During its press conference at Hannover Fair, Siemensexplained that the near-term focus for the company's Industry Sector would beon industrial software, vertical expertise and its services business.

As with most large industrial suppliers, stronger verticalindustry positioning and growth of services/consulting have been major factorsfor the past two or three years. Services, consulting and maintenance programs in particular, have becomeincreasingly major sources of business for large industry suppliers, such asSiemens, given the reduction in the full-time engineering workforce required tooperate most industrial facilities today.

Therefore, Siemens announcement around its increasing focuson software is of greatest interest.

"We see the future as concurrent engineering occurring on acommon platform, allowing production planning and design optimization to occurin parallel," said Prof. Dr. Siegfried Russwurm , CEO of Siemens' IndustrySector.

With the industrial software market expected to grow at arate of 8 percent a year between now and 2015 (especially when compared to theprojected 5 percent growth per year expected for vertical industry sectors andrelated services), the company's heightened focus on this area makes a lot ofsense. It also speaks to changes the company clearly sees from machinedesigners and system builders, as software increasingly becomes a major playerin the design process -- both in the design stages and as part of the deliveredproduct.

Siemens software focus will largely revolve around expansionof its TIA (Totally Integrated Automation) Portal (youcan read more about TIA Portal here) and PLM (product lifecycle management )software, as well as its MES and HMI software. The company's vision is toenable a combined product and production lifecycle using a joint data model,allowing all software applications to access the same database for concurrency.

This vision of Siemens is still a work in progress andrequires integration of its own software with that of its acquisitions over thelast few years, such as UGS, Innotec, and Elan Software.

When asked during the press conference whether Siemensgrowth strategy in software involved further acquisitions or if growth would beorganic from existing resources, Russwurm responded that the company is "opento both" options.

Personally, I think some major announcements will beforthcoming in this area -- likely before the year is out.