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Thursday, January 29, 2009 |
Think magazines are old business--dried up? Wrong. Mr. Magazine charts start ups--and 2008 was a good year. There is still life in the magazine business. The best will learn to co-exist with the Web. That's what I'm trying to do.
Thoughts?
4:41:21 PM 
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Here's an article in The New York Times about companies ditching their corporate jets. Could be a case of acting hastily. Those things can be a great time/money saver. Of course, they can be a boondoggle, too. But I once worked for a company that shared a corporate airplane (Navajo, oh how I wished it were a jet). I used to speak at conferences in that job (product development and standards guru if you can believe that). That plane was great. I could do a one-day trip, avoid airport lines and usually land close to where I was going saving car or taxi expense. Knee-jerk reactions are not always good. Everything should be looked over thoroughly. The popular media will howl for a day or so then go on to the next hot topic and leave it all behind.
4:05:14 PM
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An interesting use of Web 2.0 social media in Canada just came to my attention. Igloo Inc., an online community solutions developer, has partnered with a group of local Canadian entities including the Region of Waterloo, Cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium (EMC), Conestoga College, University of Waterloo, the Greater KW and Cambridge Chambers of Commerce, Communitech and Canada's Technology Triangle (CTT) to jointly launch the Manufacturing Innovation Network (MIN), an online network which facilitates and promotes awareness, excellence and innovation within the manufacturing industry in the Waterloo Region.
This network, which is free of charge to local manufacturers, provides a marketplace to facilitate local and international e-commerce transactions; a professional network for establishing vital business connections within the manufacturing community; and a knowledge exchange for sharing information, ideas and expertise that can benefit the local manufacturing sector.
Members of MIN will have access to a collection of free resources and tools:
- Marketplace -- Job Board, Career Center, Company and Service Provider Directories, Classified Ads, Advertising, Sponsorship Program, Event Calendar
- Professional Network -- Personal Profiles, Member Directory, Peer-to-Peer Messaging, Contacts
- Knowledge Exchange -- Resource Centre, Expert Blogger Program, Peer Groups, Best Practices, Whitepapers, News, Educational Videos
According to Al Diggins, president and general manager of EMC, "The Manufacturing Innovation Network powered by the Igloo technology is an opportunity that is certainly going to help our manufacturing members, not only in this community, but the larger manufacturing community in Ontario, and eventually in the rest of Canada."
11:34:35 AM
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OPC Foundation conducted a comprehensive survey of users and suppliers of its technology. This specification has been recently been released and I believe that products are expected this year. The Foundation wanted to get an idea of industry awareness of the new spec and attitudes toward OPC.
I have been analyzing the statistics and have come to a couple of conclusions. First, despite whisperings you can hear in hallways of conferences to the contrary, the current generation of OPC technology serves a useful purpose for most of the people who responded. Some like it a lot. This technology is getting a little long in the tooth being based on Microsoft technologies of COM (component object model) and DCOM (distributed COM), but it continues to play well. I'm not sure about the methodology of the survey, but it apparently was global and distributed enough to get some negative answers.
The second conclusion is that the new technology, dubbed OPC UA for unified architecture, is anticipated by many as an advance that they anticipate using. But, about half of those who responded to the survey have no idea what OPC UA is or means. This indicates that more evangelization by the Foundation and its members must be done. As the first products that incorporate OPC UA appear, their success and the continued success of engineers and IT professionals who use the technology, will depend upon the word getting out.
This blog post, of course, will help that. There are also several blogs that explain OPC and its many uses. One is sponsored by supplier Matrikon (OPC Exchange Blog). Another is the OPC TAC blog. The third, which just started and is more technical, is Randy Armstrong's OPC UA blog.
Survey details
Here are some details of the survey. Conducted over the last quarter of 2008 and into the first three weeks of 2009, the survey contained over 3,500 responses. Of these, about 20 percent were end users and about 20 percent were system integrators with the remaining respondents coming from a variety of automation hardware and software suppliers.
Respondents were fairly evenly distributed among various industries with Oil & Gas Production, Power Generation and Chemicals the top three. Following the top tier were Oil & Gas distribution, Pharmaceutical, Water Treatment, Buildings & Building Automation, Automotive and Metals & Mining.
Asked if their company currently uses OPC technology, only 6 percent said no. A third said sometimes while 59 percent were often or always. Only 77 or roughly 2 percent were either unsure what OPC was or had no knowledge of OPC.
The most used application for OPC was visualization (1,744 or 66 percent). Control (60 percent) and data archiving (58 percent) followed closely. About half use OPC for internal data exchange while external access to data was used by 43 percent.
When asked about technologies that might be used for data exchange in the future, about 1,100 said they would mostly use OPC technology. Only about 320 each noted a majority of data exchange would be by proprietary driver or other standard (not specified).
Nearly three-fourths of the respondents found OPC classic technology useful, but half of those said it could be improved. Only 20 percent were negative with only 5 percent calling the technology defective or unusable.
Forty-five percent had favorable opinions of the new OPC UA technology, but 42 percent were unfamiliar with it. Meanwhile 60 percent thought that OPC technology would be more important for their business in the future compared to only 6 percent who thought less important.
11:15:08 AM
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© Copyright 2009 Gary Mintchell.
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