Gary Mintchell blogged about Ethercat opening an office in the US so I checked out their website to discover that the Ethercat Technology Group is “The world’s largest Industrial Ethernet organisation.”
Hmm, that did not sound… accurate. So I set about comparing us to them:
|
|
PROFINET |
Ethercat |
|
Organization size |
1400 |
512 |
|
Regional Organizations |
25 |
4 |
|
Competence Centers |
35 |
0 |
|
Test Labs |
8 |
0 |
|
Training Centers |
9 |
0 |
|
Products |
115 |
41 |
|
Installed Base |
a lot |
<100,000 |
Regarding the membership, our membership does cost while Ethercat membership is free. For free I might even join. But how will the organization survive. We are a non-profit, member-supported organization. We only exist because our members find value in the educational and promotional work we do… and they pay us to do it. Something is missing here.
Ethercat does not have global reach. Our regional certified competence centers, test labs, and training centers allow local access to expertise in PROFINET (and PROFIBUS) almost anywhere. They don’t seem to have this concept of providing local, worldwide expertise. Of course, none of the other fieldbus organizations do either – just us.
While we have not published a node count for PROFINET yet, I am very sure it is many times more than Ethercat’s “sub-100,000” number (reported in the Industrial Ethernet Book article “EtherCAT looks to 2008”).
There must be some other sense in which they are the “largest.”