Invensys Process Systems' Foxboro business unit is making a limited-time offer to users of its I/A Series distributed control system to upgrade their communications backbone from standard Ethernet to a high-speed mesh network, a critical piece of infrastructure for Invensys's next-generation automation systems architecture.
The incentive program, dubbed "Move to the Mesh," bundles the latest generation of field-mounted I/A Series control processors, Windows XP-based flat-panel LCD workstations, high-speed Ethernet switches, and software. It also includes Invensys's Address Translation Station (ATS) modules, which transfer and translate information flowing between an existing Ethernet Nodebus set up and the mesh network architecture.
The company has historically offered similar limited-time offers to encourage customers to try new automation systems components. For example, in the early 1990s, Invensys established the Advantage upgrade program, which allowed customers to purchase new equipment at discounted rates in exchange for returning older equipment.
However, Invensys's Move to Mesh program is a more strategic sell; it provides a seamless upgrade to the automation vendor's next-generation enterprise control architecture, called InFusion, that was introduced in April. By upgrading to the new communications backbone, customers, when ready, can upgrade their control systems for optimal performance. (Read what analysts are saying about InFusion.)
The mesh control network is a multi-switched Ethernet backbone that can transmit at speeds of up to one gigabit per second. The Nodebus predecessor, Invensys's industrialized version of Ethernet, was configured for fault-tolerance through redundant nodes and wiring. Mesh, on the other hand, not only has more data transmission capacity and can span great distances, but it is often described as 'self-healing,' meaning there is no single point of failure.
"The mesh network is an extremely secure technology," said Larry O'Brien, an analyst with ARC Advisory Group, in an interview. "It can break at just about any point in the network and it will stay up because there are three to five connections on every node, like a big web."
The good news for customers is that the mesh technology does not require a rip-and-replace of Nodebus-based I/A Series systems. Some companies may have had an I/A Series for 20 years, and it is still completely viable, said Gayle Hicks, program manager for Invensys Process Systems Lifecycle and Advantage programs.
"Most customers have upgraded once or twice for various components, but one of the things that we feel strongly about is helping customers move forward when it is appropriate for them, but not forcing them to do it," Hicks said in an interview. "They have intellectual property they created in their control strategies, [as well as] graphics and historian data. All of that still works and is balanced on both the mesh and Nodebus sides ... with the ATS device allowing communication back and forth between the two different network backbones."
The cost for a customer looking to buy into the mesh architecture as part of the incentive program is hard to quantify; it depends upon the age of the equipment coming back, Hicks said. However, it will be less than the $75,000 list price of the technology, she noted.
The Move to Mesh program expires on Sept. 30, 2006, and the timing couldn't be better, because, as ARC has noted in past reports, there's a $65 billion installed base of systems that are at the end of their useful lifecycle of 20 years or more. O'Brien says such incentive programs from DCS vendors are not unique. "They all have some kind of program," he said. But from the standpoint of getting customers ready to migrate to InFusion, this is a savvy tactical offer, he said.