P
Its time for a break from my other job, so having trolled through the archives I thought to write a little burley bait and see if I catch any flame fish by coming out in defense of the "big companies" and their evil schemes for world dominance.
There are three main types of people who play roles within any company, the "managers: who endeavour to set the agenda and regulate the money flow, the technicians who get things done, and the entrepenuers who woo and sell the customers. I willing to bet that most of us on this list are "technician" types who love getting things done. The centre of our world are the toys and tools that we are skilled at using, and we take pride and pleasure in a "job well done".
But it means also that typically we utterly fail to "grok" those other creatures that infest our lives: the bean counters, the project managers, consultants (hoick-sput!), the sales jocks and marketing dudes. And so many of the opinions I've read in here, while usually sound technically, or valid within a limited sphere, completely fail to make it in the real world because of this.
The fact is that the Rockwells, Seimens and Schneiders that dominate our industry do so for one simple reason...that 85% of the time they deliver to 85% of the market, 100% of what it needs: predictable, reliable products with stable life-cycles, that are used in a very wide range of applications, all at a reasonably low total cost of ownership. i.e. good value. Within those parameters they have been pretty successful. Not perfect, not leading edge, not always elegant and not always the lowest purchase cost, but in the final analysis (measured in the bottom line of customers who use them)... damm good value.
Let me take one example that the archives throw up...the question...why can't I connect the Ethernet port of my SLC to the same on my Quantum or S7 and get data to shift? Perfectly good question, but the answers are of often muddied by silly prejudices about how monopolies and evil marketing hype are used to protect "weak products" and milk cash from captured customers. Sighs...if only the world were so simple.
Here is a simple question. When Modbus, or DH+ were first introduced 15-20 years ago, how many qualified networks engineers were to be found in your typical electrical crew? Not so many right? The fact is that millions of feet of "Blue Hose" and Modbus was pulled in and connected with reletively little fuss (except when the basic rules were broken) by guys like you and me who would not have known back then what an IP address was if it bit us in the butt. The upside was..it worked; and if it didn't... you knew whose cage to rattle.
The downside was that the "big boys" didn't like getting their toys broke, so for a long time, too long, they kept them locked up in their proprietary corporate boxes. Well that was way back then...times have moved on. Overall the industry is now capable enough to manage open protocols and hardware systems with far more maturity than 20 years ago. (The PLC was only invented 30 years ago.) No-one has been more aware of this than the major vendors, who have vigorously responded with DeviceNet, ASI, Profibus DP, Modbus TCP and a sprinkling of other offerings promoting open interconnectivity.
In response we grizzle about "network wars" blithely assuming that somehow a committee from all the big competing vendors was supposed to sit down and all peacable like and dream up (and in a few short months) some universally wonderful protocol that was a) technically advanced enough to be future proof, b) capable of allowing each vendor to add their own unique brand value (no-one wants to turn their own product into a commodity...when did you last ask for a drop in pay?) and most importantly c) didn't leave behind and render obsolete their own huge installed bases.
What did happen was that over the last decade or so the vendors have all made big strides towards a version of the perfect protocol that they could live with. Siemens evolved various incarnations of Profibus; Schneider re-packaged Modbus with TCP/IP wraps and added sexy Weblike functions, and Rockwell slowly woke up to the fact that the CIP protocol they first invented for the ControlLogix backplane could get used in other forms, such as DeviceNet, ControlNet and now EtherNet/IP. All these major corporate initiatives are OPEN...to some degree or another. The days of the proprietary protocol are gone. When I started in this game (not so long ago if someone asked me, can I connect Vendor A's Box to Vendor Kamakuza's ThunderBox B?... the answer was usually no. Nowadays the answer is usually yes. (Well at the very least you might have part with a little cash.)
Now the big vendors haven't been spending shareholders cash on these OPEN Protocol programs, just so as us techies have new toys to play with. Along the way the marketing and sales guys have to build a critical mass of customers to place orders and roll in real cash to pay for it, the managers somehow have to hack out a business plan so as it looks good in Powerpoint and we all have to show the CFO that it makes an ROI. (And besides there's all those corporate AMEX's to pay for). Is this so wrong? Another simple question. You are about to buy a brand new car, one you really want, you've earned it, you got the cash... but the scuttle is... the works that makes them is slowly going bust. Now how do you feel about shelling out those hard-earned greenies?
