Wednesday, February 6, 2008

ARC Forum 2008, take two It's Wednesday morning at ARC in Orlando and I'm at another 7 am breakfast. This features a discussion of the Rockwell Automation / Dassault Systemmes (Delmia) partnership. I wrote about that a couple of months ago after meeting with the managers involved. The news today is that they are now delivering a "solution" called virtual commissioning. The simulation is interesting. Key points, RA's Factory Talk application "inherits" objects created in Dassault. Controls can then be added. Changes at the electrical design can be sent back from Factory Talk to Dassault. Then they demonstrated the virtual commissThis is powerful stuff. Competition is brewing. Not much news to report from yesterday's early presentations, but the number of meetings and hallway conversations is huge. This is still the best place to "meet and greet" in the automation market. The June meeting always featured software, while this Forum featured "automation." With the blending of the two, ARC is canceling the June forum on software and initiating an October Forum pointed to process--I'm told especially oil & gas and similar markets. Unfortunately, the date conflicts with one trade show (that I've never attended) and is October 6-8 in Houston the week before ISA Expo--also in Houston. I've had lots of meetings that really have served to give me a better understanding of the current dynamics of the industry. One interesting conversation was with an  engineer (I believe) from Chevron who said that all these features  software suppliers keep developing are nice, but what he really needed was workflow help. Everything is related to getting work done, he told me. GE Fanuc and Microsoft are working on this concept right now. We'll see how that shakes out. And...if they are, I'm sure other companies have things "under the covers" that we'll learn about soon. So suppliers take note--this is an important idea. One last item of note from yesterday. I saw a demonstration at the Rockwell Automation booth from the IsaGraf part that was acquired with the ICS Triplex acquisition of an implementation of the IEC 61499 networked function blocks. This is the first working demo of these blocks I've seen. This holds promise for future control design. 8:02:20 AM    comment []

Wireless I received the official press release about Mike Bradley becoming CEO of Apprion with co-founder and previous CEO Stephen Lambright becoming VP of marketing and customer services. I'm learning more about Apprion, which is not a supplier of radios and protocols at the lowest level, or the actual sensors, but it builds applications to make wireless work in practical application. The importance of this appointment is hard to overstate. Wireless has been a subject of conversation almost to the point of hype with much political posturing and standards debates. I have believed that the industry is close to a point where we'll see critical mass start to build up with adoption starting to pick up. The thing about Bradley joining Apprion is that he knows the industry and the channels of distribution. He is ideally situated to move wireless to the next level. And, at this point, I should say that when the word Wireless is used, you should not automatically limit your thinking to only sensor networks and the famous "mesh" word that is subject of some debate. Bradley emphasized to me at our lunch meeting yesterday the breadth of wireless that Apprion supports--from sensor networks to voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) and security. We're starting to move from the pioneers to the actualizers in the wireless arena. The potential benefits are huge. This will be interesting to watch. 7:34:58 AM    comment []