Since industrial automation is such a fragmented business, most new product ideas come from relatively small companies. All the large companies have a conglomeration of products, each with relatively small volume, but lumped together to form sizeable businesses.

Indeed, many industrial mini-conglomerates such as Spectris and Ametek, plan their continued growth through acquisition and combination of lots of small companies. An exception to the small company innovation rule was Distributed Control Systems (DCS), a mix of several important innovations developed in the early 1970s by a team of engineers at Honeywell. This generated a new category, which achieved $ 100 million annual revenue within just a couple of years, and the Segment has since expanded to several billions of dollars worldwide.

The other major automation segment to achieve significance, also in 1970s, was the programmable logic controller (PLC). This breakthrough innovation was the brainchild of prolific inventor Dick Morley, who was with Bedford Associates, a small development company that worked for Modicon (now part of Schneider).

The first PLCs were for specific applications—reprogrammable test installations in the automobile manufacturing business replacing hard-wired relay-logic, which was hard to modify. This innovation resulted in a market segment that has also grown to several billions of dollars worldwide.

Another major industrial automation segment is supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA. This loose conglomeration of products have long been the realm of systems integrators, Fragmented among several markets and applications. Networked personal computers (PCs) and Windows-based HMI, or human- machine interface, software arrived in the late 1980s and 1990s.

After that, several innovative start-ups, like Wonderware and Intellution, grew fairly rapidly, offering HMI software with connections to remote PLCs and industrial input/output devices. Sensors and actuators are major segments of industrial automation. Rosemount started with resistance temperature

detectors but grew rapidly with development of innovative capacitive differential pressure sensors, which overtook the traditional instrumentation leaders.

Fisher Controls started in Iowa by Bill Fisher, making innovative valves and actuators. Monsanto then acquired it, and then later Emerson picked it up. Interestingly, both Rosemount and Fisher tried to grow by branching out into DCS, but their offerings were relatively insignificant until Emerson put them together with PCs and software to generate leadership with DeltaV. So, where will the next big surge of growth come from? If you listen to some of the major suppliers, wireless is a definite possibility, provided someone can introduce innovative wireless products rapidly, at a breakthrough price, without getting bogged down in prolonged standards negotiations. This could spark new phase of growth that will reenergize industrial automation.