Industrial Ethernet is growing. No surprise there, but it’s always good to examine the real market. Technology market researcher VDC did that according to their press release on the topic (that caught my attention in the October Control Engineering magazine): “Ethernet Continues to Gain Traction in Industrial Distributed/Remote I/O Market.”
They are predicting that the Ethernet IO market will grow more than twice as fast as the overall IO market through 2010. That’s why device manufacturers are jumping on the Industrial Ethernet bandwagon as we saw at our recent PROFINET Developer Workshop. VDC analyst Jake Millette concludes “Ultimately, the choice to migrate to Ethernet from traditional fieldbuses will allow for greater intelligence in distributed/remote I/O regardless of the brand.”
The first advantage of Industrial Ethernet mentioned in the press release though is “Easy Integration with office IT and other devices.” So why is PROFINET the only protocol that is actually implementing open standards to facilitate that integration?