Sign of the times: Emerson partners with Intergraph

From Emerson's Jerry Moon: Emerson Process Management has joined the SmartPlant® Alliance Program of Intergraph Corporation, a leading global supplier of engineering & information management products. This new agreement expands Emerson's current use of Intergraph's lifecycle instrumentation engineering software and enhances interoperability and efficiency between Emerson's DeltaVâ„¢ digital automation system, a core component of the company's PlantWeb® digital plant architecture, and Intergraph's SmartPlant Instrumentation software. Through this alliance, Emerson will collaborate with Intergraph to provide enhanced bi-directional integration between PlantWeb digital architecture products and technology and the SmartPlant Enterprise portfolio of products. As a first priority, Emerson's DeltaV automation system will be integrated with SmartPlant Instrumentation . This integration will provide a bi-directional data exchange capability allowing a reduction in the time and an increase in accuracy when configuring and documenting PlantWeb digital plant architecture projects. The integrated software will also form the engineering information basis needed to support key activities during operation & maintenance of process plants. I've been saying it for several years. We're close to the Holy Grail of plant operations: High fidelity simulators --> automated plant design software --> automated automation system design --> automated and "living" as-builts all tied together and bidirectional. Wooohoo! It's a great time to be an end user!