Looking at the results of the "consolidation" into "consortia" that occurred last week at SP100's plenary meeting in Raleigh, it is clear that there are now two camps: the "Honeywell" camp and the "Emerson" camp. Pretty nearly everybody has divided themselves into those two camps.
This could be very bad.
It doesn't have to be, however.
If we continue to look at Jose Gutierrez' concept for determining which proposals should ascend to become the standard, the fact that battlelines were drawn pretty clearly last week may, in fact, help to make that occur.
Suppose the two camps consolidate a proposal, design a set of protocols, and nominate a design for silicon. We then have "proposals, quantity two each."
Then we give one of them to Wayne Manges at ORNL and one to his counterpart at INEEL, or some other testing lab, like Southwest Research Institute, and we let them test them against the RFP's requirements.
The one that is demonstrated, by a disinterested third party, to be the better proposal wins. Everybody climbs on the same bus and we go make a market for wireless in process automation.
Sounds like a pipe dream?
It doesn't have to be.
It is up to the end user community to make sure that it doesn't become one.
