Keith Larson is group publisher responsible for Putman Media's manufacturing automation titlesControl and Control Design. Corporately, he also serves as vice president of content across Putman Media's other magazine titles.
New virtual training classes from Industrial IP Advantage are designed to meet the emerging needs of automation engineers and IT professionals tasked with deploying Ethernet networking technologies in an industrial context.
Today's Ethernet technology can satisfy the performance needs of automation systems as well as ease integration with Ethernet business networks, but the engineers and technicians responsible for plant-floor environments are ill equipped to deal with it, according to Mike Slepikas, manager, learning solutions, Panduit.
"We're hearing from customers that they're not ready," he said. "IT doesn't have the domain expertise, and control engineers don't have the network skill sets. This is all about getting education to the people who need it."
"It provides a common language and can help bridge the ‘credibility gap' between IT and OT professionals." Paul Brooks of Rockwell Automation described how new online courses offered by Industrial IP Advantage can ease the industrial network skills shortage in many organizations.
"The training courses provide an excellent opportunity to begin the journey toward a structured, converged network that will help maintain security, performance and maintainability best practices," added Paul Brooks, networks business development manager, Rockwell Automation. "It also provides a common language and can help bridge the ‘credibility gap' between IT and OT professionals."
The online training brings together the combined knowledge, best practices and application-specific expertise of three industry leaders—Rockwell Automation, Cisco and Panduit—to teach industrial professionals how to design, build and maintain holistic, IP-based network architectures. "This unique offering brings together domain expertise across varying critical aspects of designing, operating and maintaining an industrial network architecture," Brooks said.
The first two of four modular courses were launched this week at Automation Fair in Chicago. Two more are planned for release in 2016:
- Courses 1 and 2: Designing for the Cell/Area Zone
- Course 3: Designing for Production Operations
- Course 4: Enterprise Integration and Maintenance
The courses are designed to help engineers drive design decisions from the device-level to enterprise-wide network, leveraging interactive, scenario-based training on topics such as logical topologies, protocols, switching and routing, security, physical cabling and wireless considerations.
The full series of four courses can be purchased for $350 on the Industrial IP Advantage website, with a promotional discount for those registering by January 2016. Four "try before you buy" modules are available at no charge.
