industrial//industrial ecosystem//automation vendor

Automation vendors are the companies that sell the components of automation: PLC, DCS, HMI, SCADA, drives (VFD), remote I/O, instrumentation, networking and software. The big ones are Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, ABB, Emerson, Honeywell and Yokogawa.

Automation vendors are the companies that sell the components of automation: PLC, DCS, HMI, SCADA, drives (VFD), remote I/O, instrumentation, networking and software. The big ones are Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, ABB, Emerson, Honeywell and Yokogawa.

Their customers are plants, EPCs, integrators and OEMs, through any of the commercial chains (industrial ecosystem).

Each big vendor owns an ecosystem: its own industrial Ethernet (PROFINET for Siemens, EtherNet/IP for Rockwell, CC-Link IE for Mitsubishi), its own engineering tools, its own DCS platform. Choosing a vendor is choosing a network, a toolchain and the integrators who know them (industrial Ethernet).

The strategic incentive follows: the more integrated a plant is with one vendor's software, the higher its switching cost, and the longer the vendor earns on the aftermarket. The plant on the other side is a sophisticated buyer that knows what leaving would cost and prices it into every negotiation, which is why industrial deals are slow and hard.