ISA's SP99, formed at the same time as the SP100 Wireless Committee, has just issued preliminary standards for Cybersecurity in process automation for ballot.
It is Amazing! to me how easily and fast a standard can be written that has as its end result getting the Department of Homeland Security off our backs, while it takes enormous effort to even bring the wireless world to the point where they might consider really, truly starting to work on one, instead of jockeying for raw competitive advantage.
Has everybody forgotten that without the end users there is no freakin' market???
Literally everybody who is making industrial wireless devices will make many more and much more money just as soon as we agree on what the S100 standard and the HART Wireless Specification are going to be.
Look, this is NOT rocket science. Get on board with the standards effort, or the end users will vote with their feet. Wanna know how bad it can get? How many Foundation fieldbus devices have your company sold in the past 10 years? The Foundation fieldbus standard is a great idea that hasn't utterly failed, but is growing so slowly as to be stunted. Why? Its brand values are stained with all the miserable inter-company warfare that roiled around the standard at ISA and at the IEC.
A large number of companies, in the last days, put out a joint press release saying they were now going to play nice in the sandbox. Does this mean that they weren't before? Some of the signatories were NOT playing nice--- you know who you are. I found it very interesting which companies were not named in that press release. Let's see, Emerson, Schneider, Rockwell, and Siemens. Did they not get invited to play nice too?
There is a saying that no one should see the making of either laws or sausage. That usually applies to standards, too. But maybe the end users ought to know who's jerking the chain to their future as productive process automation professionals by disrupting the orderly operations of the standards process.
