This past week (Jun 02-06) was the 2014 Honeywell User Group (HUG) Americas Symposium down in San Antonio, Texas and Tetranex Solutions was able to send down two delegates to the conference. Over 1300 attendees from over 20 countries were present, representing a collection of companies covering various industrial sectors ranging from oil and gas to fertilizer producers.
There had been many Honeywell announcements throughout 2014 regarding some of the new releases of various products and the HUG was a great platform to show end users some of the future directions. Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) introduced the Lean Execution of Automation Projects (LEAP) solution which combines the Honeywell offerings of the Universal I/O, Virtualization of Honeywell servers, and Cloud Engineering for more rapid deployment. New hardware announcements include the Experion Orion R2 operator console to coincide with Experion release R430, new SCADA hardware RTU2020, continued emphasis on cybersecurity, and new additions to the SmartLine transmitters.
Rounding out the conference were various other training sessions, round-table discussions, lesson-learned industry talks, as well as the Honeywell Knowledge Center showcasing various Honeywell products and consultants as well as other related vendors.
Tetranex was also able to take the opportunity to pull aside some of the engineers involved in bringing the universal I/O concept to their safety system I/O offering (e.g., Remote Universal Safety I/O or RUSIO). Good discussions were had regarding the technical implementation of this new offering and a good amount of exchanging of information back and forth was appreciated from both sides. Because Tetranex’s approach of utilizing leading edge technology in their automation solutions, at times it would require bridging the gap between vendor and client design in order to satisfy cohesion/functionality/safety while still keeping relevant in the technological curve for the lifecycle of the solution. Overall a most informative week from both vendor and end-users.