Emerson Global Users Exchange, Day 2

It’s a dryer if windy day in Grapevine as we wrap up day two of the Emerson Global Users Exchange. One of the hazards of working on the Exchange Today is that we have few opportunities to attend sessions due to the volume of material that we must assemble to fill the pages. Jeanine Katzel and I are here in the newsroom joined by Katie Cadera who is coordinating logistics. Our publisher Michelle Palmer is even here today with a video crew capturing demonstrations on the exhibit floor.

A big chunk of this morning was taken up with an interview with John Berra, Peter Zornio (chief strategic officer) and Bob Tinker (from Cisco). The notes compiled from this lengthy interview will be included in the Exchange Today over the next two or three days. It’s interesting material and a lot of it. Between the three of them, it made for a comprehensive picture of where Emerson is headed with wireless.

As a peculiar aside, I went so far as to comment to John Berra that while I was watching him deliver his keynote address, I saw certain similarities to the style and general presence of Jack Benny during his TV career. Peter Zornio perked up and said that he’d had exactly the same thought. Fortunately for all, it was taken as a compliment. That is the way I had intended it. (Maybe it says something about our collective ages.)

You should read the interview in the Exchange Today. (If you aren’t at the event, we will find some means to post the material on our Control Engineering Website next week. Watch for that.)

We spent some time discussing how Emerson is establishing itself in the pantheon of wireless providers. With the addition of larger scale wireless integration through their partnership with Cisco, Emerson can now answer the other side of the question as Peter Zornio put it. To give you one small preview of tomorrow’s interview, here’s one comment from him that I find particulalry interesting:

"I think one reason for the partnership with Cisco is if we focused just on the instrumentation aspect of wireless, when customers ask us, ‘What about this other side of wireless?’ they have to be assured that we have a vision and a plan that we aren’t creating a stand-alone kind of system when they look at our field wireless solution that’s different from what they might be doing in their larger plant wireless solution. Partnering with someone like Cisco and making sure we have a combined architecture makes everybody feel there is a whole story here if I choose to start in the field and then move up to the plant network."

This is an important move for Emerson. If they want to contend in the wireless arena at the same level where they are in other market and product areas, they need a more comprehensive solution. As important as instrumentation is, it may not be the port of entry for companies initiating new wireless projects. Now they have more to bring to the table. And so they should. More tomorrow.