Bond at Emerson's Vienna Event Excerpts from Industrial Automation Insider - December 2007

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Emerson turns the screw with more wireless devices as Cisco deal sets the stage for a new round of COTS

Last month saw Emerson hosting a major European press event on wireless for the second time in 2007, a measure of its determination to exploit to the full what it perceives as the advantage over arch rival Honeywell created by last September's release of the WirelessHART protocol in the face of last minute objections from Honeywell president Jack Bolick.

The Signpost in Vienna! The Bologna Event

Back in January the venue had been Bologna, Italian birthplace of wireless pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. This time Emerson's European PR supremo Charles Lewis had chosen Vienna, with the entertainment including a ride on the Ferris wheel which featured in Carol Reed's film of 'The Third Man'. Could Lewis be seeing Emerson's newly appointed president for Europe David Dunbar replacing Orson Welles as Harry Lime, perhaps with him- self standing in for Trevor Howard as the archetypal English intelligence officer, Major Calloway? Or were we to find parallels somewhat earlier with wireless redrawing the process automation map of Europe as profoundly as did the Congress of Vienna the political map back in 1815?

Emerson and ARC are surprisingly close in their assessment of the current size of the global process automation systems market. According to ARC's newly published 'Automation Systems for Process Industries Worldwide Outlook' it was worth nearly $30bn in 2006 and is set to grow at 9.6% compound over the next five years to reach more than $47bn by 2011. Identifying globalization as the key driver, the report argues that the resultant challenges are significantly changing how users approach process control, engineering, operations and maintenance across the enterprise. Process automation products are expected to have robust growth because of their applicability across industrial segments from food & beverage through metals & mining and chemicals to water & waste. Higher energy prices continue to contribute to increased capital investment and large project backlogs for oil, gas and refining companies.

Despite these real or imaginary subtleties, however, once we'd all thawed out after drinking Gluehwein in not just one but two separate and sub-zero al fresco locations, the principal message wasn't very subtle at all. Emerson now claims to dominate the global process automation market and its wireless strategy is de- signed to reinforce and extend that domination as the industry goes through what it anticipates will be the major discontinuity brought on by the rapid adoption of wireless technology.

Market leader - which market?
In 2007, said Dunbar, Emerson Process Management had sales of $5.7bn, and contributed earnings of $1.1bn to corporate coffers, generating an industry leading margin of 18.7%. That, based on a conflation of data from ARC, Western Research, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and its own 'internal estimates,' gave it a claimed 17.2% share (compared with 10.7% in 1999) of a market which it believes was worth $32.9bn in 2007. For the record it estimates its competitors' shares as, in

David Dunbar - "We're now ready to look at higher applications."

descending order,
ABB 10.8%,
Yokogawa 6.7%,
Honeywell 6.3%,
Siemens 4.7%,
Invensys 4.5%,
Endress+ Hauser 3.7% and
Rockwell 1.4%.
And before hands are thrown up in horror or jaws dropped in disbelief, Dunbar con- cedes that Emerson defines the market as being made up of those sectors, and only those sectors, in which it participates.

Field focus
Significantly 76% of those sales were of field devices, compared with just 24% of systems, solutions and services, which explains, if explanation were necessary, why Emerson focussed its initial wireless efforts on field device networking rather than taking the more all embracing approach embodied in Honeywell's OneWireless concept. Now however, so the argument goes, field device wireless networking has moved out of the development phase so that, as Dunbar put it, "We're now ready to look at higher applications." That may be, but it didn't stop him focussing his own presentation almost exclusively on the successes that have been achieved at the device level since Emerson first introduced products to North America in October 2006 and to Europe last January.

And the achievements are impressive. Emerson is now able to point to real installations, solving real problems for real customers including PPG Lake Charles, Wheeling Pittsburg Steel, Croda and Milford Power. In Europe, there have already been a total of nine applications since product was released in June of this year including on Statoil's Grane platform in the North Sea and at BP's Wytch Farm, the largest on shore oil field in the UK. And its able to quote and name users reporting that "Five minutes after installing it, the wireless network came to life;" "Overall we have . . . improved throughput by 5%;" and wireless devices "typically take around two hours to install compared with up to two days for a conventional wired unit."

Wheeled out as the tame real life user was Anders Royroy, project manager for R&D projects with StatoilHydro which has installed a total of 22 wireless transmitters on its Grane platform in the North Sea as part of its long term Mesa Verde project to develop an entirely unmanned process platform by 2015. Perhaps not quite as tame as had been intended, Royroy conceded that there had been minor problems with the in- stallation, not least because Emerson had been unable to supply a qualified remote antenna for the gateway for installation in the offshore environment. Nevertheless installation had been faster than expected, with all transmitters live in a matter of minutes. Interestingly, and another feather in the Emerson cap, the wireless networks integrate not with an Emerson but with an ABB DCS.

