Vimal Kapur and Jason Urso (now returned to his duties as Chief Technology Officer) laid down a challenge for other vendors today by stating that the control system was going to the cloud– it is inevitable, Urso said, and is already happening with some SCADA functionality. This will lead to what they boldly called, “The Last Migration.” All the large automation companies have been operating on a business model that uses upgrades and migrations to keep money flowing from their customers. This, it is obvious, is something Honeywell wants to change. What this will lead to is a software-based control schema in which hardware is subordinated to the software, both in the field controller and in what used to be the DCS– which will be moving to the cloud…
More on this soon.