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Several ARC analysts attended the annual Emerson Global Users Exchange the week of October 24. For the first time ever, this event was held in Emerson's backyard in Austin, Texas at the Austin Convention Center. This continues to be one of the best user group meetings in the industry and probably the largest pure-play process automation user group meeting on the planet. Emerson Exchange attracted around 3,000 people this year, about the same as last year and a good sign in light of the still-struggling economy and persistently low oil prices. Most of the user group meetings this year have been focused on rolling out the respective suppliers' Industrial Internet of Things strategy, and this year's exchange was no exception. Emerson's Global User Exchange Board is fully in control of Emerson Exchange and approves all the presentations and abstracts given. ARC was fortunate enough to have our analysts, Janice Abel and Paula Hollywood, participate in panels discussions at the event. Doug De Bruin of Clearwater Paper and Chairman of the Emerson Global User Exchange Board opened the event, followed by the keynotes by Emerson Automation Solutions chairman, Steven Sonnenberg, and executive president, Mike Train. Emerson recently went through some restructuring in the wake of the sale of the Network Power business to Platinum Equity in August and the Motors and Drives businesses to Nidec in the same month. The new Automation Solutions division consolidates all of Emerson's automation-related businesses from Emerson Process Management as well as some of the businesses from Emerson Industrial Automation. Sonnenberg remarked during his keynote that the restructuring and his appointment to chairman of Automation Solutions frees him up to do more high-level strategic planning on the direction of the division and investment in new technologies. Mike Train, who has been with Emerson since 1991, will assume the executive president role. 
Emerson has also made several acquisitions over the past year, most notably Pentair Valves and Controls. This gives them a huge presence in the on/off and pressure relief valve marketplace and provides a huge installed base and potential market for devices that can be connected to the Industrial Internet of Things. It didn't take long for IIoT to take center stage at the Exchange either. After a nice tribute to former Emerson Process president John Berra, Mike Train got down to business, first talking about the fundamentals that drive both Emerson's and their customers' businesses: safety, reliability, productivity, and emissions. 
Emerson has always been good about building a strong business value proposition behind the technologies it sells, and the IIoT is no exception. The company has been building a pervasive sensing strategy over the past several years, acquiring a multitude of specialized sensors (both wired and wireless) for everything from acoustic monitoring of steam traps to intelligent pressure relief valves; real-time, non-intrusive corrosion sensors; and more in addition to its already strong business in process field devices like pressure transmitters and Coriolis flowmeters. Pervasive sensing will be a big part of Emerson's story moving forward, but it's not an IIoT ecosystem in and of itself. Many in the media and analyst community were expecting that Emerson would announce their new IIoT approach at this meeting, and they didn't disappoint. Mike Train announced during his keynote that PlantWeb would be the new name for this ecosystem, resurrecting the name that was applied to the overall business philosophy behind the introduction of the DeltaV process automation system, where the system itself is just another node on a network along with intelligent field devices, control valves, and other applications and functions. Bringing back the PlantWeb name is a great idea. It's already familiar to most people in the industry and represents the open and contextual access to information that is part of the IIoT. Of course, the new PlantWeb encompasses much more than DCSs and devices. For starters, Emerson has decided to use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which the company has already used for some smaller scale applications involving remote services for monitoring the performance of steam traps and other devices (link goes to a very good case study with Denka Singapore). 
Train also announced that Emerson would partner with Cisco to create a new series of secure edge devices for PlantWeb. Emerson also showed off an increasingly wide range of mobile applications and remote services that will also be part of the new ecosystem. And of course, the Pervasive Sensing message is still strong. In our next installment, we'll go into more detail about the various aspects of PlantWeb and the related services that Emerson is offering. We will also provide more details on some of the new sensors, packaged solutions, and partners.
Emerson has also made several acquisitions over the past year, most notably Pentair Valves and Controls. This gives them a huge presence in the on/off and pressure relief valve marketplace and provides a huge installed base and potential market for devices that can be connected to the Industrial Internet of Things. It didn't take long for IIoT to take center stage at the Exchange either. After a nice tribute to former Emerson Process president John Berra, Mike Train got down to business, first talking about the fundamentals that drive both Emerson's and their customers' businesses: safety, reliability, productivity, and emissions. Emerson has always been good about building a strong business value proposition behind the technologies it sells, and the IIoT is no exception. The company has been building a pervasive sensing strategy over the past several years, acquiring a multitude of specialized sensors (both wired and wireless) for everything from acoustic monitoring of steam traps to intelligent pressure relief valves; real-time, non-intrusive corrosion sensors; and more in addition to its already strong business in process field devices like pressure transmitters and Coriolis flowmeters. Pervasive sensing will be a big part of Emerson's story moving forward, but it's not an IIoT ecosystem in and of itself. Many in the media and analyst community were expecting that Emerson would announce their new IIoT approach at this meeting, and they didn't disappoint. Mike Train announced during his keynote that PlantWeb would be the new name for this ecosystem, resurrecting the name that was applied to the overall business philosophy behind the introduction of the DeltaV process automation system, where the system itself is just another node on a network along with intelligent field devices, control valves, and other applications and functions. Bringing back the PlantWeb name is a great idea. It's already familiar to most people in the industry and represents the open and contextual access to information that is part of the IIoT. Of course, the new PlantWeb encompasses much more than DCSs and devices. For starters, Emerson has decided to use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which the company has already used for some smaller scale applications involving remote services for monitoring the performance of steam traps and other devices (link goes to a very good case study with Denka Singapore). Train also announced that Emerson would partner with Cisco to create a new series of secure edge devices for PlantWeb. Emerson also showed off an increasingly wide range of mobile applications and remote services that will also be part of the new ecosystem. And of course, the Pervasive Sensing message is still strong. In our next installment, we'll go into more detail about the various aspects of PlantWeb and the related services that Emerson is offering. We will also provide more details on some of the new sensors, packaged solutions, and partners.