No, I haven't posted all week. Sorry, I was at our
AutomationXchange event, and the discussions held there are private. I will hopefully be posting an Adobe Presenter version of the keynote speech that Ian Nimmo of User-Centered-Design Services gave on Tuesday morning. I'm hoping we can use the recording I made with my handheld Sony recorder.
AutomationXchange is unique. We spend a year finding end-users who are interested in looking at new, different, or better technologies and vendors, and we ask them who in the vendor community they'd like to meet. Out of their lists, we recruit vendors to attend, and talk to them. It is a completely buyer-driven event, as opposed to a trade show or even a user group meeting, which are vendor driven events. It is the only buyer-driven, end-user driven event in the automation industry, anywhere in the world.
This year, we had Anil Sharma, from India, as one of the buyers. To show how global the industry has become, Jim Cummings, of
Total Systems Design, one of the system integrators who come as vendors, came on the same plane with Sharma from Mumbai, where Cummings had been opening an office for TSD in India.
Large and small companies attend AutomationXchange, both as buyers and sellers. Siemens, Rockwell and Yokogawa were there, as were Magnetrol, Pepperl+Fuchs, Weidmuller and Softswitching Technologies, a very interesting startup company that does power quality analysis. End user companies as large as Lyondell and Tesoro and Kraft were there, as well as smaller end user companies.
If you want to go where people really can exchange ideas and information, in a completely discreet and private way-- even the organizers and I and my staff are excluded from the meetings-- AutomationXchange is the place.
