Executives from leading automation companies expressed their commitment to the WirelessHART™ standard and announced product release schedules during the HCF press conference at ISA 2008 (14 Oct, Houston, TX). Representatives from ABB, Emerson Process Management, Endress+Hauser, and Siemens spoke of the positive impact WirelessHART technology will have on the process industry and their expectation for the quick adoption of the technology by end users.

ABB Instrumentation - Josef Guth, head of Global Instrumentation Business Unit
ABB has long believed that a single fieldbus standard would provide significant benefits to both users and vendors. However, it is a business reality that multiple standards are here to stay. To maximize our customers’ ability to choose a best fit solution, we support, at board level, all the major global communication protocols for process applications, from device to system host.

Among these technologies, the HART protocol has stood the test of time, emerging as a global standard with over 26 million installations worldwide. ABB has been active in the specification of the HART 7 standard, which includes WirelessHART. We plan the release of HART 7 devices with WirelessHART early in 2009. These products will complement existing ABB wireless solutions which include, vibration monitoring; HMIs; SMS Messaging; remote I/O; LAN protocol conversions; metering for oil and gas, pulverized coal, and water flow; and robotics position sensing.

Emerson Process Management – Mark Schumacher, President Pressure/CPS Business Unit
Emerson Process Management is excited that the new WirelessHART standard gives end users the promise of a growing range of wireless products for automation applications. These will come from the industry-wide member companies of the HART Communication Foundation that approved the standard in September 2007. Emerson began shipment in late September of wireless automation products with the new standard built in. Through success with applications worldwide, end users have demonstrated the appeal of wireless. They are ready to extend wireless in their plants, and HCF is to be congratulated for the standard that allows mainstream use today.

There are clear reasons why Emerson believes WirelessHART to be the one standard needed to support the global deployment of wireless technology. Wireless technology will realize its full potential when end users have the freedom to choose and the scope to perform plant-wide applications. WirelessHART delivers this now by enabling standard inter-operable wireless field networks. We believe WirelessHART technology will grow to account for more than 20 percent of the signals in new plants within five years.



Endress+Hauser - Frank Hils, Corporate Director Projects and Solutions
Endress+Hauser sees HART 7 and WirelessHART as a key to a new era in process automation. WirelessHART will unlock information which is hidden in today's intelligent instrumentation. It will extend the scope of monitoring and automation to areas which were "in the dark" so far. In the course of 2009 we will launch instruments, systems and services which improve solutions for Plant Asset Management, Process Monitoring and the Supply Chain Management of bulk material.

We see WirelessHART as a powerful technology to smoothly migrate, extend and improve applications and installations. WirelessHART has the full potential to become the standard for wireless field communication in the process industry. We are looking forward to a fast growing quantity of successful customer applications employing the new HART 7 and WirelessHART features.

Siemens - Hans-Georg Kumpfmüller, Division President for Sensors and Communication
Exactly one year ago the specification of HART V7 was released and – at least from our point of view – WirelessHART is the most important part as it is currently the only open industrial standard for wireless communication at field level in the process industry available worldwide. In the process industry there are a lot of critical requirements for many good reasons. New technologies do always have a job to do to be successful.

But we believe that WirelessHART will be successful as many customers and big automation suppliers brought their experience in wireless technology into the specification. In 2009 we plan to have WirelessHART products to enable our customers to build up complete solutions.

Ron Helson - HCF Executive Director
WirelessHART technology is simple, reliable and secure. It provides the same experience that users know and expect from HART-enabled products, protecting the global installed base of 26 million plus HART devices. WirelessHART is easy to use, easy to deploy, and fully backward compatible with existing instrumentation and host systems, preserving the investment in HART-enabled devices, tools, training, applications and work procedures used today.