Control and safety
Royroy's view is that the real value of wireless devices derives not necessarily from their ability to provide more information but to provide correct informa- tion in difficult locations and he sees no inherent reason why they should not be used in the future for both control and safety critical applications. Critically, however, he added that "We don't want to be tied into one vendor. Rather we want to see collaboration between vendors."
With the advantage it feels it now has, not just over Honeywell, which thus far has chosen not to go down the WirelessHART route, but over other vendors who have been slower to market with WirelessHART offerings, Emerson is now piling on the pressure by introducing a whole raft of additional WirelessHART enabled field devices. In addition to the original pressure, flow, level and temperature devices and gateways and interfaces intro- duced at the time of the original Smart Wireless launches, fully WirelessHART compliant versions of which will be available from Spring 2008, it is now adding a vibration monitoring transmitter for low cost, continuous monitoring of vibration levels on pumps and other rotating equipment and a discrete switch for applications such as level monitoring and spill prevention. Also on the stocks for introduction during 2008 are the corrosion monitor developed in conjunction with Rohrback Cosasco Systems, a valve position monitor, a multi- input temperature device, a wireless device router, the long awaited THUM (HART Up-grade Module) which can be added to exist- ing HART devices to provide access to their 'stranded' diagnostics and, with the release of DeltaV v10.3, DeltaV native wireless I/O which will make a wireless device network appear to an operator as indistinguishable from conventional I/O.

Does it or doesn't it?
How does Emerson react to suggestions, such as those made at last month's Honeywell European User Group meeting down the road in Salzburg, that the Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP) technology on which WirelessHART is based "doesn't just work" (INSIDER, November 2007, page 3) but that installations do in fact require extensive site surveys. "Most of the installation planning for self- organizing mesh technology can actually be undertaken . . . within an office environment," said European marketing manager for Smart Wireless Solutions Mike Ferris. "You don't need to go out on the plant and do point-to-point or line of sight or extensive climbing over pipework to ensure you've got the visibility between the gateway and the measurement device."
As to the suggestion made at the same meeting that incorporating additional nodes to ensure that a path can be found around particularly intractable obstacles, Ferris says, "Yes, it will increase the latency of the device network ... but really when you are looking at update rates of 15 seconds it really is negligible and it is not an issue."

Meanwhile how confident is the Emerson team that it has indeed backed the right horse at the device level and that WirelessHART will not be stranded outside the eventual ISA 100 standard? Chief strategic officer Peter Zornio says that "We are pretty confident and comfortable that WirelessHART is a protected path within SP 100." All of which, rather strangely was meant to be the preliminary to the main event, the announcement of the extension to Europe of the agreement, first announced in the US in September, between Emerson and Cisco to deliver wireless plant networks and applications based on Cisco's Unified Wireless Architecture (INSIDER, October 2007, page 2).

Just who gets the best out of this deal is by no means clear. Emerson certainly gets the opportunity to thumb its collective nose at Honeywell by presenting an architecture so similar to the latter's OneWireless above the device level as to be barely indistinguishable. Moreover what purists might argue it lacks in logical consistency and elegance, it looks like more than making up for in having the backing of one of the best known brands in enterprise communications.

IT savvy
One of the key issues facing plants hoping to install such technology will be in allaying concerns at the enterprise level over security. "Cisco is trusted by IT people," said Dunbar. "That's a huge advantage," a view reinforced by Zornio when he said that "IT needs to be sure that process applications comply with IT standards."

But the advantage for Emerson seems to go further than that. Not only does the Cisco architecture support the full gamut of video, voice, mobility and tracking applications but Emerson will be able to leverage Cisco's extensive partner network and hence allow its customers to choose their preferred partner for specific applications. Moreover, while Emerson continues to insist that users will not in general need help in deploying field device networks, they will, it concedes need support if they're ambitions go further up into the plant hierarchy. Emerson is building up a global network of service and technical support resources and will design, specify, install and support both field networks and wireless plant networks but it will also be able, as Zornio puts it, to "lean on Cisco's expertise."

Here comes Cisco
So what does Cisco get out of it? Well it clearly sees an opportunity to extend its reach deeper into the process industries, just as its partnership with Rockwell will allow it to penetrate the discrete market. But Mike Ferris's diagram of what might constitute a combined Cisco/Emerson solution had rather less coloured Cisco than did that presented by Cisco's Stuart Robinson. He heads up manufacturing and energy verticals for Cisco in Europe, and he drew the boundary of Cisco's area of interest a good deal further down the page. In answer to a question from IN- SIDER, he said that "There is absolutely no intention of us moving elsewhere outside of the plant control network right now," but, there did seem to be an emphasis on the "now" and he admitted in a subsequent conversation that Cisco's ultimate aim is to see Ethernet and IP extending right down to the device level and replacing 'proprietary protocols' such as Profibus and Foundation fieldbus. Indeed in a splendidly indiscrete aside he added that "Siemens would love to be free of Profibus."

It's also clear that Cisco's ambitions don't end with Emerson - or indeed Rockwell. "Cisco doesn't do any exclusive deals," said Robinson, although he added that " ... in terms of building a global market strategy this is the only one that we are working on right now and it doesn't make any sense to introduce any new ones until we have established that we can actually do something together."

So despite is non exclusivity, the deal with Cisco allows Emerson to counter suggestions that its solution addresses only one part of the total plant wireless application space. At the same time it enables it to differentiate that overall offering by allowing the user initially to address only that part which offers the best immediate ROI, be that at the device or the plant level. As Zornio put it, "You can do what you want and you don't have to do the whole thing."

All of which sounds entirely plausible. So why did one gain the impression that there was more to this than met the eye? More than a decade ago, Emerson was in the forefront of the revolution which saw DCS vendors abandoning proprietary technology and embracing COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) technology in the form of Microsoft and Dell. Robinson's second slide carried the caption "The Network as a Platform." Could it be that a decade form now the process automation industry will be looking back at the Cisco-Emerson deal as the point when the network emerged as THE platform?