SeQent, a leading developer of industrial alarm notification and plant-floor communication solutions, has announced the acquisition of Open Automation Software (OAS), an industrial data connectivity provider whose platform enables seamless data transfer among controllers, databases, and cloud services across different vendors. The acquisition broadens SeQent’s capabilities beyond alarm notification and escalation, adding edge-to-cloud connectivity, data integration, historization, and visualization to its portfolio.
SeQent’s platform ingests alarms and events from SCADA, MES, and PLC systems, applies routing and escalation rules, and delivers notifications to two-way radios, smartphones, displays, and PA systems. OAS adds the layer beneath it: native drivers for Allen-Bradley and Siemens controllers, Modbus devices, and OPC servers, store-and-forward buffering across machines, lines, and sites, and high-speed logging into customer-owned databases.
“Getting data out of the plant and getting a person to act on it have always been sold as two separate problems, by two separate vendors, with the gap between them left to the customer. Adding OAS to our business closes that gap. One company is now accountable for whether a signal actually becomes action, not just for its own piece of it.”
-Sheret Ross, Co-CEO, SeQent
At the heart of the OAS Platform is the Universal Data Connector, which moves data from anywhere to anywhere: from an Allen-Bradley PLC to a Siemens PLC, from a PLC to a database, from a database into visualization. Open protocols, edge compute, and the Unified Namespace (UNS) spanning OT and IT are reshaping how plants move data. OAS is built for that architecture without locking a plant into a single vendor’s stack. SeQent applies the same principle after detection, delivering to any device or channel a plant runs on. A plant running four generations of equipment from three vendors gets one path in and one path out, with no requirement to standardize on either end.
“We built OAS so that a plant’s data belongs to the plant, in an open format, in the customer’s own database. What most of our customers still solve on their own is the last step, making sure a human being finds out in time. That is the problem SeQent has spent three decades on, and it now comes from the same place as the data.”
–Ken Eldridge, President, Open Automation Software
Both companies count Fortune Global 500 manufacturers among their customers in automotive, data centers, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods. Several run SeQent and OAS side by side today. With OAS, SeQent’s platform spans connectivity, aggregation, and response: everything between a signal on the plant floor and the person who resolves it, with no handoff between vendors in the middle.
SeQent is a leading provider of open industrial data connectivity, alarm management, and plant-floor communication solutions designed to help manufacturers minimize costly downtime and maintain efficient operations. With more than 30 years of industry experience, SeQent has enabled thousands of facilities worldwide to shorten the gap between identifying an issue and taking action. Its portfolio covers edge-to-cloud connectivity through the OAS by SeQent Universal Data Connector, data historization and reporting, wireless alarm and event notifications, industrial Wi-Fi messaging, and visual display management. By bringing together information from controllers, databases, SCADA, MES, and PLC environments, SeQent can send critical notifications through the communication channels used across a plant, including two-way radios, smartphones, wearable devices, email, SMS, displays, and public-address systems. This enables important alerts to be quickly received, acknowledged, and acted upon.
Open Automation Software (OAS) is founded on the principle that industrial data should remain open, accessible beyond the control room, and independent of proprietary vendor formats. The OAS Platform integrates Allen-Bradley and Siemens controllers, Modbus devices, OPC and OPC UA servers, databases, and cloud services. It also records operational data and alarms in open formats, allowing them to be accessed and queried directly by reporting and analytics systems.
