After a gangbusters start yesterday with over 40 people attending the pre-conference short courses taught by me, John Kuensler of ARC and Jim Geisman who is one of the two leading gurus of pricing for technology products, and a terrific keynote by Julie Fraser, Principal Industry Analyst from Cambashi, Inc.

Julie's talk was "Bridging the Engineering-IT Divide" and she's agreed to produce an article for Control magazine on the subject.

And while this might be the time for some shameless self promotion, the fact is that as titular chair of the event, I was backed by a group of tireless people who did all the work. So they should get the credit, and not me.

The list includes, but is certainly not limited to: Shari Worthington and Juliann Grant, from Telesian Technology, Mike Nager from Phoenix Contact, Peggy Koon from Morris Digital Networks, and above all Rodney Jones from ISA.

They all did far more work than I did on this pr...

Been at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit since yesterday afternoon...

Alison Smith of AMR set the tone by discussing what manufacturing management wants... Peter Martin of Invensys talked about how to speak to the C-level and why we should...and Jerry Gipson of Dow Chemical was the Voice of the Customer, talking bluntly and directly about "How End Users Want to Be Sold To." In between, Joel Blumenthal of Endress+Hauser gave a great breakout session on Marketing Communication, and Rick Dolezal...