Futuristix-Wonderware's 10th User Conference (X-CHANGE 2002) will be held at Sun City from 10-13 March 2002. The conference, which promises to be the most successful yet, will be co-sponsored by Microsoft SA, as will the informative national breakfast road shows that will follow later in the year. X-CHANGE has become one of the most significant events on the calendars of manufacturing industry professionals and system integrators involved with scada, supply chain management, maintenance and all aspects of industrial automation.
From its beginnings a decade ago where it focused on scada, the X-CHANGE User Group Conference has grown to address the ever-widening needs of the manufacturing, process and utility industries.
"Today, scada's true role is as the I/O component of a far broader and integrated system of solutions focusing on productivity and profitability," says Mike le Plastrier, MD Futuristix-Wonderware. "Shop floor, production and IT personnel alike are realising that their companies must become more integrated to become more effective. As a result, system integrators and end-users are growing their skills base to cope with the increasingly sophisticated demands of operational and business processes. This includes everything from web-enabled scada and alarm systems to the remote viewing and total transparency of production and customer information across all applications. Shop floor, production planning, customer and business processes cannot work in isolation of one another because they are all trying to achieve the single goal of profitable client need satisfaction. X-CHANGE 2002 will show how a variety of end-users are winning through the application of a rapidly-expanding range of evolving technologies."
A number of these enabling technologies and concepts are being pioneered by Microsoft and Microsoft SA will be co-sponsoring this year's X-CHANGE 2002 User Group Conference. Of particular interest will be BizTalk and Microsoft.NET,
BizTalk Server enables companies to rapidly build and deploy integrated business processes within their organisations and with their trading partners. They can get their solutions to market more quickly, using fewer resources, which allows them to move more swiftly to respond to customer needs and competitive pressures. BizTalk Server 2000 offers a suite of tools and services that make building business processes and integrating applications fundamentally faster and independent of operating system, programming model or programming language.
The driving force behind Microsoft.NET is a shift in focus from individual Web sites or devices to new constellations of computers, devices and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions. People will have control over how, when and what information is delivered to them. Computers, devices, and services will be able to collaborate directly with each other and businesses will be able to offer their products and services in a way that lets customers embed them in their own electronic fabric. The Microsoft.NET platform will fundamentally change the way that computers and users interact. By bringing employees, customers, data and business applications into a coherent and intelligently interactive whole, .NET will allow businesses to benefit from radically increased efficiency and productivity.
"The focus on the integration of technologies and approaches that will help unify businesses into cohesive entities rather than fragmented departments is very gratifying," says le Plastrier. "This is something that we have been rather passionate about for some time now and to see it all become a practical reality is very exciting."
Futuristix-Wonderware's 10th X-CHANGE User Conference will, as always, focus on the successful and practical application and implementation of the Wonderware range of solutions in the manufacturing, mining, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, industrial automation and IT industries. This includes (among a host of others) scada, maintenance management (condition-based as well as down-time analysis), plant information portals, web-enabled monitoring, alarm and control applications as well as a unified approach to integrate, view and manipulate information from a wide variety of application-specific and proprietary data sources from anywhere in the world.
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