Amtech (CONT’D FROM PAGE 22)
grate their products to cloud than any other private eq- uity firm,” said Schneider. “They've got 90 companies do- ing enterprise software that all come together and share best practices. So, when there’s a problem we’re trying to solve, we can go back to the Vista team and find out how other companies are solving similar problems.” Several customers have shared that on-premise deploy- ment is limiting their growth. How? Schneider explained, “As your company grows, typically you’ll eventually need to add new hardware, more memory, and you’d hire more IT people. When your servers are on-premise, they inher- ently become attached to your growth. The cloud simpli- fies this process by eliminating these extra steps, so all you’d need to do as your company grows is to add a user to the cloud.” The second thing to consider is security. Ransomware is now the number one operational threat facing pack- aging manufacturers. On-premise servers running aging operating systems are no longer just an IT concern, they are a business continuity risk. Manufacturing ransomware incidents have increased 56–61 percent, and the average ransom demand has exceeded $1.2 million. Being in the cloud can mitigate that risk. This is where AWS comes in. The investments they make in security en- able Amtech to provide a much more secure data environ- ment than any individual plant could do on its own.
tions for you, but it can take independent action based on what it learns. Amtech Quick Quote uses agentic AI to automate manual, everyday plant work. Amtech has re- mained firm on its view on agentic AI, which is that there should always be a human in the loop to make judgment. Big Bet Number Two: MES Solution The next big bet centers around Amtech’s Manufac- turing Execution System (MES) solution. Schneider intro- duced an automotive analogy to support this idea: “MESla – a combination of MES and Tesla – is Amtech’s internal name for the strategy around how we’re going to take its MES solution to the next level (Note: MESla is not the prod- uct name).
It was a sales meeting with a potential customer that inspired the MESla strategy. Schneider explained, “Your MES is a Ford and my MES is a Chevy. Both get me where I need to go, they both look good, and they're both reliable. Maybe your Ford's a little bit faster, but if you really want me to make a switch, don't give me another Ford. Give me a Tesla. “Today, MES, whether it's ours or competitors, is about optimizing equipment. We're going to expand equipment performance to plant performance. We’ll combine data from your equipment, your plant-specific processes, and your operators into one platform called Team Perfor- mance , an AI-powered platform that takes real-time MES and ERP intelligence and translates it into frontline actions to operators on the floor.” An example of this tool in action: You've done a quote and won the job, and that quote was predicated on the machine running at a certain speed. As long as that ma- chine runs at that speed, everything is good. But if you start running below that speed, there’s a risk of that order being late, which will cost more money. Team Performance comes in to recognize that the machine is running too slow and give everyone on the team a notification of the problem so it can be resolved quickly, rather than realizing at the end of that job that there was an issue. “We really believe that focusing not just on equipment, but the plant optimization is what really is going to be that step change in our MES.” Schneider said. Big Bet Number Three: Enabling Growth With The Cloud The third big bet Amtech Software is making is on the cloud. “Vista will claim they've helped more companies mi-
Schneider shared about the approach, “We're building up a team to do this. Theo Peterson, our VP of Infrastruc- ture and Security, has a team of over a dozen people al- ready that are supporting our cloud migration.” The team is comprised of three groups – the system designers who work with AWS, engineers who monitor and maintain the systems to provide Follow the Sun sup- port, and the security team, who is looking out for security incidents 24/7. Amtech is investing a lot in its journey to the cloud. Making The Roadmap A Reality By the time the next Amtech user conference comes around in two years, much of what Schneider laid out in Nashville will have moved from roadmap to reality. It’s an ambitious vision, from AI and cloud technology to ex- panded global capabilities and a new approach to plant performance, but through all of that growth, Amtech re- mains clear about who it is building for. And as Schneider affirmed throughout the week, “We're still 100 percent fo- cused on packaging.”
24 November 2, 2026
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