Schneider Electric’s Open Foxboro SDA Fuels Debate Between SDA and OSDA in Manufacturers' Digital Transformations

According to ABI Research, Software-Defined Automation (SDA) revenue will grow from US$380 million in 2025 to US$4.5 billion by 2035 (28.2% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)) as suppliers decouple hardware and software in the industrial automation tech stack to improve agility and enable more customized products. To this end, Schneider Electric unveiled Foxboro SDA—an open SDA Distributed Control System (DCS) and the latest tool in its Ecostruxure Automation Expert (EAE) industrial automation platform—to provide process manufacturers with a digitally centralized location to execute broad control decisions in factories. The open SDA aspect of Foxboro DCS means that hardware is decoupled from software, allowing devices from third parties to interoperate with the Schneider Electric automation environment. The benefit to customers is more rapid deployment and integration than typical DCS solutions, allowing for quicker scaling and adaptation to a changing market. However, this changing landscape is challenging legacy systems and their associated standards in an increasingly digitalized manufacturing ecosystem.

Whether to shift or maintain current standards is a key discussion in this decoupling. Currently, Industrial Automation (IA) stacks are built on the IEC 61131 standard, utilizing object-oriented programming languages similar to Operational Technology (OT) ladder logic. Most IA suppliers are prioritizing this standard due to customer familiarity and makes SDA more of a technological transformation, rather than the ecosystem transformation implicit in Open SDA, which Schneider Electric is evangelizing under the new IEC 61499 standard. The difference between IEC 61131 and IEC 61499 is that IEC 61131 builds code blocks that mirror traditional Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) logic, whereas IEC 61499 is more responsive to environmental changes. The result is an industry-wide division along the lines of openness, creating four divergent approaches: hardware-only (software agnostic), software-only (hardware agnostic), SDA-oriented (for providers of hardware & software), and Open Software-Defined Automation (OSDA) (hardware & software agnostic).

The SDA-oriented perspective is represented by firms such as Siemens, Bosch Rexroth, and Rockwell Automation, which sell both hardware and software solutions, making them more reluctant to join an open ecosystem that could potentially commoditize their current revenue models. For such suppliers, the rise of SDA is an opportunity to shift revenue, from hardware sales to a recurring software-based business model.

Schneider Electric is the leading champion of OSDA, fully decoupling software and hardware, aiming to set the entire transition toward hardware-software agnosticism. This defines OSDA as a modularized automation environment where different software and hardware from different vendors interact seamlessly. However, the challenge is getting an entire user base to shift standards from IEC 61131 to IEC 61499 due to high costs associated with migrating legacy codebases. The practical implication of these challenges is that Schneider Electric is currently the primary adopter, making IEC 61499 appear less open and interoperable than professed.

Software- or hardware-only vendors, consisting of firms such as CODESYS and Phoenix Contact, respectively, do not experience the same pressures as vendors of hardware and software because they are required to be open to exist. These firms could benefit from OSDA, due to the existing business model being modular solutions.

Schneider Electric faces two considerable challenges when it comes to OSDA: change management and true openness. Manufacturers will struggle with a change in standards due to legacy infrastructure built around IEC 61131, hindering a transition to Schneider Electric’s EAE, as updating the logic to a new standard is time-consuming. This problem is compounded by the limited availability of OT/Information Technology (IT)-capable workers, even in the common standard; this means Schneider Electric must alleviate the extra burden of switching, providing materials to upskill to an event-driven ecosystem, a more intensive and time-consuming training than competitors offer. Working with Systems Integrators (SIs) will be important for getting manufacturers to commit to upskilling and convincing stakeholders of a true open ecosystem in this standard, avoiding creating another locked-in environment and requiring new partners—a step taken with software-agnostic Phoenix Contact.

For other SDA-oriented vendors, the key advantage is the existing customer comfort with object-oriented programming. This enables providing tools to upskill and bring in a new generation of workers familiar with object-oriented programming to address the shortage. However, customers could lean toward OSDA if tools supporting the codebase change become available and easy to use. In this event, creating pools of partnerships with other vendors to support interoperability between hardware and software could be a protective intermediary in the opening phase to ease the transition off hardware revenue dependence.

For vendors slow or unwilling to adopt SDA-driven solutions, such as Mitsubishi Electric, sticking with just hardware solutions, joining in the OSDA ecosystem and becoming a software-enabled and agnostic firm will be critical to avoid falling out of favor with customers. Enabling this interoperability with software will eat into current margins, but it avoids the costs of becoming a software-developing firm, or even total obsolescence. A more costly, but survivable option is to invest rapidly and create their own SDA environment, enabling more control of their future. Most customers are currently remaining on the IEC 61131 standard, making the burdens associated with shifting to IEC 61499 major barriers for software suppliers. Hardware manufacturers face this barrier less, with Phoenix Contact already joining Schneider Electric’s OSDA ecosystem.