ISA announced a couple of days ago that a whole group of Honeywell and Yokogawa instruments and devices had completed WCI-compliance testing and were now certified ISA100.11a devices. That's cool.

Or is it?

Which ISA100.11a were these devices certified against?

ISA100.11a-2009, which was withdrawn from the ANSI approval process?

ISA100.11a-2010, which is being re-written with some significant changes from the 2009 model year and hasn't been approved yet?

This announcement came out of the Honeywell Users Group conference in Phoenix this morning.

Well, it's over. Finally. The ISA100 leadership team is packing the .11a standard up and sending it to the Standards and Practices Board for approval...and then on to ANSI, and maybe to IEC.

Wait! Didn't this already happen?

Well, no. Not exactly. The vote to approve the standard came with so many technical comments and objections that the leadership team decided, after they felt they'd resolved all the comments and objections they were going to, to "recirculate" the ballot to see if they could get more people to vote yes.

I've just received the following press release from Nivis. I'm going to let the release speak for itself, but after you've read it, read down for some commentary and some questions the release raises.

Nivis Releases World's First ISA100.11a Integration Kit

Atlanta, Ga -July 15, 2009 - Nivis LLC, the world's leading developer and integrator of wireless network technologies, is announcing the release of the world's first ISA100.11a Integration Kit. The ISA100.11a Integration Kit will start shipping immediately.

New press release from Wurldtech signals a movement into wireless network security as well as wired network security:

Wurldtech’s Achilles Helps Make Industrial Wireless Safe and Secure

Industrial Cyber Security Leader Expands The Achilles Platform to Increase Security and Robustness of Industrial Wireless Protocols Used in Critical Infrastructure and Smart Grid Applications

As the ISA100.11a draft standard nears approval, the chorus of vendors committed to WirelessHART, at least for now, continues to swell. Last month, at Interkama, ELPRO Technologies, Emerson, Endress+Hauser, Pepperl+Fuchs and MACTek all launched WirelessHART products. ABB launched its own WirelessHART product line at its ABB Automation and Power World last month, and now, at Achema (the world's largest chemical exposition) Dust and Phoenix Contact have made a long-awaited announcement that Phoenix Contact will be making a Dust-enabled WirelessHART Gateway.

And further to the idea that there WILL be multiple wireless standards used in the industrial plant environment, here's a press release from the ZigBee folks that clearly plants them in the race for wireless sensor networks, not only in the process plant, not only in the discrete plant environment but in the Smart Grid environment, in power gen, in T&D, and in home automation.

As expected, the ISA100 standard committee yesterday voted in favor of the draft ISA100.11a. Now it must go to the Standards and Practices Board at ISA for approval, and then to ANSI before it is an officially recognized standard.

As Co-chair, ExxonMobil's Pat Schweitzer told me, "What we've done is passed a huge milestone. There's lots of work that still has to be done. There are comments that have to be integrated into the document, still. And we have to make one and make sure it works, too."

In a new report just released, industry analyst firm VDC says that while 802.11 usage will grow from $168 Million to $543.9 Million by 2012, and proprietary field networks will grow from $111.2 to $273.7 Million, standards based field networks like WirelessHART, Zigbee and ISA100.11a will only grow from $9.9 Million to $76.2 Million over the same time period.

From the press release from the Automation Standards Compliance Institute, an ISA company:

NIST Collaborates with ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute to Validate ISA100.11a Draft Standard