Hart Communication technology has been employed in intelligent field devices for more than 15 years.

  Expand a single-node system by a couple or more nodes, or change topologies, or connect computers to another server—and “things get complicated,” states Rashesh Mody, vice president of human-machine-interface (HMI) and supervisory-control-and-data-acquisition (SCADA) services for manufacturing software vendor Wonderware (www.wonderware.com), Lake Forest, Calif.

  Calling OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA or UA) from Scottsdale, Ariz.-based OPC Foundation (www.opcfoundation.org) “very scalable,” Jeff Harding identifies two principal features that make it a communication mechanism across various protocols or standards: its ability to model complex things, and the basic set of services it provides.

 ILS Technology Inc. (www.ilstechnology.com), of Boca Raton, Fla., leverages 25 years of experience in device-and-automation-to-enterprise connectivity through its deviceWise platform.

  Regardless of whose control technology they have, end-users need help in correctly and securely gathering, storing and retrieving data.

  If you are captive of drop-everything, produce-information-now fire drills that create hectic sorting of e-mails or other files, deliverance comes through Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp.’s (MS, www.microsoft.com) Office SharePoint Server’s collaborative technology.

  The importance of change management rises steadily with companies’ chief information officers and, generally, information-technology departments, observes Rick Porter, vice president of Revelation Software Concepts, Pty. Ltd. (RSC, www.xrsc.com), a provider of change management software based in Melbourne, Australia.

  Service-oriented architecture (SOA) visionary Ron Schmelzer thinks businesses create most of their own problems.

  Try talking seriously about network administration without mentioning security. You can’t, can you?

 “Security is the journey, not the destination,” declares Bradford H. Hegrat, senior network security engineer with automation vendor Rockwell Automation Inc.’s (www.rockwellautomation.com) Components and Packaged Applications Group, in Cleveland.

  Because of the power to analyze numbers for all manner of uses from accounting to engineering, companies have needed to live in spreadsheets. Oftentimes, though, that lifestyle has produced pain and agony when one tries to verify a single point of truth.

 While Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Studio is an integrated development environment for general Windows and Web-based applications, the “automation studio” focuses on industrial automation applications, explains Donald Mack, senior marketing specialist in the Process Automation Systems group of automation vendor Siemens Energy & Automation Inc. (www.sea.siemens.com), in Spring House, Pa.

  Managing software-programming development - including revisions to any specific program - should be a concern to all programmers and developers involved.

 “Do your homework. Not all Ethernet application layers from different vendors are the same.”

 The most pressing information technology (IT) security issue is recognizing that manufacturing systems need protection through separate security policies, says Dennis Brandl, principal of BR&L Consulting (www.brconsulting.com), Cary, N.C.

 It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Do you know where your support manuals are?

 The major cyber-security issues facing automation-systems users are recognizing threats and allocating sufficient resources to reduce risks, says Robert C.

 Piracy and vandalism are the biggest fears that manufacturing companies have about collaborating with their business partners over the Internet.

 In modern manufacturing plants, databases of information compiled directly from manufacturing processes have become so large and crucial to business decision making that control engineers need to avail themselves of the latest technologies and best practices from information technology.

 In his book, “Being Digital,” Nicholas Negraponte, founding head of the MIT Media Lab, draws a fundamental distinction between atoms and bits.