After it was announced that Sullair was being purchased by private equity firms BC Partners (www.bcpartners.com) and The Carlyle Group (www.carlyle.com) from Hamilton Sundstrand (www.hamiltonsundstrand.com), the party had begun.
More recently, Bentley Systems (www.bentley.com) acquired Ivara, an asset performance management software company that we've written about before in Plant Services when its solution was used in ArcelorMittal Flat Roll Operations’ 12 facilities (http://www.plantservices.com/articles/2011/06-reliability-centered-maintenance-optimizes-production.html).
The thought is that Ivara’s EXP solution, along with the Aladon Network consulting arm, which Ivara acquired more than five years ago, will extend Bentley’s AssetWise asset lifecycle information management services and software for asset management and improvement. Bentley plans to leverage information mobility between capital expenditures and operating expenses with an expanded AssetWise and ProjectWise platforms. According to Bentley, the amounts and types of information productively reused, with interactive inspections and health modeling, will help to eliminate the information mortality, which results when data are stranded until they become useless.
“The asset performance management opportunities created by information mobility pertain equally to integrated-project engineers whose information modeling deliverables and expertise can contribute in new and innovative ways to operating reliability and safety, also to teams in operations and maintenance, where lifecycle reliability experience data, such as failure modes and effects analysis, can be structured to drive better designs,” said Paul Marshall, formerly CEO of Ivara and now Bentley vice president, asset performance. “Working smarter, together, we can now make the world more productive and safer by ensuring with integrity that the right information is securely accessible at the right time, for the right purpose, throughout the design, construction, operations, and maintenance of intelligent infrastructure.”
Andy Chatha, president and CEO, and Paula Hollywood, senior analyst, at ARC Advisory Group (www.arcweb.com), have both given the acquisition a hardy thumbs-up too, explaining that it positions Bentley to deliver solutions that enable owners of capital-intensive assets to design reliability into systems.
Allied Reliability Group (www.alliedreliabilitygroup.com) also made a key play of its own, acquiring ABB’s Reliability Consulting business in North America, which consists of 20 remote employees, all of whom will be fully integrated into GPAllied. The Reliability Consulting business unit will complement the reliability consulting and training arm of Allied Reliability Group, GPAllied’’s current reliability consulting organization. GPAllied adds business units in the disciplines of work execution management, equipment maintenance plan development, preventive maintenance, CMMS integration, and planning and scheduling.