The Control and Information System Integrators Association (CSIA) meeting held recently in Palm Desert , Calif. , was a stunning success. Over 250 attendees, from nearly half the entire company membership, crowded the meeting rooms for three days of sessions on benchmarking, best practices, legal and intellectual property issues, technical discussions and an extremely well-attended vendor night. CSIA has grown from 145 members to over 200 in the last year, with over 60 of those members having completed the Registered Member audit. Vendor companies such as Rockwell Allen-Bradley, National Instruments, Schneider Automation, GE Fanuc, and others are incorporating the Registered Member program into their own integrator channel programs. Rockwell's Chris Vaidean told the group, We support CSIA because of the increasing level of professionalism you have brought to system integration. ISA again affirmed its close ties to CSIA in the person of Don Zee, President-Elect/Secretary.The meeting's keynote session was a discussion of the future of automation and the automation engineer with Dick Morley, Jim Pinto, and CONTROL's Walt Boyes presenting, followed by a very lively panel discussion.