Channels, plants and innovation

I am on quite the road trip —won’t be back in the office for a few more days— and my head is spinning from all I’ve learned. The next few posts will be my attempt to recap and set it all into context for those of you not at the Autodesk Channel Summit, COFES and FIATECH.

The events themselves could not be more different. The Autodesk Channel Summit was glitzy and vendor-run; COFES was informal, outdoors-y and about engineering and innovation in general, while FIATECH is very focused on the world of plant design in a traditional conference setting. Even so, a couple of common themes emerged over the week, the most important of which is economic optimism: the consensus is that we are on the upswing.

All of the channel partners at the Autodesk event said that 2010 was a tough year but that it generally trended upwards as their customers saw business improve and began investing in technology again. Even better: 2011 is off to a strong start. Cyon’s sentiment survey (unveiled at COFES) shows positive sentiment, after a year of trying to do significantly more with less. In fact, the survey highlighted the different priorities between corporate levels; it’s worth checking out when posted at cofes.com.

Also brought home at all three events is the complexity of the problems our technology is trying to solve. Just sitting through the data interoperability session at FIATECH made my head spin: The information needed to fully describe a piece of monitoring equipment from Emerson, for example, has one simplified representation in the overall design of a process plant but needs to be much more detailed for the plant operator – but that need comes a step or ten later in the life of the digital model. How should that detailed data be promoted, who is responsible for ensuring its accuracy, what is the best format to use? Huge problems with no easy answers.

Speaking of huge: John Voeller at COFES painted a frightening picture of a world in plentiful scarcity, where many of the basic elements (minerals, gases and so on) required for the things we rely on are available in insufficient supply to meet coming demand — and we have no replacements. Mr. Voeller challenged software designers to build into their solutions technologies highlight reliance on components which will soon become scarce. He also spoke about the efforts of the US and others governments to assess the implications of this scarcity but, again, the complexity of the problem is overwhelming and there are no quick fixes.

My favorite theme, though is this: everywhere I went, I learned from people who are trying hard to solve the world’s problems. ZWSOFT is trying to build a world-class CAD company in China, bringing a reasonably priced solution to a huge market. Finland’s CadFaster has a cool technology that allows realtime collaboration between stakeholders. SpaceClaim continues its quest to redesign the world of product creation. The iRing team is trying to drive interoperability between the complex systems involved in asset design and operations using ISO 15926. People at each event are trying to do something about the impact our consumption has on the environment, on other people and on profitability. And so much more.

All in all, it’s good.

More coming. Soon. I promise.