ISA Show
Our staff is at the ISA show in Houston this week. Just back from a run, and even at 6 AM here you come back really wet. I could almost feel water condensing from the air. There may have been more water condensing from the humidity than announcements so far.
Invensys announced an expansion of service offerings. With a "consulting" type of model, Invensys will help clients with network, alarming and loop management services. One offering will help ciients with data and network security.
The company also announced that orders were up 14% this year in a year-to-year comparison. Listening to comments, it appears that the Wonderware unit, with its ArchestrA platform, is performing well.
Mettler-Toledo, a provider of automated weigh scale systems, announced a partnership with Wago to combine offerings through distributors but targeted to system integrators. In a kind of "you got chocolate in my peanut butter" combination, the companies are targeting small to medium sized batch processing companies.
Phoenix Contact continues to expand its product line around its core competency of connecting things. New Ethernet switches and a fiber optic converter for fieldbus networks were very interesting. Also, Dave Skelton briefed me on plans for its Entivity acquisition. Expect to see the return of the Think-and-Do and Steeplechase brand names. Those products will continue through their distribution channels with the added financial backing provided by Phoenix, while the company will coordinate its flow chart programming offerings with existing IEC 61131 offerings gained through the acquisition of Klopper & Wiege several years ago.
Process safety systems were mentioned many times. We talked with Siemens, Invensys and John Berra from Emerson. This is going to be a contested market space with many new product advances to come, I'm sure.
Are you at ISA? Click comment and give me your impressions.
6:44:04 AM 
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