The organization is 12 years old, and, according to Bob Reinhart, outgoing Chairman, has accomplished quite a lot.

CSIA has become "thought leaders for the information technology industry." If that sounds a little ARC-ish, it ought to, since ARC has taken CSIA on as a client.

Seriously, though, CSIA has built a brand that has raised the bar for all system integrators by insisting on higher and higher benchmarks.

They've forged liasons with AHTD, with ISA, with WBF (and MESA, as you will see l...

I invited Rob Renner, the Executive Director of ISA, and Shari Worthington, President of Telesian Technologies, and an ISA volunteer for over 25 years to have lunch and discuss the results of the just-concluded President's Meeting. We were joined by former Computec Division Director Charlie Gifford (now with GE Fanuc) as we discussed the possibility of resuscitating the Industrial Computing Society. Stay tuned. I think Rob may have something.

Comments?

--Walt Boyes...

Todd Walter, Industrial Measurement and Control Group Manager for National Instruments, is hot for PACs. That is, Programmable Automation Controllers, which NI makes, as do Rockwell (Contrologix) and many others. Todd, who as Shari Worthington commented looks far too young for his job, calls the PAC the next wave of automation controllers. PACs combine the best of the worlds of the PLC and the PC, and the power of embedded computing's FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). He pointed out that ...

As a side note, Shari Worthington, my co-author on EBusiness in Manufacturing (available from ISA press), and one of the most brilliant PR minds in automation, slid me a note during the CSIA meeting just now:

"Have you done a column on "The IT guys are Coming"? We got a call from a $billion company from India that does outsourcing of IT who's now going after the manufacturing system integrator market. Manufacturing has spent years trying to avoid the IT department, and now IT companies are afte...

Nic Gihl, VP Automation and Control from Schneider, asks some thought provoking questions in his presentation at CSIA.

How are we going to find a new direction that will reinvigorate customer interest in automation?

How are we going to explain to customers about all this stuff in a way that we can make money?

Can we create a global information infrastructure so that the guy in the USA can keep his job even though half his products are made in China?

The fact is, as Nic points out, we've been...

One of the things I hate about meetings is the information transfer rate is usually pretty low. In other words, lots of talk, little data. The CSIA meeting has historically had an impressive information transfer rate, and this morning’s sessions are no different.

“Bill and Bill Electronics�

Gerry Niemi of B&B Electronics led off after a small commercial in which he admitted that the Bs in his company name were really “Bill.� “We’re a small company that used to be in a cornfiel...

I feel a little like the Roaming Gnome from the commercials...People keep asking me to go places and sit down in chairs. This week I'm blogging from the 12th Annual Executive Conference of CSIA, the Control and Information System Integrators Association. I've been involved with CSIA for a number of years, first as an interested party, then as a representative of ISA, then as a consultant, and finally as an editor. I find the CSIA meeting generally to be one of the two or three best of the year a...

We've been meeting this way since December, and I am having a great time. This is a fantastic way for me to chronicle the daily life of the process automation marketplace. We're moving to a new web platform, which will give me real blogging software soon, and there may be some disjointedness in the next couple of weeks or so.

I've been hearing reports about the activity at the ISA President's Meeting, just winding up in Portland, Ore. this morning.

There are some initiatives being discussed th...

4/28/2005
Fieldbus in the middle of Nowhere
I´m not sure how far away it actually is, because your humble editor slept most of the way....we arrived in Natal at about 5 AM because of a broken flight schedule. We left for the Petrobras plant at 7.

It was 33 degrees Celsius, and I have had this easy job for too long now...I used to be able to handle heat, humidity and safety shoes, long sleeve shirts and hardhats, but since I´ve become an editor, my user muscles have atrophied. But even though ...

I´m not sure how far away it actually is, because your humble editor slept most of the way....we arrived in Natal at about 5 AM because of a broken flight schedule. We left for the Petrobras plant at 7.

It was 33 degrees Celsius, and I have had this easy job for too long now...I used to be able to handle heat, humidity and safety shoes, long sleeve shirts and hardhats, but since I´ve become an editor, my user muscles have atrophied. But even though they practically had to carry me the last p...