Summary
Despite the current volatility in oil prices; the need to transport, store, and distribute oil, natural gas, LNG, refined petroleum products, and petrochemicals continues to grow. Petroleum product terminals play a key role in this supply chain.
For decades, upstream operating companies have been employing some sort of artificial lift technology to increase production of mature wells, both onshore and offshore. The technology is also being widely employed in newer, unconventional wells to help offset the steeper decline rates and maximize the production over the life of an individual well.
India has the world's fifth largest coal reserves and, as an affordable commodity, coal may remain the fuel of choice for a long time to come. Given this backdrop and the need to rapidly add new capacity in the power generation sector to meet the supply-demand gap while complying with environmental regulations, it becomes imperative to adopt technologies that increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired thermal power plants.
The year-over-year growth of the worldwide enterprise software market accelerated in the third quarter of 2014. Growth in the EMEA region, cloud subscriptions, and acquisition activity were the major contributors to overall growth. The euro appreciated with respect to the dollar just by over 0.2 percent from Q3 2013 to Q2 2014. This exchange rate fluctuation did not have a substantial effect on the overall reported growth rate of the market.
Global pharmaceutical company Novartis has grown over the years due to acquisitions. Today, the company aims to increase transparency and simplify its governance structures and employee empowerment. To this end, Novartis recently implemented a common shared services organization. As we learned during Antonio Buendia's presentation at the OSIsoft EMEA Users Conference in Lisbon, Sept 22, 2014, this philosophy also impacts manufacturing.
Effective patch management is an important element of a comprehensive security program for industrial control systems (ICS). The complexity and criticality of this environment present specific challenges to asset owners. They need practical guidance that acknowledges and addresses these challenges. The ISA99 committee has provided this type of guidance in the ISA-TR62443-2-3 technical report.
The Indian information technology (IT) services sector continues its momentum, with most of the IT services companies covered exhibiting high double-digit growth. In this report, we try to analyze the second quarter of financial year 2014-15 of the Indian IT sector and compare it with same period in the previous year.
In late 2011, a new term entered the world of manufacturing: "Industrie 4.0." Half concept, half initiative, and clearly a catchphrase; the term was introduced in Germany by the Fraunhofer Institute and the German federal government, with support from a large number of suppliers. Industrie 4.0 describes a vision for the future of industry that combines information and manufacturing technologies to take advantage of the information surrounding industrial processes.
Today's imperatives call for more flexible production across both the dis-crete and process manufacturing industries. This can include being able to produce a greater number of products or different product grades in smaller batches or lots, rapidly changing from one product grade or recipe to another, or actually modifying plants quickly by reassembling lines or equipment using modular process technology.
Executive Overview
A recent ARC Advisory Group survey indicated that the mood of the automation market is in a state of flux, with the ratio of those respondents who are "optimistic" to "pessimistic" shifting continuously over the course of the survey. This was driven by macroeconomic and political developments, rather than factors directly related to the automation market.