Report in Industrial Automation Insider - October 2003 (pdf format)

Vendors circle the wagons as users turn hostile

Congratulations to Eoin Ó Riain, publisher and editor of the Irish control and automation journal Read-out and of the Readout Instrumentation Signpost web site (readout.net) for coming up with an entirely fresh and original format for his Second Readout Forum, sponsored by ISA Ireland and held alongside the Irchem 2003 chemical engineering show in Cork in midSeptember.

Eoin’s formula for success? Put representatives of the major automation vendors on the same platform and have them explain their respective companies’ responses to the issues raised in four keynote addresses on such disparate topics as ‘Future Proofing Your Control System’, ‘Electronic Paper and Batch Tracking’,

‘Control System Accessibility and Interoperability’ and ‘Security’. And for added spice, round off each session by throwing the discussion open to the floor – or was that the vendors to the wolves?

Those who had anticipated blood on the floor as the competing vendors’ gripped each other cordially by the throat were, inevitably, a little disappointed by the degree of unanimity that was exhibited by Emerson’s Nick Taylor, Honeywell’s Alan Walsh, Siemens’ Sean Cahill and, stepping into the breach at the last moment when Ulli Mueller succumbed to food poisoning, ABB’s Peter Malin.

Ganging up

On the other hand there was a frisson of excitement as, more than once, the audi-ence, or at least the part made up of users, ganged up against the vendor community in general. But then the vendors them-selves seemed to be happy enough to fight their collective corner, falling in behind, for example, Nick Taylor when he re-minded users that vendors are actually in this for the money and will provide their customers with just as much and no more than they ask for.

Inevitably, given the location, much of the discussion centred on the needs of the pharmaceutical industry with three of the keynote speakers, providing smaller systems with the same Foundation fieldbus functionality such the keynote speakers, Joe Haugh of Zenith, currently on secondment to Wyeth, Paul Murray of Proscon and David McBratney of MCOS either working directly in or providing engineering and consulting services to the industry.

Cyber terrorism

Odd man out was Brian Ahern of Verano who sent a shiver up everyone’s spine by pointing out just how vulnerable Internet enabled, Windows based automation systems are to ‘cyber terrorism’. Few dissenters when he told this largely pharmaceutical industry oriented audience that the security issue is “the next 21CFR11.”

Clearly system security is already a major concern for pharmaceutical companies who find themselves between a rock and a hard place faced with threats which change on an almost daily basis while having to conform to validation processes whose timescale is measured in months or years. That leaves them with a choice of ignoring the possibility of systems becoming corrupted or reversing current trends for greater integration with the enterprise and effectively isolating mission critical systems.

Given the degree of concern shown by the audience it was perhaps surprising to hear the vendors respond pretty much with one voice that they have as yet to see the issue addressed in RFQs but would of course respond once they did, not a view which particularly impressed some members of the audience who took the view that vendors were under an obligation to ensure that their systems were secure. That in turn prompted ABB’s Peter Malin to retort that no solution could be 100% secure and that “this is not a technical issue; it’s procedural one.”

Unanimity

Strongest message to emerge from the forum held incidentally in the cork Greyhound Stadium, thereby allowing the chairman to remark, not for the first time, that “The process automation industry is going to the dogs” is how little competitive advantage individual process automation vendors can now gain from technology. Hence the degree of unanimity with which they answered the issues raised by the keynotes on future proofing, batch tracking and interoperability by professing there total adherence to and support of standards. It is conceivable, had Eoin been able to establish who he should have invited from Invensys, that a dissenting voice might have been heard but it seems unlikely. ArchestrA, for all its supposed advantages, isn’t going to result in systems which, to the user, look much different from those based on Industrial IT, PlantWeb, Totally Integrated Automation or Experion PKS. Indeed, with process automation systems becoming increasingly commoditized, and vendors ever more unsure what constitutes their irreducible core expertise, competitive advantage must increasingly lie not in what you deliver but in how you deliver it.