“We have set some really ambitious targets about where we want to take the manufacturing world,” declared Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and chief executive officer of Invensys Operations Management (IOM, www.iom.invensys.com), Plano, Texas, in a keynote address at the company’s OpsManage’09 user conference Nov. 3-5 in Anaheim, Calif.

The OpsManage event replaced the annual conference previously known as WonderWorld, sponsored by Wonderware—one of four units of London-based Invensys plc that were merged last May to form IOM. Other units that make up the new IOM division include Invensys Process Solutions (IPS, which includes Avantis, Foxboro, SimSci-Esscor and Triconex), along with U.K.-based Eurotherm and IMServ.

Will it stick?

Partners exhibiting on the OpsManage Expo floor expressed mixed opinions about the reorganization. “Let’s see how long they stick with this one,” said a representative at one systems integrator booth, in a reference to past uncertainties involving Invensys strategies and organizational structures. But Bhattacharya, who most recently served as president of Wonderware, portrayed the IOM reorganization as one that brings the right focus to the market at the right time.

IPS is “one of the largest and most successful automation companies,” and is strong in safety, control, and advanced optimization applications, he said, while Eurotherm is “very strong in mid-sized controllers.” When combined with Wonderware, which is strong in manufacturing software and infrastructure, and IMServ, which serves the energy monitoring space, the IOM division is well-positioned in both hardware and software to provide solutions for a new set of “macro problems” faced by process and hybrid manufacturers today, Bhattacharya said.

The IOM employee base seems to be on board with the changes. Since the reorganization, an “adversarial” relationship that existed previously between Wonderware and IPS has been replaced by a new spirit of cooperation, one Wonderware manager told Automation World . And as at another IOM conference held in Houston in September, IOM employees who spoke with Automation World at OpsManage were uniformly enthused with their new roles and outlook. Despite the recession, overall attendance at the OpsManage event was about 715, up by around 10 percent over last year’s WonderWorld conference, according to IOM sources.

Fundamental change

In his keynote, Bhattacharya said that the timing of the IOM reorganization was important, because it comes as “the manufacturing market is undergoing some fundamental changes.”

Five years ago, the primary concerns of process manufacturers were productivity and quality, he said. But today, engineers and managers must grapple with an expanded set of issues. These include sustainability and energy concerns; an increased focus on real-time metrics; a need to capture or replace expertise lost through a pending wave of retirements; and control requirements that are no longer limited just to plant automation, but to control of the business as a whole.

No vendor to date has been able to holistically capture and provide a solution for this new set of macro problems, Bhattacharya said. But he expressed confidence that the new IOM business model will enable the company “to morph into the one that can do this.”

Bhattacharya compared the task needed in manufacturing to that undertaken by enterprise resource planning (ERP) suppliers. The ERP market did not exist 30 years ago, he said. It was created when suppliers including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft developed packaged ERP solutions by stitching together a range of applications such as supply-chain planning, materials-resource planning, human relations, accounting and others. “When we stitched the whole process together, we realized that the bottleneck in this real-time world has now started to become manufacturing,” said Bhattacharya, who served as an SAP executive prior to joining Wonderware in 2007.

Enterprise control

So to solve this problem, “our vision is to be able to build what we call an enterprise control system, leveraging the full understanding we have of the automation world, of the control world, leveraging the core understanding we have of the software world and the information management world, and stitching those worlds together,” Bhattacharya explained.

In a subsequent keynote session, Rashesh Mody, IOM vice president, portfolio and strategy, expanded upon Bhattacharya’s comments with a detailed discussion of the company’s product roadmap. It incorporates an open system platform, upon which applications will be built, with yet another layer of industry-specific solutions above that.

Both Bhattacharya and Mody emphasized the importance of the company’s “partner ecosystem,” which enables the company’s 3,000-plus partners to contribute their expertise and innovation in the development of needed industry applications, which can then be incorporated into the IOM platform.

This is an approach that IOM ...