ABB Automation and Power World Event -Better and Bigger

ABB Automation and Power World Summary

ABB hosted its Automation and Power World 2015 (APW) event in Houston March 2-5. APW is the primary customer event for ABB in the Americas region, but many international customers also attended. This year's appropriate event theme, "Harnessing the Power of Change," featured a greatly streamlined agenda and much greater attendance than in the past. ARC delivered several presentations at the event. Significantly, ARC observed many process industry and utility end users remaining at the event through the end of the very last sessions.

While past APWs featured many market, technical, and product tutorial sessions, this year's agenda and exhibit were developed from an end user perspective. ABB reached out to many customers and worked with their customer advisory board to develop the conference program, which clearly resulted in a better event. Over 8,000 registered. Going forward, ABB plans to continue hosting APW in Houston, staging the event every other year.

Another agenda modification was a daily morning keynote session. The keynoters were ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer, retired Ford CEO Alan Mulally, and former US Airways pilot Chesley Sulllenberger. Mr. Sullenberger is famous for the "Miracle on the Hudson," where he made an emergency landing of an A320 aircraft in the Hudson River on a cold January morning in 2009, with all 155 passengers and crew escaping without serious injury. All three keynote presentations were excellent, with Mr. Speisshofer leading off.

ABB Automation and Power World Keynotes

Spiesshofer updated customers on ABB's new strategy and organization, which the company announced to financial analysts last September at ABB Capital Markets Day. From a customer perspective, the major change is that three consolidated regional business organizations will replace a much larger number of national units. In addition, customer intimacy is coming to the forefront, with major customers each having an ABB executive committee member designated to nurture the relationship.

ABB also wants to grow its support for the "Design" and "Operate" phases of the Design-Build-Operate asset lifecycle. While acquisitions have provided much of this type of growth in the past (Ventyx and Mincom, for example, which are now part of ABB Enterprise Software) existing products and businesses are focusing on these areas as well. A few examples that come to mind are the design capability that Thomas & Betts offers to its distributors and the ServicePort Service delivery platform for ABB's DCS installed base. This growth is not a one-way street, though, as the recent sale of ABB Full Service showed. ARC interprets this to mean that ABB sees itself in a supporting role with its customers' operations, rather than owning a major aspect of their asset lifecycle.

ABB Looks to Expand Its Presence at the "Ends" of the D-O-B Lifecycle
(Source: ABB)

Spiesshofer and the other keynoters were not shy about discussing values of the non-financial kind. ABB has articulated a set of five "value pairs" as internal models and criteria for customer evaluations. The next day's keynote presentation by retired Ford CEO Alan Mulally emphasized building a collaborative organizational culture within a large firm during periods of great distress. ARC found his story inspiring and agrees with the former CEO that Ford has become the thought leader in today's Detroit automotive ecosystem and the US auto industry.

Product News

No customer event would be complete without a number of product and partnership announcements. ABB highlighted that Ericsson chose its Decathlon software to serve as the DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) platform in its new cloud computing offering. Of greater interest to the automation world is the launch of the SD Series control and I/O products for ABB Symphony Plus DCS, used primarily in power generation and water utility applications. The I/O is designed for a temperature range of -20 to +70 degrees C. This enables it to support a wide variety of remote installations while using only passive cooling. Corrosion-resistant modules are also available in this temperature range. One of the virtues of new automation product designs is low energy consumption, an attribute that creates both installation flexibility and additional savings through reduced cooling requirements.

ABB SD Series Control and I/O for the Symphony Plus DCS
(Source: ABB)

ABB also reorganized this year's 120,000 square foot exhibit. Instead of dividing the space by ABB business unit, the exhibit space was designed with a "source-to-socket" theme, emphasizing the flow of energy from the customer viewpoint. ARC's usual take-away from an exhibit of ABB's full portfolio is how wide-ranging it is, and (as a result) the diversity of the company's customer base. Even within a typical customer firm (for example, an electric utility) ABB addresses numerous aspects of their business including DCS, plant auxiliaries, drives, SCADA, EMS/DMS/OMS, substations, transformers, relaying, distribution, renewable integration, asset management, etc. The difficult part for ABB is that within many customer organizations these functions remain very siloed, though that is beginning to change.

ARC Takeaways from ABB Automation and Power World

This year's event targeted a broader segment of ABB customers and succeeded. ARC noted significant numbers of end users attending. Many of these folks were long-term ABB automation customers, taking advantage of the event to update their knowledge of ABB. If ABB continues in this direction, it's likely that it will continue to break attendance records at future conferences.

For ABB itself, the new strategy likely means a period of integration/digestion following the frenetic pace of acquisitions that began with Ventyx in 2010. It is likely that more of the innovation going forward will involve employing these new capabilities in underserved areas of the asset lifecycles of ABB's existing customers.

In terms of working to grow at the "ends" of the design-build-operate lifecycle, ARC sees two major challenges; first is getting greater mindshare during the design phase. While ABB has done this quite well with close, long-term oil & gas customers such as Statoil, it requires a solution tailored for the vertical industry and in some circumstances to the individual customer. Second, ABB needs to offer customers a compelling rationale for moving away from the siloed response they receive from many customer organizations, especially utilities. The central question customers will be asking is how they can benefit from broader collaboration with ABB. At this point in time, ARC believes the answers are mainly related to business practices rather than technical cross-fertilization. That is appropriate for their present level of engagement, but in the long term the ABB portfolio would also benefit from greater common technology.

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Keywords: ABB, Automation, DCS, Energy, Process Automation, Power Generation.