Device connectivity specialist ILS Technology this week announced that Chief Operating Officer Fred Yentz has been named CEO, replacing Joe Cestari, who has left the company to pursue other endeavors after four years in the top spot.
In a July 1 letter addressed to ILS employees, Edward F. Crawford, chairman and CEO of ILS parent company Park-Ohio Holdings Corp., announced the management change, saying, “I am confident that the management team, through Fred’s leadership, will be successful in capitalizing on the company’s current momentum and in turn create significant value for ILS and our customers.”
“A lot of the heavy lifting in terms of our product portfolios has been done in terms of creating the assets and gaining traction over the past couple of years,” Yentz said in an interview with Managing Automation today. In the near future, he said, ILS will focus on “moving forward with more technology partnerships and more commercialization [of the products],” areas in which Yentz, who joined ILS as senior vice president and chief operating officer in 2007, said he has considerable experience.
Prior to working at ILS Technology, Yentz was vice president and general manager of RadiSys Corp., a provider of embedded solutions for telecom, medical equipment, enterprise data, and industrial automation. At RadiSys, he was responsible for worldwide sales, marketing, professional services, and business development in addition to his executive management roles. Yentz earlier worked for IBM, where he held various positions, including in engineering, management, and new business development.
ILS products link production data with business intelligence, targeting the entire production lifecycle of companies in such industries as electronics, automotive, and pharmaceutical. ILS originated as a development group within IBM’s e-manufacturing solutions division in 1988. Spun off as a separate entity in 1999, it was renamed ILS Technology when it became a subsidiary of Park-Ohio Holdings.
The ILS deviceWISE product securely links intelligent devices to one another and directly to the enterprise for real-time information transfer, transaction logging, and bi-directional control, eliminating unnecessary layers in the information chain, according to the company. A second portfolio, secureWISE, protects sensitive manufacturing information from unauthorized access while making it available for real-time collaboration between locations around the world.
deviceWISE, which historically had been available as an embedded technology at the control system level, now includes an Enterprise Edition, unveiled at ARC Advisory Group’s annual manufacturing forum in February, which sits in an IT server that aggregates native factory floor device data within the enterprise domain.
In a related technology agreement, Mitsubishi, ILS, and IBM announced Mitsubishi’s MESI (manufacturing execution system interface) tool, which uses the deviceWISE integration technology to provide a direct link between the factory floor and the enterprise, including connectivity to IBM’s WebSphere enterprise-based middleware or the DB2 database.
Moving forward, Yentz said today, “you’ll start to see the secureWISE and deviceWISE portfolios move across industries,” as well as new products that blend technology from each.
Cestari, who joined ILS as president and chief executive officer in 2004, will continue to act in an advisory capacity as part of a new ILS Technology advisory board. He will pursue “new endeavors in developing turnkey systems solutions for the semiconductor and bio-pharmaceutical marketplaces,” according to an internal memo.