Yesterday was certainly a full day at Automation Fair in Chicago. A few years ago, they started a special day for the media called Manufacturing Perspectives. This year's lineup of speakers was impressive. The goal of the event was not an eight-hour sales pitch, but they tried to give us a glimpse at what they think are the most important technologies and trends. Some of those would be international, especially Asia, given by Cliff Waldman, an economist with the Manufacturers Alliance. Important to Rockwell is process control, and Sr. VP Steve Eisenbrown introduced two speakers involved in biomass conversion and biodiesel.
In an interesting (to me at least) panel, Sr. VP and CTO Sujeet Chand brought in four heavy-hitters from standards organizations to discuss the role of standards in manufacturing competition. There was the CEO of ANSI, a VP of IEC, CEO of UL and managing director of the American Electronics Association in Europe. Another panel explored the IT/Manufacturing convergence. Another explored food safety and track & trace technologies. The last was a Rockwell presentation as Kevin Roach, vp of software introduced Ralph Carter, CEO of Pavilion Technologies, recently acquired by Rockwell and Kevin Zaba, marketing director of process as they discussed the impact of the acquisition.
As I predicted in a recent post, there were lots of smiling faces this year. Rockwell is still undergoing changes as it absorbs its recent acquisitions, but CEO Keith Nosbusch reported the stellar earnings for FY07. His themes to us last year were process and information. This year, he repeated the two and added safety (not coincidental with the acquisition of ICS Triplex, I presume). Nosbusch pointed out the leadership position that Rockwell has attained in many areas and singled out ARC analyst Larry O'Brien who now includes it in the list of leading process suppliers. Coincident with the process remarks, the Monday-Tuesday sessions of Rockwell's Process Systems User Group drew about 500 people -- 60 % new from last year.
Rockwell expects over 16,000 total attendance at this year's Fair, with about 10,000 of those (estimate at this time) customers. I didn't count them, but I was told there were about 100 exhibitors. It's a large trade show.
I have 5 Rockwell interviews with various divisions today -- Jane has one additional to mine, Wes has three, and our Web production manager Dave McCue is allowed out of the office and will be reporting on all the new product announcements. (Sure beats the years when I covered the whole thing alone!) I gotta run, so more later.
7:09:09 AM 
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