Hannover Messe 2017 Raised The Bar For An International Industrial Conference.

Since our last visit to Hannover Messe two years ago while it still billed itself as an industrial equipment showcase, #HM17 is now at its heart an Industrial-IoT conference with an equipment showcase included. And a show at an impressive scale. This is the industrial central, hardcore in the truest sense. (& this praise coming from a former engineer that once spent time sleeves rolled-up inside of the largest manufacturing environments). There truly aren’t many global events that matched the size, organization and content quality this year as HM17. With nine packed exhibit halls (each an equivalent of San Francisco’s Moscone Center), it was practically impossible for this jet-lagged analyst to sample everything HM17 had to offer this week, and still do justice to prescheduled business meetings, content sessions and those insightful side-conversations.

We picked one company for Part-1 of our Hannover Messe report series. As always, ArcInsight Partners appreciates the time companies spend with us on 1:1 conversations and analyst briefings during conference appearances .

We have observed Schneider Electric show up on keynote stage at nearly every global IIoT conference last year, parading its CTO recycle the same big picture slide-deck. Yet the company has in the past faced nagging challenges articulating a clear product positioning to a broader IIoT marketplace analysts.

This year however, the company did a nice job describing its latest offerings and present get a credible Industry 4.0 story, weaving its architecture brand EcoStruxture and a newly launched app-development environment called System Platform 2017. Here’s our take.

A Microsoft software partner in the past, Schneider Electric has origins in the old world power industry making switch-gears, industrial circuit-breakers, power & motor controls, process-control components, sensors, power & motor controls, shop-floor HMI. It acquired Wonderware/Invensys in 2014 to add manufacturing execution systems to its portfolio. There is a natural legacy focus on four core vertical markets – Utilities & Power-grids, Continuous-process Manufacturing, Data-center operations, and Buildings-automation.

Broadly EcoStruxture (not the catchiest of brand names) is Schneider Electric’s architecture-brand that it offers customers looking to connect edge-assets and route operational performance data through its own edge-control offerings all the way to the cloud, while making it easier to develop domain-specific applications on this. It insists on being cloud-brand agnostic.

System Platform 2017: The company continues its end-to-end IoT stack story with the new applications development environment. With this Schneider Electric is looking to connect its plant-floor monitoring (edge-control loops) to a system-platform where operational data gets aggregated to run higher-end analytics (correlations, derivative KPI generation for business reporting, and combines enterprise platform data (SAP / Oracle / Infor / Epicor / others). The classic IT/OT convergence pitch.

Leaving the old Wonderware legacy behind, System Platform 2017 (another generic mouthful) redefines it with a new architecture for tag management, among others. A very interesting capability of SP17 was a situational awareness feature that uses contextual information about the end-user to pull up the most relevant design components for a specific end-user/operator (enhanced graphics, visualization and navigation) for the best user-experience by quickly displaying only the most useful actionable intelligence on any device.

This is a powerful feature when considering just one sample end-user segment – “the plant operator”, confront an array of process monitoring information being displayed on panels every shift for decision-making and action. This operator faces significant “cognitive-overload” in the course of here shift, often requiring her to interact with an average of 24 different applications, either to access new information or to communicate with colleagues and the rest of her operations community. We wrote about this in an earlier piece “An Experience Layer For The Industrial Internet“. The use-case here illustrates the tremendous value of user-centered design even in the industrial world. 

SIMULATING A PLANT EMERGENCY: Imagine the simple example of an operator managing a municipal water treatment plant from a remote offsite control station when several alarms go off in the plant, and fills his control panel with multiple flashing red icons and alert messages. The human brain is usually very good at focusing on one alarm at a time, recognizing its implication and logically resolving root-cause parameters to the point where the alert stops flashing and the system reverts to normal operating state. Now consider an escalated situation with 20 different alarms going off simultaneously as adifferent experience. The operator is now required to first process a simultaneous stream of fast moving inputs, then prioritize them for triage, before recognizing the best course of action that minimizes the most imminent operations risk. With such an overwhelming burst of new inputs, the brain of an average operator may simply shut down or (worse) go into reactionary mode, worsening an already bad emergency situation. Only the rare operator with substantial experience, expertise and a calm demeanor can manage situations (such as this) effectively.   The bad news: the industrial world is fast running out of such experienced operators with that rare combination of skills and experience.

Industrial product innovation has evolved beyond Operating Reliability to Features & Functionality in the last two decades. In the last couple of years, Functionality has progressed beyond its one-dimensional emphasis on technology and moved forward to focus on Operator Interface dynamics, as well. And Interactions logically lead one to the realm of holistic Virtual Experiences.

In short, the goal of System Performance 2017 is to enable building re-usable industrial applications and content with the ease of building web page that allows the most relevant pieces of operational performance data and contextual workflow information to be presented to the end-user in the most intuitive manner, to enable effective outcomes. “This engineering work can now be done with practically zero customization and scripting, and provides seamless integration with a diverse variety of industrial hardware and software, according to Norm Thorlakson, Vice President, HMI & Supervisory Software for Schneider Electric.

ARCINSIGHT PARTNERS’ OBSERVATIONS:

An end-to-end stack offering story is an effective one that gets attention in the industrial-IoT world. And Schneider Electric has most of the pieces in-house to back this up.

• At its Connected-Assets Layer it has sensors and RFID tags, edge-gateway devices, metering devices, and other components.
• At its Edge Closed-loop Control Layer, its has products covering industrial automation components covering intelligent power & motor control center, traditional SCADA/PLC type components.
• At the top, the Analytics, Applications and Services Layer, enabled by SP-2017 is connected via its EcoStruxture architecture to any major vendor cloud. The key pieces come from its Wonderware legacy (a few others) to support capabilities such as process engineering, planning & scheduling, plant operations management, asset performance management and information management.

The Good News Here: This is a go-to-market story only a handful of industrial players can create without filling their portfolio gaps with a string of partnerships (for real deployments or PR purposes). The obvious ones are GE, Honeywell, Siemens, ABB, a few others. Schneider Electric’s strengths clearly lie in the two bottom layers where it has its legacy offerings. System Platform 2017 is its latest attempt to fortify the top layer, which the company does by offering a marketplace of industrial apps supported by its own internal developer base and its community of 4000 industrial app partners adding a 160,000 additional developers.

The Not-So-Good News: This is a IIoT catch-up effort by Schneider Electric. It mirrors what GE Digital spent a lot of its marketing dollars past three years promising the world a brand new trend in industrial management (it has since run through many acquisitions & partnerships to cover the gap and messaging changes to keep the market’s attention, while staying focused to deliver on that ultimate vision. Its remains a work in progress). Simply put, the stack-story has been marketed many times in industrial-IoT over the last two years by multiple players. See an earlier article by ArcInsight Partners: “GE’s Predix – Looking At The Road Ahead”. There are over 400 IoT platforms (in some form or another) claiming to connect assets at the edge to data-aggregation in the cloud as a way to run sophisticated applications, without much differentiation. All vying for share-of-voice and share-of-mind in this rapidly commoditizing marketplace. The more visible ones include GE’s Predix, PTC’s ThingWorx, Siemens’ Mindsphere, ABB’s Agility, and a host of other semi-industrial ones.

So what should one expect to see Schneider Electric pitching at Hannover Messe 2018? Perhaps an Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality/Mixed Reality story to keep up with the hottest new fashion accessory in industrial-IoT – a la Microsoft Holo Lens. We shall wait and see.