Regarding the June cover story, "The Fieldbus Chronicles," I won’t tout myself as an expert in fieldbus deployment, other than to say we at PTC-Alliance prefer EtherNet/IP, as defined by Rockwell Automation, due to its overall versatility. That said, I don’t think you’ll ever see a unified standard if, for no other reason, than because automation vendors will always want that part of their solutions strategy to be uniquely theirs. Other reasons, of course, include legacy platform support, node count and scalability, to name a few. I like standards, and appreciate the conventional wisdom of a single fieldbus standard. Nonetheless, I’m not optimistic that I'll see such a fieldbus in my lifetime.
Nick Baranyk
PTC Alliance
[email protected]
