ISA Past President Kim Miller Dunn began the session proper of the 4th Annual Marketing and Sales Summit by discussing the work of the Automation Federation in reaching out to do workforce development and the Automation Competency Model that the AF designed for the US Department of Labor.

Then, Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and Founder of OSIsoft and the creator of the concept of a data historian, OSI PI talking about marketing when you're the market leader.

"Kids are natural engineers and we talk them out of it." Kennedy said.

Every year, I chair the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit, which this year will be in lovely downtown Boston in splendid September...go to www.isa.org for more information. The reason I do this is that, frankly, in the automation industry, as a colleague of mine recently noted, "The bar is set pretty low."

He's right, and this isn't a good thing, especially if we want to continue to gain respect for the absolutely essential work we do.

The afternoon sessions were uniformly excellent. The way we form this conference every year is I pick the keynotes, and give them their topics. The rest of the conference comes from solicited and unsolicited presentations. Some very fine presentations were made by the serious subject matter experts from the automation industry.

Although we really hate to do it, we had such good sessions that we had to have concurrent sessions running. So in one session, we had:

Following break out sessions by Vance VanDoren, whose day job is to write for Control Engineering, on "Opportunities with Industry Specific Search Engines," and Paul Cherry, president of Performance Based Results on "Questions that Sell: The Powerful Process to Motivate Customers to Buy," we were stimulated by a terrific keynote address by Rick Dolezal, marketing development manager for process systems at Rockwell Automation.