I'm at the ARC Forum. Full afternoon and evening and some news of note.
I wrote yesterday about the Mitsubishi connectivity announcements. Continuing the connectivity theme, Kepware, known for OPC connectivity among other technologies, announced a working relationship with Oracle and connectivity to Oracle databases. Perhaps even more interesting than that connectivity is that Kepware doesn't just pass unadulterated data potentially flooding a corporate database with too much data. Kepware has introduced analytics to provide a preliminary filter for the data before forwarding that will help the enterprise people make sense of the data and provide better information to its users.
Ran into Mike Bradley, recently retired CEO of Wonderware last night. Seems he will join wireless networking provider Apprion as its CEO. I have lunch today with him, so I'll learn more. Wireless networking is very competitive right now. It'll be interesting to see if Mike can do his magic that he worked with Wonderware in this market.
I'm listening to Shuzu Kaihori, COO and President of Yokogawa, right now at breakfast, but I heard the same presentation yesterday in the press conference. In a radical move for a Japanese company, he is laying out a product roadmap that details Yokogawa's development of a new DCS. Interesting that I was just pondering if anyone was going to do anything new in that technology. The first part of the CentumVP DCS, that will be available in May, is a visualization or HMI product. It is designed to be one display that will gather information from all the disparate control systems in a process plant so that an operator just has one place to look. Eventually, the company will bring all the process control databases into one real-time database and one DCS. There are lots of details we don't know yet (don't get me started on integration of safety and control, for example), but I think this is a significant technology upgrade. Or as I told the Yokogawa executives, this sounds really great. I can't wait to see how the implementation goes.
7:50:27 AM 
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