Keeping an Eye on Technology Futures, No Hidden Agendas, New Attitudes, No Platitudes!
It's little more than three months since Honeywell announced its "OneWireless" solution at the Honeywell User Group meeting. Honeywell president Jack Bolick claimed that "OneWireless was the only wireless network a plant needs." The implication was that users who adopted other vendors' solutions would find themselves having to manage a plethora of protocols and several potentially conflicting wireless networks. Emerson, which was already selling its HART-based wireless networking, was the primary target against which this marketing volley was aimed. Honeywell suggested that by focusing solely on field device networking, Emerson was not giving its customers the opportunity to take advantage of the wider possibilities offered by Honeywell's much broader OneWireless in-plant wireless networking solutions.
Now Emerson has responded by announcing an alliance with Cisco, which offers users pretty much everything that Honeywell's OneWireless offers AFTER the ISA-100 standard is released, plus the added bonus of WirlessHART-based wireless networking NOW.
Cisco, the mainstream networking "big gorilla", is once again (previous alliance with GE-Fanuc fizzled) eyeing the industrial automation arena. CISCO sees the growing convergence of the IT and automation worlds, and hopes to extend its reach from the corporate level to the plant, not quite recognizing the intricacies in the fragmented industrial markets.
In April 2007 Cisco announced an "alliance" with Rockwell, with plans to develop what they called a "common technology view". No one really understands the sweet-nothing words that were used to introduce that alliance, beyond the fact that CISCO wanted to play in the industrial arena.
This is clearly a marketing game of ping-pong, with CISCO playing all sides. Honeywell must soon come up with a response to the latest Emerson initiative. Or, take my advice: Forget it, and simply focus on gaining market-share - which is the real prize.
InTech eNews - The wild, wacky, wireless wars
Alliances keeps CISCO moving up the application stack
