Schneider Electric has finally acquired Aveva, adding the British design software company to its French industrial engineering group. Aveva is now well placed to leverage much of the operational data from IoT sensors and management experience of Schneider at different sites to improve its offering. We expect that this kind of vertical expansion is going to get more common, as established industries embrace IoT tech in their operations. There is an overlap between two, as Schneider sells software for managing sites using IoT, while Aveva makes software that allows companies to design such facilities (mainly in the oil industry) – enabling Schneider to offer a package of software to a customer the covers both the design and management of a…