Mr. Norman:
Sorry for this late response since I has been out of town.
SMCI has a pretty long history of operation and its products are solid. The majority of their customers are the refineries of well established oil companies. Their products are often more user-friendly than those from its major competitor, AZPN. Nevertheless, AZPN has been aggressively pursuing industry-wide consolidation through merging and acquisition recently, aiming at providing a complete solution, e.g., process development, design, operation, control, optimization, and scheduling to various process industries including petroleum processing, environmental engineering, and manufacturing of petrochemicals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, papers, cosmetics, and steels. Consequently, they have been growing much faster than SMCI and are probably 2 or 3 times bigger than SMCI right now. In addition, they are, very possibly, capable of providing a more comprehensive product line than SMCI can.
The new management in SMCI has been trying to pursue the same strategy, e.g., providing a complete solution via acquisition and merging although they are probably 2 years behind AZPN. The coming competition looks tough. There are also smaller competitors, e.g., Hyprotech in Canada and Chemshare in Houston.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Gangyi |
