I (along with many others) thought it was strange that given all the hype about wireless by Invensys' competitors North American president Ginny Burnell devoted all of about 15 seconds to the topic in her keynote Monday. Well, I sat through two of Hesh Kagen's sessions on wireless (boy am I a glutton for punishment) yesterday. The sessions were well attended and users had many questions and some experiences to share. Invensys partners with Apprion--whom I was not able to interview for my November wireless article. They have a few working installations. They also lend a different perspective. Whereas some Honeywell engineers are extremely concerned about battery life (and therefore prefer a "wired wireless" solution along with line-of-sight 802.11 solutions) and Emerson has cast its lot so far on 802.15.4 "mesh" networking, the Invensys/Apprion solution builds on top of all that. Their theory is that there will likely be different networks for different application within a large plant. So, Apprion communicates to bunches of different networks and serves as a kind of gateway/protocol converter (sorry, but the gross oversimplification is all I can do right now). As Hesh put it, others look from the device level up, we're looking from the business system down.
Then there is the fact that wireless is a very broad term. It can mean sensor networks, remote data acquisition radios (in wide use now), computer networks (such as a tablet PC in the hands of a maintenance tech troubleshooting from wherever--see Wes Iversen's December article in Automation World), and much more. It's a complex subject and will provide fodder for many more interesting articles. That's good news for editors.
By the way, since I was at two different user conferences on this trip, many people have asked me to compare them. In fact, this year I have attended ABB, GE Fanuc, Emerson, Invensys, Yokogawa, Rockwell Automation, National Instruments, Honeywell conferences. Any comparison would not be useful. I think all of them were winning situations for both the companies and their users. In a not unusual presentation, this morning I heard a speaker from SimSci-Esscor take a half-hour and go through all the features that have been and will be added directly due to input from users at their conferences. Some companies have many years of experience of these groups and some are just starting. That would be the difference. As the companies newer to this build momentum, their customers will also see products begin to better represent their needs. And that's a good thing. And I get to meet lots of interesting and intelligent people. That's more than enough compensation for all this time in hotels.
8:08:58 PM 
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