Some news trickles back from ISA100's China adventure...

Hearking back to the press release ISA put out last week, it appears that the first draft of the ISA100.11a standard was NOT voted out of the Task Group in China as the press release indicated it would be. There will be a delay of at least 30 days, I am told, before the Task Group votes out the draft for comment. This, of course, makes one wonder again about the "alpha test bed" that Andre Ristaino talked about in the press release...and it also makes one wonder again about the incredibly swift schedule the standard committee leadership is trying to maintain. It appears, too that the natives are getting restless. The "natives" I mean are a group of mostly end users who have started to notice that the Elephant in the Wireless Room has a friend: the rhinoceros in the other corner... and they've decided to go forward with a proposal to really do a serious study of what would happen if ISA100 simply adopted WirelessHART as the field device standard. Oh, yes...the demo that the press release talked about. There was a demonstration. It consisted of a couple of devices and a gateway, but with no interoperability shown, so far as I have been told. But the press release was accurate, except that the demo didn't happen until a day or so after the release was sent out. There will, I am sure, be more news as the standards fight gets more serious.