My guess is that in the next few years the natural action of the marketplace will gradually nudge the three biggies into some kind of accomodation with each other about interconnectivity. Personally I hope that Rockwell's CIP (Control and Information Protocol) is the winner, but that is by no means certain, given the way the world works.
CIP has the following merits. 1. It is fundamentally routable across multiple network segments. 2. The publish/subscribe messaging paradigm uses bandwidth intelligently. 3. It defines an set of open automation objects and services that are the foundation of true interoperabilty. 4. It is media independent. 5. It's not old sauce served up as new soup.
But this is just my little day-dream. Meanwhile back in the real world the issues move on. In a few years time we will hopefully have buried the silly PC v PLC debate, the industry will have a least one set of open services and protocols that most of the big players support, and we will have a univeral logic editor that scans text based FD's and generates logic code and downloads to anyone's hardware. Whoa damm! Those polar bears do fly low.
Guys. The core of my argument is this. Those other dudes, the bean counters and marketing stiffs don't care about our leading edge technical elegance, it just doesn't get on their radar. They don't want our latest version of perfection; it's too expensive. They don't actually want our fancy boxes and software tricks at all. What they really want is for us to deliver minimum internal process risk in order that they can both continue to maximise their external (entrepenurial) market risk and at the simultaneously minimising their financial risk; they want us just to invoice them for a job well done, and not to make trouble. i.e. the age-old balance between risk and return.
And it is a huge marketplace out there. Automation customers come is all sizes and shapes, with all kinds of value drivers; good, bad and ugly. Some of them will love Linux and the OpenPLC, but the remarkable thing is that the "big boy vendors" in our industry keep most of these customer's handle's cranked most of the time...and along the way us techies siphon off our own cut of the tomato sauce. There is nothing wrong with constructive grizzling, informed whingeing and the odd well deserved shot or two(especially if the fan is running), but it's time we lost the immature envy script that goes like, "Bill Gates is rich, I'm poor; therefore Bill is a bastard."
It's a big wide world out there. Have fun... my word these daisies do smell funny.
There are three main types of people who play roles within any company, the "managers: who endeavour to set the agenda and regulate the money flow, the technicians who get things done, and the entrepenuers who woo and sell the customers. I willing to bet that most of us on this list are "technician" types who love getting things done. The centre of our world are the toys and tools that we are skilled at using, and we take pride and pleasure in a "job well done".
But it means also that typically we utterly fail to "grok" those other creatures that infest our lives: the bean counters, the project managers, consultants (hoick-sput!), the sales jocks and marketing dudes. And so many of the opinions I've read in here, while usually sound technically, or valid within a limited sphere, completely fail to make it in the real world because of this.
The fact is that the Rockwells, Seimens and Schneiders that dominate our industry do so for one simple reason...that 85% of the time they deliver to 85% of the market, 100% of what it needs: predictable, reliable products with stable life-cycles, that are used in a very wide range of applications, all at a reasonably low total cost of ownership. i.e. good value. Within those parameters they have been pretty successful. Not perfect, not leading edge, not always elegant and not always the lowest purchase cost, but in the final analysis (measured in the bottom line of customers who use them)... damm good value.
Let me take one example that the archives throw up...the question...why can't I connect the Ethernet port of my SLC to the same on my Quantum or S7 and get data to shift? Perfectly good question, but the answers are of often muddied by silly prejudices about how monopolies and evil marketing hype are used to protect "weak products" and milk cash from captured customers. Sighs...if only the world were so simple.
Here is a simple question. When Modbus, or DH+ were first introduced 15-20 years ago, how many qualified networks engineers were to be found in your typical electrical crew? Not so many right? The fact is that millions of feet of "Blue Hose" and Modbus was pulled in and connected with reletively little fuss (except when the basic rules were broken) by guys like you and me who would not have known back then what an IP address was if it bit us in the butt. The upside was..it worked; and if it didn't... you knew whose cage to rattle.
