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As the suppliers made the transition to COTS components, they also discovered that the hardware market was shrinking fast.
COTS not only resulted in lower manufacturing costs for the supplier, but also steadily decreasing prices for the end users, who were also becoming increasingly vocal over what they perceived to be unduly high hardware costs.
Some suppliers that were previously stronger in the PLC business, such as Rockwell Automation and Siemens, were able to leverage their expertise in manufacturing control hardware to enter the DCS marketplace with cost effective offerings, while the stability / scalability / reliability and functionality of these emerging systems are still improving.
The traditional DCS suppliers introduced new generation DCS System based on the latest Communication and IEC Standards, which resulting in a trend of combining the traditional concepts / functionalities for PLC and DCS into a one for all solution — named " Process Automation System ".
The gaps among the various systems remain at the areas such as: the database integrity, pre-engineering functionality, system maturity, communication transparency and reliability.
While it is expected the cost ratio is relatively the same ( the more powerful the systems are, the more expensive they will be ), the reality of the automation business is often operating strategically case by case.
The current next evolution step is called Collaborative Process Automation Systems.

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