Pavilion keeps on going...

Spent Friday morning at Pavilion Technologies with Matt Tormollen, two refugees from ABB and Honeywell, Ric Snyder and Don Hart, and Amy George. Like that other Austin company, National Instruments, Pavilion marches to a far different drummer than most automation companies. They've just released the second version of Pavilion 8-- their "does almost everything except take out the cat" software suite. Pavilion 8 is another of the platform software suites, where lots of things can be done with one part of the software or other. Pavilion 8 is remarkable from a software design point of view. It is, of course, web-based, and was designed from the ground up to be multi-language capable. Tokens are used instead of text strings on the page, which point to the correct phrase in the database in the appropriate language. So change your browser settings to Japanese and all the text in all the parts of the program changes to Japanese automatically. There is even room for user customization, so that end users can write new text and it works exactly the same way. Not only do they do model predictive control, which Pavilion is famous for, but they also have lots of Sarbanes-Oxley inspired data management tools for everything from process to environmental monitoring. And of course, Pavilion is still doing the very gutsy thing they announced last year: ValueFirst. By this they mean: if it doesn't meet the previously agreed-to benchmarks, you don't pay. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody sold this way. No broken promises, no vaporware, just stand and deliver. Their alliance with Halliburton (see the podcast in the Process Automation Radio Network) is going well, according to Tormollen. I've invited Pavilion to talk more at a later date about some of the really neat things they're doing for a specific couple of customers. More about this later...