Open up to software-defined automation

ONE ISSUE foremost among the practical pressures facing manufacturers across industry is the challenge of scaling efficiency gains beyond isolated pockets of automation. Framing this, Neil Smith asked, "How do you create an enterprise plant level?", pointing to the common problem of 'islands of automation' that fail to connect into a coherent, plant-wide system.

Compounding this is the issue of legacy technology; ageing control systems that cannot simply be ripped out without enormous cost and disruption. As Smith pointed out, the obvious fix to replace everything is rarely viable: "You rip it all out, you shut down for six months, twelve months, and then you rebuild. No one's going to thank you if that's your modernisation strategy!"

The Spotify analogy

To illustrate the shift he believes the industry needs to make, Smith used an analogy from outside manufacturing: the music industry. He traced its journey from physical media through digital files to streaming, noting that the real transformation wasn't digitisation itself but the move to an open, hardware-independent experience. "You don't have to have a specific hardware device in which to listen to your favourite music," he said, describing how a Spotify playlist now follows the user across a TV, a hotel room, or a hire car without reconfiguration.

Smith pointed out the parallels: In a traditional automation project, the first decision is always which hardware to buy, with the control application built around that choice afterwards. Software-defined automation reverses this sequence. 

"You take the application first," he explained. "This becomes application-centric development. What is the application? What is the device? What do I need it to do? I create the schema, then I can decide what hardware I choose to support."

Crucially, Smith was careful to distinguish Schneider's "open" approach from software-defined automation more broadly, a term he acknowledged has become increasingly used and "quite congested" among the sector over the past 18 months. The distinction, he argued, lies in vendor neutrality. Without it, he asserted, organisations simply trade one form of lock-in for another: bespoke configuration software and proprietary languages that mean "you're typically moving at the speed of someone else's business".

Vendor-neutral architecture

Technically, Smith described open software-defined automation as separating control logic from the underlying hardware, using containerisation to enable portability and resilience. 

"If you have a problem, you can move the application from one container to another," he said  – a container that might run on a different virtual machine, an industrial PC, or even directly on a drive. This, he argued, gives engineering teams genuine architectural choice rather than a single locked-in path.

Smith pointed to Schneider's own history as evidence of a long-standing commitment to open standards citing Modbus, which was originally a proprietary Schneider/Modicon protocol later released as a public standard, as a precedent for the company's current strategy. That strategy now centres on Universal Automation, the nonprofit consortium (uao.org) of which Schneider is a founding member, alongside more than 100 other technology vendors, end users, OEMs, and academic institutions, including UK partners such as the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland and Nottingham Trent University. 

EAE in practice

At the centre of Smith's presentation was Schneider's EcoStruxure Automation Expert (EAE) platform, which he described as "the first truly open software-defined automation solution on the market," spanning discrete, hybrid, and continuous process control under a single unified system, a span that he argued is essential for industries like dairy, which straddle process and discrete manufacturing within a single facility.

Smith cited two customer examples to illustrate results. GR3N, a plastics recycling company, adopted EAE partly to accelerate time to market, which Smith called critical for any company needing to control spending during scale-up. He also pointed to Paebbl, a carbon capture technology firm aiming to scale its process 2500 times within three years, as an example of EAE supporting rapid deployment during aggressive growth phases.

Underpinning much of this, Smith noted, is Schneider's deep integration with AVEVA, used by around 90% of its industrial customers, which combines EAE's control capabilities with AVEVA's data and engineering tools to create what Schneider calls Connect, a unified OT/IT data platform.

For UK manufacturers wrestling with legacy infrastructure, multi-vendor environments, and mounting competitive pressure, Smith's pitch was less about persuading them to standardise on Schneider exclusively, and more about removing vendor lock-in as a barrier to progress altogether. As he asserted: "That's not the reality of the world. Every customer has multiple technologies in it, and that has to no longer be a barrier to progress."

Neil Smith is segment president for consumer packaged goods at Schneider Electric

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