Fieldbus Scorecard – Price/Performance and Market Acceptance
Fieldbus Scorecard – Price/Performance and Market Acceptance
Now that the fundamental architecture of the various standards for delivering real-time Ethernet fieldbus has been defined, let’s compare, contrast, and ultimately assign a score to each standard.
When evaluating the viability of a standard, there are two primary dimensions by which a standard should be measured. First, the standard needs to compete favorably with proprietary and competing standard alternatives, and thereby deliver the performance, reliability, and efficacy that are typically ascribed to a proprietary solution. These lead to the economic breakthrough from lower costs of the components of the standard. Second, it is important to understand the long-term viability and market acceptance of the standard by both suppliers and consumers.
That being said, it is often difficult to clear away the marketing hype to understand the key distinguishing technological and price/performance differences and to measure market acceptance.
With respect to market acceptance, long-term viability depends on a standards body’s ability to make progress advancing the standard. Additionally, a prerequisite to successful adoption is that the standard must lower the barriers that allow vendors of the ecosystem to enter the market. This is done by making the standard independent and interoperable. In other words, the standard needs to be published and “open”. Equally important, however, vendors that adhere to the standard require low risk and low cost to making its solution comply with the standard. Regardless of the openness and successful adoption of the standard, success is really a measure of how interoperable the various vendor devices are. The strongest of these fieldbuses will be the one that has a very well supported compliance and interoperability program.
As is the case with most industry standards bodies, the Ethernet fieldbus standards bodies all stem from industry titans so they are well funded and capable. However, some of the resulting standards remain too dependent on the original titan, and the “standard” has limited efficacy because it incorporates too many legacy components from the proprietary precursor to the standard. Because of the dependence of proprietary components, the standard often fails to lower the risk and cost sufficiently to get many entrants to adopt the standard. So while the standard delivers the desired definition that enables interoperability, there are certainly differences in the costs of implementation that impact long-term viability.
As stated above, long-term viability is a function of how many vendors in the ecosystem support a given standard. The lower the risk and costs and the better the interoperability, the more suppliers will offer a solution. The more venders that offer a solution, the stronger and stickier the standard becomes. Once again, some standards bodies have done a better job of creating an independent, interoperable, low risk and low cost standard, and this has produced unstoppable momentum that will carry the standard far into the foreseeable future.
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