ARC- an assessment

As I didn't post almost all this week, I suppose I ought to explain-- but I did Twitter like crazy. If you haven't been infected with the Twitter virus, run like crazy.

The ARC Forum was smaller than last year...about 200 people smaller. But everybody there agreed that in the current economic climate, 450 attendees was a huge win for ARC Advisory Group.

And everybody who attended the sessions said that most of the presentations were good. There were the usual vendors who didn't get it, and gave commercials instead of presentations...

Unfortunately, I was able to see only one presentation. Starting with a continuous set of press conferences on Monday, lasting over 6 and a half hours straight with no breaks, I was in side meetings with vendors almost continuously the entire week, and then at the WBF face-to-face board meeting.

There were some exciting announcements. Emerson and Yokogawa debuted complete MES/MOM architectures to go on top of their respective DCS systems; Honeywell introduced what is essentially "Experion Lite" -- a smaller overhead version of Experion that is intended to compete with the PLC/HMI market. We did a product exclusive in this month's Control magazine, and you can find the exclusive on ControlGlobal.com.

The big topic was the elephant in the room. It's the economy, yes? The general opinion is that we may have already started back up, but we can't see the leading indicators yet. The lagging indicators will likely show bottom in June or July, and 4th quarter will likely look like where we are now...and we should have growth, albeit slowly, in 2010. From their mouths to God's ear.