IEN: What strides do you see in ease of integration? Flexibility and scalability?
Walker: Integration, flexibility, and scalability are three out of the four key drivers from Schneider Electric''s customer base; the other is cost performance. We see significant strides if you look at what we are doing in terms of integration of products. We''re not just selling individual products as much any more. We will still sell a contactor to a customer, but we''re looking for the all-in-one panel approach, which is to have products that are tested and validated by our design centers working together.
An example would be the Telemecanique® Advantys™ STB platform that is used to integrate the U-Line and Altivar® 31 motor control devices. Similar devices are available in the marketplace as discreet components, but what Schneider Electric has done is taken them to the next level -- using the Advantys platform to integrate the motor control products to reduce the amount of wiring, troubleshooting in the installation, and then -- because they are integrated on a communications bus -- feed up the data as needed to the machine, process, or operator.
Flexibility from a drives point of view, the Altivar 71 is a constant torque drive in the base version. Depending on what options you need, you add the needed options to the drive, either through software setup or through hardware, to give you a base unit which is a good cost performance drive for starting, stopping, and controlling the speed and torque of the motor, right through something that is a high performance, sensorless flux vector that provides servo-like capabilities with an integrated PLC, if necessary, to do the localized control.
We see the demand of the customer driving us to continue to develop individual products, but the real thrust is to create these packages where one plus one equals three as far as the customer is concerned. If you take one of our drives, and one of our distributed I/O platforms, you actually get more performance than if you went with one company''s drive and another company''s distributed I/O.
IEN: What improvements can users expect in drives, motors, servers, advanced control, distributed controls, programmable automated controls, software, MEMS, deterministic Ethernet, PID tuning, customization, robustness, and elsewhere?
Walker: In all those areas, we are driving to continually increase the performance and drop the cost to the customer. That''s the big thing in scalable drives, distributed controls, Advantys STB -- which is more than just distributed I/O; it''s an integration platform for control products. You look at Unity™ software, which is offering customers all the IEC programming languages and is an open system, so third parties can integrate into it easier.
If you look at deterministic Ethernet, we have a lot of advances in embedding Ethernet switches in products. We have high-speed Ethernet that can be daisy chained, rather than the star configuration, making it easier to implement Ethernet. We are improving all the time, listening to the customers, using focus groups. New product developments are driven by customer input telling us they need these types of functionalities, but at the same time we are still trying to drive the cost out of products wherever possible.
IEN: How about open standards and data sharing?
Walker: Schneider has been a leader in this area for about eight years. Ethernet and TCP/IP is the way to go. We are still pushing that Modbus® as a protocol is an open, free protocol that anyone can download and use. We emphasize adopting commercially available standards. We use TCP/IP in its native form and don''t modify a protocol. Schneider Electric makes our protocols available to download for use. If you look at the most widely adopted protocol, it''s Modbus.
Schneider Electric''s emphasis is to use open standards. If you are open, then data sharing is second nature. With a web browser, customers can go and get the information they need, as they need it, in real-time, using standard commercially available tools such as web browsers. A lot of our customers are starting to understand that Ethernet is ubiquitous, it''s everywhere. There is a great knowledge in the marketplace of Ethernet technologies, so customers are moving away from proprietary networks with the expectation that multiple manufacturers will talk over a single Ethernet link.
Security is also a big issue. We''re working closely with third parties that do web-based security, to allow someone to be open, yet in a protected environment. A customer wants to share his data with the people he trusts in his corporation.
IEN: Which R & D advances are closest to commercialization?
Walker: Most of the work on Ethernet is coming toward commercialization in terms of developing Ethernet switches embedded in products. Schneider Electric is expecting to release some of these technologies to market next year. The biggest area of improvement for us is embedding Ethernet in a lot of products, putting a switch inside so you don''t have to cable back the device to some sort of Ethernet switch.