. This slow, but welcomed growth will come as changes in IT and operations priorities drive demand for UPS products.

For more details on our thoughts and to see some preliminary findings about the UPS and Surge Suppressor market, we encourage you to listen to the recording of the webcast or scroll through the slides below.

Changing Requirements Power Growth in UPS and Surge Suppressor Markets

View more presentations from VDC Research Group.

Top 5 Stats from VDC’s May 2010 Survey of Functional Safety Buyers

This week, VDC Research launched one of our regular polls of industrial automation buyers. The survey is currently open. Please feel free to jump to the survey now; or check out the top 5 stats culled from nearly 100 respondents and take the survey at the end.

1. Nearly 80% of respondents indicated having funded plans to evaluate or deploy a new, upgraded or extended safety solution.
2. 62% of respondents stated that the recession has/is having No Impact on their investment in functional safety solutions.
3. Almost 89% of respondents expect that their investment in functional safety solutions will remain level, or increase during the next 12 months.
4. Leading barriers to adoption of functional safety solutions in new applications cited by respondents included lack of internal resources, installation cost, maintenance cost and a lack of perceived need in certain applications.
5. Almost two thirds of respondents cited applications knowledge/support as competitive pricing as the two issues that would most influence their investment and source selection decisions.

Although it is appears that companies still place a high level of importance on ensuring their employees safety, they continue to face price pressures and cutbacks in resources which are causing them to demand more from their safety solution suppliers’ understanding and serving their specific application requirements.

VDC welcomes your feedback and perspectives on functional safety issues facing your company.  Please click here to take this short survey and receive a summary of the survey’s findings.

The Timing & Scope of Industrial Networking Solution Deployment is Changing

As discussed in a previous post, we recently took the pulse of industrial networking buyers  - and we presented the full set of data from that survey in a webcast yesterday - feel free to listen to the recording or scroll through the slides below to learn a little bit more.

Although we learned a lot with this survey, there are still many pressing questions:

• How can the demand be mapped along market segment dimensions?  Regional markets?  Verticals?  Applications?  Account types and tiers?
• What are the primary technical product/ solution selection criteria?  And how do they influence the tension between industrial and commercial grade offerings?
• What are the primary commercial vendor/ supplier selection criteria?  And how are they shaping the co-existence of industrial and commercial suppliers in these markets?
• What do price and margin trends look like?
• Given customers’ current requirements, preferences and practices, where are they most likely to go for information?  Purchasing?  Support?

We will dig into these questions in more detail in our Industrial Networking Infrastructure Products: 2010-1014 Market Requirements and Opportunity Analysis,  This study, currently in its founding sponsorship period, will help suppliers make the best product, market and channel development investment decisions by providing reliable, accurate, relevant and real-time data.

Industrial Networking Markets - 2010 User Requirements Update

View more presentations from VDC Research Group.

Top 5 Stats From VDC's March 2010 Survey of Industrial Networking Buyers

This week, VDC Research launched one of our regular polls of industrial automation buyers.  The survey is currently open.  Please feel free to jump to the survey now.  Or check out the top 5 stats culled from nearly 100 respondents and take the survey at the end.

1. 42% of respondents stated that the recession had/ is having No Impact on their investment in industrial networking infrastructure.

2. More than 75% of respondents expect that their investment in industrial networking infrastructure solutions will remain level, or increase during the next 2 years

3. Almost 60% of respondents will deploy both wireline and wireless solutions in upgrade and new industrial networking infrastructure solutions

4. Leading barriers to adoption of industrial networking infrastructure solutions in new applications cited by at least 50%of respondents include:  installation cost, security and reliability.

5. Approximately 70% of respondents cited lack of competitive pricing by their current suppliers as the issue they post would most influence their investment and source selection decisions. 

However, this market is revealing itself to be about a lot more than lower cost and more competitive pricing.  Our survey explores a number of other technical and commercial requirements and opportunities. 

If your team is responsible for the design, development, marketing, sale, integration, deployment or operation of industrial networking infrastructure, please take a few minutes to join us during our webcast next week. 

We will be exploring these issues and 10 others that are defining this exceptional opportunity. 

Industrial Networking Market: Ethernet and Integrators

In preparation for the release of our proposal for the study of the industrial networking market, we surveyed 25 of the top suppliers of industrial networking solutions and asked them what topics they were most interested in having us cover.

Two of the most highly rated requirements were:

1. Ethernet penetration in factory floor and process control environments; and
2. The rise of highest-value-adding integration and engineering firms as primary channels to market. 

Ethernet -- wireline and wireless -- occupies a dominant position in the product development roadmaps and go-to-market plans of every major supplier of industrial networking solutions.  This is true for both the emerging suppliers of standards-based solutions as it is for the leading suppliers of proprietary networking solutions.

Channel share of supplier revenues and user consumption continues to grow.  Most specifically, it is the higher-value-adding channels, engineering/ consulting firms and independent systems integrators, that are capturing more share of customer time and wallet. 

Why are ethernet and integrators so important to the industrial networking market?  Three reasons elevate among many others:

1. Changing investment priorities.  From innovation in the first part of the decade to cost reduction during the past 2 years, factory managers and process control engineers now need to balance both requirements.  As customer orders continue to fragment in requirements, shrink in average order value, and change in terms and conditions, industrial operations need to become more agile.  More agile than ever before.  In order to do that, they need to make more, sharper decisions, faster.  In order to do that, they need visibility.  They need access to information.  In many cases, that information exists, it is just not available at the point of application where the new decisions need to be made.  As such, their investment priorities are more focused on connecting systems to deliver information with decision makers. Oftentimes, these are smaller footprint, software, network management and systems integration projects.
   
2. Changing investment patterns.  In a recent study we conducted on the connected factory (application integration and database migration in factory floor and process control environments) we found that average project budgets were continuing to cascade.  We surveyed more than 400 buyers and their average project budget in 2010 was reaching downward to $50,000 -- a fraction of their budgets in 2007.  Primary factors driving this included a reflection of the shifting investment priorities and new cash management strategies in light of the recession and slow or no growth forecasts.
   
3. Trust and availability.  Buyers appear to have higher degrees of trust and loyalty with their local, application or vertical market-expert integrators and engineering consultants.  In many cases, factory managers and their engineering teams have worked with their local integration and engineering/ consulting partners through many projects over many years.  With most of the market still in the habit of layering new systems in over and with old systems versus ripping and replacing, the integrators supporting these approaches become closer to the center of gravity for these markets. 

To learn more about industrial networking, check back with us in a week when we launch our 2010 industrial networking proposal.  Additionally, we've got plenty of insights from our 2008 study here.