A little late, however I just found out that now that John Berra has officially retired, Dr. Gunther Kegel has been elected the chairman of the Fieldbus Foundation Board of Directors.  John was chairman for 16 years – basically since the beginning.

I am pleased to announce the Class of 2011 for the Process Automation Hall of Fame. Elected by their peers in the Hall, these automation professionals have made clear and extensive contributions to the domain of process automation, and are being recognized for their work and careers.

John Berra, recently retired Chairman of Emerson Process Management.

Coming down to the end of one of those weeks where I feel like if I have to put one more thing in my brain, it might explode. Between Emerson Exchange and the Stuxnet virus, I've had trouble keeping up.

"After fifteen years, we can emphatically say that the technology works," John Berra, wearing his hat as Chairman of the Fieldbus Foundation Board of Directors, said in his welcome to the Fieldbus Foundation General Assembly.

"Since we're in Washington, DC," John Berra quipped, in his last official address as business leader of Emerson Process Management, "I thought I should give a state of the union address. We are stronger than we have ever been before. This is the last week of our Fiscal Year, and I can't reveal the whole year numbers, but for the first 3 quarters, our business was up 18% over last year. If the numbers stay on track, Berra intimated, Emerson may grow a little over a billion dollars in a single year.

Welcoming us to the 10th Annual Emerson Exchange was Greg Stephens, chairman of the Emerson Global Users Exchange, to give it its whole and rightful title. Stephens said that attendance would run over 2579 (might get as high as 2700) which is ten times the attendance (250) at the first Emerson Exchange in 1998.

He talked about this third year of the PlantWeb Feedback tool, and asked for more feedback, and he annouced that there would be a PlantWeb Excellence Award for the person "who squeezed the orange and got every drop out of it."

The following release just popped up in my email box.

Emerson First to Offer WirelessHART Automation Products
Emerson is now taking orders for open, industry standards-based products in its Smart Wireless portfolio  

Austin, Texas, March 14 -- Emerson Process Management is the first process automation supplier to begin taking orders for WirelessHART-enabled products, based on the recently approved open standard for in-plant wireless communications. These measurement and communicatio...

At the ISA Wireless Summit last week, notwithstanding all the other fine presentations, including an excellent one by Honeywell's Harsh Chitale, the cream was the speech given by John Berra, CEO of Emerson Process Management. You can read my contemporaneous notes on the blog from last week but I asked John if...

"I consider myself a veteran in living through and working through technology changes," Berra started out, noting that he had been an ISA member for 38 years. He went through the ringing of the changes from pneumatics to fieldbus. "All of them were exciting, but ultimately the ones that scored, so to speak, were the ones that translated into demonstrable business results for the companies that used them."

"I am here to tell you today that wireless has the potential to deliver a very broad spect...