With its stock price soaring high, Zebra announced in late May interesting expansions in its solution portfolio, entering the machine vision and fixed industrial scanning (FIS) markets, including one acquisition as part of the moves.
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| The fixed industrial scanning is a mature market, but one in which Zebra has not really had a presence until now. |
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The industrial scanners and machine vision camera work together for a more total solution. Applications are envisioned to include inspection of production lines and product movement processes, helping to improve quality in manufacturing, warehouse and logistics environments. It’s all about being able to view the status and condition of inventory and assets through visual-based sensing and analytics capabilities, Zebra says.
The machine vision and FIS scanning products can be managed by Zebra’s Aurora software platform.
In addition, Zebra announced its acquisition of Adaptive Vision, a small, privately held Polish provider of software and libraries for machine vision application development.
This software could be an accelerator its success with the new products, says research firm VDC, and “allow Zebra to offer rapid machine vision application development options to its customers. This could become a critical competitive differentiator for Zebra."
Just what is machine vision? The Zebra web site says that the technology involves the use of computer vision in an industrial application or process where it is necessary to execute a specific function or outcome based on the image analysis done by the vision system.
It adds that machine vision systems use software to trigger various actions based on the analysis of an image, and are widely accepted for applications including quality control and automated inspection. Advances in technology have led to more applications being solved using machine vision, including process control and optical sorting
The fixed industrial scanning is a mature market, but one in which Zebra has not really had a presence. Now, the company will complete for share along with current players including Datalogic, Omron (Microscan), SICK, Cognex and Keyence, and a few others.
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 What’s more, Zebra has hired industry veteran Donato Montanari as VP and GM, Machine Vision. Montanari previously held a similar position at Italian company Datalogic.
As with others, the Zebra scanners capable of reading 1D or 2D bar codes, direct part marks (DPM) and optical character recognition (OCR) text.
Zebra’s new portfolio includes seven fixed data capture products featuring a unique set of FIS and/or MV capabilities. It says that companies can choose the products that meet their needs today and upgrade at any time to add support for new bar code symbologies, increased scanning speeds, or advanced machine vision tools via the purchase of a software license.
Zebra’s primary target markets for its machine vision and industrial scanning solutions – specifically in logistics/warehousing and manufacturing sectors – represent approximately a $1.4B hardware only opportunity, significantly expanding Zebra’s existing total available market (TAM), says VDC.
VDC adds that “With the volume of ecommerce transactions continuing unabatedly, demand for logistics automation solutions - such as MV and FIS technologies – is expected to remain strong. Moreover, these new products and services will further open the door to the manufacturing shop-floor for Zebra – an environment with strong upside potential.”
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