Expanded range of software solutions for the industrial cloud

Plex Sys­tems, a lead­ing orig­i­nal cloud plat­form for large-scale intel­li­gent man­u­fac­tur­ing, and Rock­well Automa­tion, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), a large indus­tri­al automa­tion and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion com­pa­ny, announced the acqui­si­tion of Plex Sytems by Rock­well Automa­tion for $2.2 billion.

Plex Sys­tems pro­vides the sin­gle-instance, mul­ti-ten­ant SaaS plat­form for large-scale man­u­fac­tur­ing and includes advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing man­age­ment sys­tems and qual­i­ty and sup­ply chain man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties. The com­pa­ny has more than 700 cus­tomers and man­ages more than 8 bil­lion trans­ac­tions per day. Plex’s soft­ware capa­bil­i­ties will fur­ther lever­age its advan­tages thanks to Rock­well Automa­tion’s glob­al mar­ket reach, com­ple­men­tary indus­try exper­tise and abil­i­ty to turn real-time data into the basis for data-dri­ven decisions.

“The acqui­si­tion will sup­port our strat­e­gy to deliv­er the Con­nect­ed Enter­prise and accel­er­ate val­ue cre­ation for our cus­tomers as they adopt cloud solu­tions into their oper­a­tions for greater resilience, agili­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The com­bi­na­tion of Plex’s cut­ting-edge cloud tech­nol­o­gy with Rock­well’s soft­ware port­fo­lio and spe­cif­ic exper­tise is valu­able to cus­tomers and cre­ates new oppor­tu­ni­ties for suc­cess. In addi­tion, the acqui­si­tion will accel­er­ate the growth of our soft­ware rev­enue and strength­en our rev­enue from recur­ring revenue.”

- Blake Moret, pres­i­dent and CEO of Rock­well Automation

For man­u­fac­tur­ers, the imme­di­ate require­ment to increase pro­duc­tion and improve resilience while dri­ving effi­cien­cy and com­pli­ance is a grow­ing con­cern. Com­pa­nies must look for ways to aug­ment their man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems with mod­ern, cloud-based man­u­fac­tur­ing man­age­ment sys­tems that are easy to deploy, use and main­tain. The Plex plat­form helps cus­tomers con­nect, auto­mate, track and ana­lyze oper­a­tional process­es and their asso­ci­at­ed sup­ply chains.

“Rock­well strong­ly believes that data and tech­nol­o­gy are the foun­da­tion for trans­form­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing and indus­try oper­a­tions,” said Bryan Shep­herd, senior vice pres­i­dent of soft­ware and con­trol at Rock­well Automa­tion. “Com­bined with the advanced asset main­te­nance and man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties we recent­ly acquired with Fiix, Rock­well has a strong port­fo­lio of orig­i­nal cloud solu­tions for our cus­tomers’ man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems once the Plex acqui­si­tion is complete.”

“Plex has always been more than just a com­pa­ny,” said Bill Berut­ti, CEO of Plex. “We are lead­ing the way to smart man­u­fac­tur­ing while serv­ing as a trust­ed part­ner to more than 700 man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies world­wide. Join­ing forces with Rock­well Automa­tion ben­e­fits our cus­tomers as well as our part­ners and employ­ees by expand­ing our reach and influ­ence, and advanc­ing our mis­sion to move man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es to the cloud.”