Top Wildly Used PLC right now ?

[kick 0]

A list of Top 4 or 5 widely used PLC in wild right now ?

Thanks.

[CapinWinky 2]

The top few are currently:

Rockwell
Siemens
Mitsubishi
Schneider-Electric
B&R
Omron
Beckhoff

Rockwell and Siemens are clearly the top two and account for 50% combined though who is bigger at any one point in time is up for debate and the numbers are fuzzy because they sometimes include crap that is outside of core PLC products, like buttons and terminal blocks. They mostly trade market share with each other since they are similar ideology.

Mitsubishi used to have Asia wrapped up, but is in rapid decline as Asia branches out to foreign platforms and Mitsubishi fails to penetrate other markets. They are also the more traditional paradigm, like Rockwell/Siemens.

Schneider-Electric keeps buying other brands and then running them into the ground, so they're constantly losing market share only to buy more of it. The core of that problem is that they carry wildly different PLC lines but upper management doesn't seem to realize that lines like Modicon and ELAU (now PacDrive) are completely different paradigms. You can't sell these two completely different controls to the same customer and set them up with the expectation that they are in any way similar or you will end up with a frustrated customer looking for a new platform.

B&R, Omron and Beckhoff are all scrapping it out for 5th place with similar numbers. B&R and Beckhoff are eternal rivals with very similar offerings; both growing rapidly as they win over customers looking for a more advanced platform. B&R was clearly winning this fight until Beckhoff managed to win over a lot more 3rd party support for their EtherCAT fieldbus than B&R has secured for their Ethernet Powerlink fieldbus. However, a chip from TI that supports both of these and more and is priced to corner the component market will likely mean 3rd party support for both fieldbuses and nudge B&R ahead again.

Omron is the most interesting case. It seems like they are trying to transition from a Rockwell-like platform to a B&R-like platform, but are doing it in a much smarter way than Schneider-Electric; they seem to fully realize the magnitude of the change they are making and doing damage control with existing customers, managing expectations of new customers, and training their existing sales force. I'm not sure if their middle ground tech offering is going to cut it though; engineers comfortable enough to go that far would be comfortable enough to go the whole 9 yards to a B&R or Beckhoff. I have no idea if they are growing, but I know they aren't growing as fast as B&R and Beckhoff both have long since passed the 2006 Omron numbers (the last publicly available numbers on global market share).

 

There are tons of other platforms of almost the same size as B&R/Omron/Beckhoff, many with larger total company sales, but smaller PLC sales. Here is a full list of anyone with noticeable market share:
ABB, Altus, B&R Industrial Automation, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, Delta Electronics, Eaton, Festo, Fuji Electric, GE Intelligent Platforms, Hitachi, HollySys, IDEC, Koyo Electronics Industries, Lenze, LS Industrial Systems, Mitsubishi Electric, OMRON, Panasonic, Phoenix Contact, Rockwell Automation, Saia-Burgess Controls/Honeywell, Schneider Electric, Sharp, Siemens, Sigmatek, Toshiba, VIPA/Yaskawa, Yokogawa

I know of a few that don't make that list because their current market share is tiny, but are worth noting anyway, but right now, only Keba comes to mind. They tightly combine PLC and Robotics through traditional robot controller commands rather than CNC style commands (like B&R) or function blocks (like Elau/PacDrive/Schneider-Electric).

Edited 1 Jul 2016 by CapinWinky