"Change is inevitable, growth is intentional." Glenda Cloud
The Web is a fantastic resource. I was looking for a quote on `change' with which to open this month's editorial comment and up popped the above. But wait. When I quote authors like Asimov, Bradbury or Chaucer I can add the title of the work from which the quote originated and readers gain some context. Who is Glenda Cloud? The Web leaves us ignorant on this. The quote is still sound, but this is a reminder that we should not just take everything on the Web, or in life, at face value. We should remember that one of our most important strengths is the ability to question.
A new face
This title is changing and growing intentionally. We have strengthened our editorial team in SA Instrumentation and Control. At the beginning of October we welcomed Steve Meyer who has joined our team as deputy editor of this title. Steven is now responsible for the bulk of the editing, layout and content of SA I&C. I will continue my involvement with this title in the role of consulting editor and look forward to being able to contributing originated content pertinent to the monthly features.
Steven has engineering and marketing qualifications and his career experience spans marine engineering, smelting, military optics systems, electronics design and business development at CSIR and the Department of Trade and Industry.
Darren Smith, managing director of Technews, comments, "Steven's appointment is a reflection on the incredible year that Technews is experiencing with all of its titles growing and continuing to earn the respect of the sectors in which they are positioned. And we have exciting plans for the year ahead."
Building IP on sound foundations
I have noticed an emerging trend for smart organisations to build their own IP on top of the foundation provided by modern scada systems. In July 2007 we featured an article on Polysphere's Vizmine product, which leverages the Adroit infrastructure to provide mine management with a realtime operations dashboard. At Adroit's International User Conference in September, Deon Fourie of Shopware spoke about how his company is providing the intellectual property (IP) of its lean manufacturing solutions to multinational companies in many parts of the world. This solution also uses Adroit as its front end. We read about Korean Water Sources using Yokogawa's scada solution as a foundation for its Water-K software solution for water utilities management. The enabling technology for this is the move by scada system developers away from closed systems towards open systems and improved OPC interfaces.
The OPC Foundation seems to be struggling to meet its release deadlines for OPC-UA their Unified Architecture offering, but has been able to show some powerful multivendor demonstrations at recent exhibitions. UA puts strong emphasis on compatibility with Microsoft .NET and to a lesser extent Java.
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