Honeywell User Group

Here in lovely dessicated Phoenix, it is...well, in a word, hot. It isn't accidental that the totem bird of the largest city in Arizona is the firebird...the one that every year immolates itself and rises from the ashes, reborn. This is unfortunately the time of the fire. It was about 112 yesterday (that's Fahrenheit, for all the rest of you but it could easily have been Celsius considering that after a certain point it just feels HOT!!). Luckily, the temperature in the desert goes down rapidly when the sun sets, so the meet-and-greet last night wasn't an adventure in being parboiled. One thing Honeywell does extremely well is party. The party had a fisherman's restaurant theme, and the food was excellent. So was the company, as I spent a lot of time with the end users who are here. Honeywell's User Group is extremely powerful, because they have money. As I reported last year, Honeywell dedicates a bunch of money, and a bunch of engineers, strictly to the User Group, and this has been going on for years. That's right, a User Group that is more than an unpaid cheering section. What a concept. "Yeah, I was part of that first group," Procter and Gamble's Dave Chappell remembered last night, "and it was wild. Honeywell came to us and gave us a whole bunch of money and said, 'Here, do what you want with this.' It took us forever to come to agreement with what we were going to do." But it seems to have worked, since the User Group is working on Release 13 of user group designed, user group engineered, and user group paid for enhancements to Honeywell software and systems. Later today, we'll hear from Jack Bolick, Honeywell PCS President, and Roger Fradin, his boss, president of Honeywell ACS. We won't be having the Peter Zornio show this year, of course, since Peter is busy having a brain and blood transplant in Austin...for those of you who don't know, Peter received an offer he couldn't refuse from Emerson and will now bleed blue instead of red. Instead, we'll have the DonnaLee Skaggs and Jason Urso Show. DonnaLee and Jason will be presenting the technical updates this year. And sometime today, there will be the big, expected wireless announcement from Honeywell. It is doubtful that this will help end the Huge Unnecessary Wireless War. But the technology is sure to be interesting, and we are waiting anxiously to hear all about it. Stay tuned to this space for more details. In addition, Control will again be producing an "electronic show daily" from the Honeywell User Group. We'll be producing three editions this time, rather than the two we did last year. This year, Keith Larson and I are ably assisted by Mark Rosenzweig, editor in chief of Chemical Processing and Paul Thomas, managing editor of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, both sister publications. If you are on the email distribution list for these show dailies, I certainly hope you like them.