The Control team is in Houston to attend the Yokogawa Technology Fair and Users' Conference, and we'll be producing an e-show-daily tonight, tomorrow and Thursday. Today is keynote speech day, with speeches by Dave Johnson, President of Yokogawa America, Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental Airlines, and Mike Brooks, of Chevron USA.
Chevron, of course, is Yokogawa's prize victory in the "capture the user" game...it was last year that Chevron made the choice of Yokogawa as its Main Automation Vendor, and the alliance appears to be going well.
Numerous Yokogawa partners are here, exhibiting at the Technology Fair, and as of last night, the number of vendor companies who have told me they are currently working on a WirelessHART product for release early in 2009 or sooner increased to 13. Yokogawa is showing prototype WirelessHART products here, and has a projected release date sometime next year. Yokogawa also says they will produce an ISA100 device but have no projected release date.
Most of last night was spent raucously watching the NCAA Basketball Final...Yokogawa had a large screen TV set up in a meeting room, provided refreshments, and everybody watched till the final seconds ticked off the clock. Great game.
