Market Insights

Schneider Partners with Wipro in Industrial Automation.

Posted on 02 February, 2010 | Tags:

Schneider Electric, global specialist in energy management and IT major Wipro Ltd has recently joined hands in the field of Industrial Automation. Though business models for both the organizations are different, but the core strengths compliment each other. "Basic strength of Schneider Electric is in developing innovative solutions along with deployment and partnering with Wipro would help Schneider to consult, conceptualize, design and deploy the innovative solutions to provide value addition to customers," informs Pradeep Karnik, Director Industrial Automation, Schneider Electric (India) Pvt. Ltd.
India is one of the fastest emerging markets. With the depth of automation still limited, the opportunities are huge. Considering products, solutions, services, installed base services etc, estimated market size is more than Rs. 3500 crores. Wipro will market the products that include Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) in India.
Talking about the demand of MES solutions in Mining, Mineral Processing and Metal industries Karnik sees the demand rapidly increasing considering the requirement of delay management, tracking etc with high growth in infrastructure sector. Demand of automation technologies is expected to increase in metals, mining minerals that include cement, water and wastewater, food and beverages and pharmaceuticals industries.
The concept of developed and developing economies is now the thing of past, says Karnik. It has now changed to matured economy and developing economy. The simple connotation is there cannot be any economic sense and this is an ultimate question that one has to answer while developing strategy to have a gap. In fact new technologies are being developed specifically for developing economies.
China has grown leaps ahead in terms of manufacturing sector as compared with India, which has helped in faster acceptance of technologies as compared to India. However with the clear growth direction, India will also be ready to accept newer technologies faster considering the pressures on productivity, time to market etc.
As far as industrial automation is concerned I feel there is enough, maturity in the product per se. "What will differentiate and help the industry is the innovative services solutions," states Karnik.