I received this request today, from the Standards and Practices Board at ISA: 

Here's a quote from a blog post I read this morning:

(From Repman Blog (http://www.repmanblog.com) : 

There's a class of product I've called the 87% product for as long as I can remember. You know the kind of product I mean. It has features, and they function, and somewhere in there are benefits for the customer...

But the product doesn't sell well. And the engineers who designed it can't figure out why, so they blame the lousy marketing and bad sales effort.

The real reason might just be that it isn't designed expressly for the market it serves. It's only 87% of the product it should be, but it just misses the mark.

From Joe Kaulfersch at Pepperl + Fuchs:

We all mourn the passing of Franklyn Kirk. Franklyn or Frank as we all knew him was born on July 25, 1918 and passed away quickly on Saturday December 29th in his apartment in Rocky River, Ohio at the age of 94.

He was a friend to all and a mentor to many. He was willing to help anyone who came to him. That was for technical consultation or just someone you needed to talk to as things come up in business and life in general.

Here's a slide from my upcoming webinar for ISA Marketing and Sales Webinar Series: PR101--High Performance Marketing Communications for the Automation Industry. It shows how an integrated marketing communications and social media program works as a set of nested control loops-- in fact as a series of cascade control loops. 

If you are an engineer, you will dig this immediately. If you are a marketer, you can use this tool to talk to the engineers who have the money you need.

EXIDA CERTIFIES EMERSON DELTAV SIS WITH ELECTRONIC MARSHALLING FOR FUNCTIONAL SAFETY

SELLERSVILLE, PA (February 20, 2013) -- exida, an accredited global functional safety certification company, has issued a functional safety certification per the IEC 61508 and several application standards for the Emerson Process Management DeltaV CHARMS SIS product line.

Please register for 
ISA Marketing & Sales: Do You Know Why Your Customers Do What They Do? 
Feb 28, 2013 12:00 PM EST 

Welcome to another edition of the wireless standards polka. You know, the dance that keeps confusing end users to the point that they don't want to use any wireless devices except 802.11 WiFi.

Tiziani and Whitmyre, Invensys' advertising and marcomm agency, passed along this article in their most recent e-newsletter. I find it interesting and instructive. The survey TechTarget ran was of IT professionals, but I wonder if there is any real difference anymore between buying patterns in automation and IT. Here's TW's take on it.

The plant floor, whether discrete, batch, hybrid or process, is changing rapidly. The increasing use of smartphones and tablets and small PCs on the plant floor has given rise to the BYOD (bring your own device) movement. This is a security headache, but the use of smartphones and tablets will continue to grow because the utility of having access to these devices right there in the field far outweighs the potential problems for security.

In the meantime, people are working out the details. Here's a press release detailing the award of a patent for an augmented reality app.