The downside was that the "big boys" didn't like getting their toys broke, so for a long time, too long, they kept them locked up in their proprietary corporate boxes. Well that was way back then...times have moved on. Overall the industry is now capable enough to manage open protocols and hardware systems with far more maturity than 20 years ago. (The PLC was only invented 30 years ago.) No-one has been more aware of this than the major vendors, who have vigorously responded with DeviceNet, ASI, Profibus DP, Modbus TCP and a sprinkling of other offerings promoting open interconnectivity.
In response we grizzle about "network wars" blithely assuming that somehow a committee from all the big competing vendors was supposed to sit down and all peacable like and dream up (and in a few short months) some universally wonderful protocol that was a) technically advanced enough to be future proof, b) capable of allowing each vendor to add their own unique brand value (no-one wants to turn their own product into a commodity...when did you last ask for a drop in pay?) and most importantly c) didn't leave behind and render obsolete their own huge installed bases.
What did happen was that over the last decade or so the vendors have all made big strides towards a version of the perfect protocol that they could live with. Siemens evolved various incarnations of Profibus; Schneider re-packaged Modbus with TCP/IP wraps and added sexy Weblike functions, and Rockwell slowly woke up to the fact that the CIP protocol they first invented for the ControlLogix backplane could get used in other forms, such as DeviceNet, ControlNet and now EtherNet/IP. All these major corporate initiatives are OPEN...to some degree or another. The days of the proprietary protocol are gone. When I started in this game (not so long ago if someone asked me, can I connect Vendor A's Box to Vendor Kamakuza's ThunderBox B?... the answer was usually no. Nowadays the answer is usually yes. (Well at the very least you might have part with a little cash.)
Now the big vendors haven't been spending shareholders cash on these OPEN Protocol programs, just so as us techies have new toys to play with. Along the way the marketing and sales guys have to build a critical mass of customers to place orders and roll in real cash to pay for it, the managers somehow have to hack out a business plan so as it looks good in Powerpoint and we all have to show the CFO that it makes an ROI. (And besides there's all those corporate AMEX's to pay for). Is this so wrong? Another simple question. You are about to buy a brand new car, one you really want, you've earned it, you got the cash... but the scuttle is... the works that makes them is slowly going bust. Now how do you feel about shelling out those hard-earned greenies?
My guess is that in the next few years the natural action of the marketplace will gradually nudge the three biggies into some kind of accomodation with each other about interconnectivity. Personally I hope that Rockwell's CIP (Control and Information Protocol) is the winner, but that is by no means certain, given the way the world works.
CIP has the following merits. 1. It is fundamentally routable across multiple network segments. 2. The publish/subscribe messaging paradigm uses bandwidth intelligently. 3. It defines an set of open automation objects and services that are the foundation of true interoperabilty. 4. It is media independent. 5. It's not old sauce served up as new soup.
But this is just my little day-dream. Meanwhile back in the real world the issues move on. In a few years time we will hopefully have buried the silly PC v PLC debate, the industry will have a least one set of open services and protocols that most of the big players support, and we will have a univeral logic editor that scans text based FD's and generates logic code and downloads to anyone's hardware. Whoa damm! Those polar bears do fly low.
Guys. The core of my argument is this. Those other dudes, the bean counters and marketing stiffs don't care about our leading edge technical elegance, it just doesn't get on their radar. They don't want our latest version of perfection; it's too expensive. They don't actually want our fancy boxes and software tricks at all. What they really want is for us to deliver minimum internal process risk in order that they can both continue to maximise their external (entrepenurial) market risk and at the simultaneously minimising their financial risk; they want us just to invoice them for a job well done, and not to make trouble. i.e. the age-old balance between risk and return.
And it is a huge marketplace out there. Automation customers come is all sizes and shapes, with all kinds of value drivers; good, bad and ugly. Some of them will love Linux and the OpenPLC, but the remarkable thing is that the "big boy vendors" in our industry keep most of these customer's handle's cranked most of the time...and along the way us techies siphon off our own cut of the tomato sauce. There is nothing wrong with constructive grizzling, informed whingeing and the odd well deserved shot or two(especially if the fan is running), but it's time we lost the immature envy script that goes like, "Bill Gates is rich, I'm poor; therefore Bill is a bastard."
It's a big wide world out there. Have fun... my word these daisies do smell funny.