ABB announced as DCS market leader for 21st year

Distributed control systems (DCS) are central to automation in the energy and process industries, playing a key role within Industry 4.0 and representing a global market valued at $15 billion. A recent report published by the ARC Advisory Group confirmed that, in a highly competitive landscape, ABB remains the top DCS market leader for the 21st year running, with an overall share of 19.2% of the market.

The largest share of DCS market growth came from oil and gas, chemicals, mining, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, followed by food and beverage, metals, cement, and pulp and paper. With its two main DCS offerings, ABB Ability System 800xA and ABB Ability Symphony Plus, ABB has a strong presence in each of these segments. ABB is also said to be a leader in several of the key DCS trends identified in the report, including modular automation, batch, characterisable I/O and remote services.

“I want to thank our customers for their longstanding support, helping us to shape ABB’s automation offering and expertise into what it is today,” said Bernhard Eschermann, Chief Technology Officer, ABB Industrial Automation. “Automation makes a difference in the world around us. The DCS is the backbone for much of the digitalisation transforming our customers’ industries. It helps to provide many of the elements essential to modern society, such as the water we drink, the energy we consume or the materials used to build our homes.

“During more robust economic times, process industry producers often rely on new production machinery to increase output. In the current highly demanding economic environment, customers are squeezing as much value as they can out of existing assets, running as efficiently as possible to protect profit margins.

“Maximising assets and efficiencies is what DCS do,” he added. “We see it as our duty to continue to develop solutions that offer these benefits and more for our customers.”

A key focus of ABB’s annual $1.5 billion research and development investment is the further expansion of DCS and other digital and automation capabilities in the context of Industry 4.0. In July, ABB brought two new offerings to market that use DCS data with value-added applications to improve customer production availability, process performance and product quality. The ABB Ability Edgenius Operations Data Manager gleans value from DCS data, while the ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite combines data from operations (eg, DCS), engineering and information technology for multidimensional data analytics and decision support.