Managing Automation - February 2008 - (Page 9) Last year, however, Oracle slapped SAP with a lawsuit claiming that SAP used the unit to illegally download proprietary information from Oracle’s support Web site. SAP officials have admitted limited culpability in the case. In November 2007, the company announced a major management shuffle at TomorrowNow, with CEO Andrew Nelson being replaced by Mark White. At that time, SAP also said it was considering a sale of TomorrowNow. A trial on Oracle’s charges has been set for early next year. (SAP declined to discuss its plans for TomorrowNow.) SAP’s statement that it may sell has undermined TomorrowNow’s position in the market, says Seth Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street Inc., which sells third-party maintenance services to users of Oracle applications Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards. “If you put yourself in play, it’s hard to do well in the marketplace,” Ravin says. “These are longterm deals. Nobody makes a move [to thirdparty maintenance] for 12 months. Customers want to know you are going to be around.” Ravin says Rimini Street has won several deals over TomorrowNow since SAP’s announcement. Overall, he says, Rimini Street’s 2007 fourth quarter was the company’s biggest to date. “The state of the market is healthy, alive, and growing,” insists Ravin, who is expected to announce early in 2008 Rimini Street’s expansion into additional product lines. Despite signs that the third-party maintenance market retains momentum, no major vendors have entered the space since SAP’s purchase of TomorrowNow. Analysts attribute that, in part, to reluctance on the part of many established IT services partners to ruffle the feathers of big ISVs such as SAP and Oracle. “The big system integrators and consultants have much more to gain by being aligned with the ISVs than competing with them on maintenance,” says Dana Stiffler, an analyst at AMR Research. SCHNEIDER WAGES WAR AGAINST COUNTERFEITING I n a protracted but rarely noticed battle against counterfeit electrical products, Schneider Electric’s Square D division has taken on the role of detective, tracking down wayward distributors and tracing trails of evidence to find and sue key players in the lucrative trade in knockoff goods. For Square D, a maker of circuit breakers for home and business use, it’s not only revenue at stake; it’s customers’ lives and property. The scourge of counterfeit products has dogged the company for decades, but only recently have officials seen fakes that are “almost indistinguishable on the outside.” Steve Litchfield, who serves as assistant general counsel at Square D, says powerful computer design applications have helped close the gap between real and fake products in recent years. The bogus goods enter the stream of commerce “through the brokers, the unauthorized wholesalers, the guys that deal just on the Internet — people that buy and resell basically on price only,” Litchfield says. How those products get to the U.S market is a matter of some speculation. “It’s possible that the distribution channels of the drug traffickers have been shifted to be used by the counterfeiters because the counterfeit products seem to garner much less prosecutorial attention than cocaine,” he says. That lack of attention — Litchfield says that, as far as he knows, no sellers of counterfeit Square D products have been arrested in the United States — has turned Schneider into its own police force. Most of the company’s success stems from the first lawsuit it filed, in April 2006, against a wholesaler who sold counterfeit products. Through subpoenas and an investigation of the offender’s records, the company was able to track where the wholesaler sold the products and from Steve Litchfield whom he had bought them. Schneider has filed a total of 12 lawsuits in its anti-counterfeiting campaign. The company is attacking the problem on other fronts, too. Litchfield says company officials are hopeful that they can prevail upon government offices, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Justice, and the FBI, to bring criminal cases against offenders. “We’re trying to put together a complete picture of the situation so that we can get the attention of the government and gain successful prosecution,” he says. Square D is also working with the National Scan M Back inMA MA FEBRUARY 2007 anufacturers were moving forward on three network fronts, as converged voice and data capabilities, wireless communications, and network-enabled machinery all held the promise of increased efficiency and lower costs. A compilation of shipment data from a variety of research houses confirmed that the convergence of IP networks was changing the way people and machinery interacted. MA examined the upside and potential downside of installing an IP-based network. MA FEBRUARY 2003 T he distinction between traditional hardware controllers (PLCs) and software-based PC-based controllers was disappearing, MA declared. Manufacturers such as General Motors were opting for common control architectures that gave them the freedom to use either hardwareor software-based controllers. And the two technologies were merging into a standards-based, multi-dimensional hybrid that let manufacturers choose the best options for their particular applications. M A F E B R UA RY 19 9 8 A s manufacturers were facing increasingly time-critical competition and pressure to trim costs, software and hardware systems vendors were coming up with products for multi-site, global operations. A host of technologies were available to manufacturers, including enterprise resource planning, NT, and the Internet. With this in mind, MA pitched a series of questions to five IT experts at manufacturers aimed at uncovering their biggest challenges and how they picked their enterprise technologies. M A F E B R UA RY 19 9 3 ieldbus, a set of standards to govern communications among digital control devices, was finally set to emerge after a lengthy and politically charged international standards effort. MA explored what the potential benefits might be and whether the manufacturing industry was likely to embrace the international standard, after all, or stick with national and vendor-based protocols. F 9 February 2008
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