In his blog, Emerson’s Jim Cahill picked up some of my posts about the joint press release in which Emerson and Siemens announced some mutual cooperation. Jim rightly pointed out that Emerson has long supported PROFIBUS DP and other open standards. You’ll find his post and my comments at Emerson Process Experts.
I’ve added Jim’s blog to the blog list of PROFIblog. Wait a minute, you’re thinking, Emerson is a prime mover behind Foundation Fieldbus and PTO supports the competing technology PROFIBUS PA. True, but FF does not handle discrete, so projects that use FF frequently also use PROFIBUS DP. And besides FF and PROFIBUS PA have more in common than they have different: Both are built on the same physics. And they share a common enemy – “the old way” – the old way of conventional wiring with its labor-intensive installation, tough-to-troubleshoot maintenance, and impossible-to-integrate-to-asset-management breakdowns. So I’ll pull for the success of FF… AND PROFIBUS PA to help industry overcome the deficiencies of “the old way.” The proponents of FF and PROFIBUS PA have a lot of educating left to do.