Hal Software at Hannover Messe

Hal Software at Hannover Messe 2015

Hal Software exhibited their prototyping solution for process control systems, Spike, at Hannover Messe.  Hannover Messe is the world’s biggest trade fair, with over one million square metres of exhibition space, and in 2015 had over 220,000 visitors.  In keeping with the continuing globalisation of industry over 70,000 of these visitors were from countries outside Germany, the highest number ever.  There were over 6,500 exhibitors from 70 different countries and Ireland was represented by Hal Software and Lisk Ireland. Hal software located itself in Hall 8, which was split between the Industrial Automation and Digital Factory themes. This Hall was home to the all-important Industrie 4.0 Forum and the Industrie 4.0 Smart Factory initiative, where throughout the show global thought leaders in these two areas expressed their views on topics as diverse as security, standardisation and the impact of Industrie 4.0 on labor. On that, it seems as if Germany has decided that the architecture of Industry 4.0 is based around OPC UA, AutomationML and eClass standards – see Cormac’s recent post for more details.

Busy week

It was a busy week for the team of Michael, Cormac and Vivica. Significant interest in Spike came from potential partners and users from many different countries including the US, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Holland, India, China, and Chile.  These represented all walks of life in automation: students, process engineers, MES engineers, automation engineers, project managers and those in senior management.  Regardless of what industry they came from all responded well to the ease of use of Spike.

Presentation at Industrial Automation Forum

One of the highlights of the week came on Wednesday, when Cormac presented at the prestigious Industrial Automation Forum in Hall 14.  The title of his presentation was “Prototyping a batch process control system using ISA-S88 and ISA-S95 design patterns”.  Cormac gave a 20 minute presentation on the topic showing how the use of prototyping significantly reduces project design life-cycle whilst improving project quality. The presentation was well received, with a flood of visitors to the stand afterwards. Our language skills were put to the test as some of our Chinese friends struggled with some of the presentation, but they were able to get what they needed using the graphical posters at the stand.

Partnerships at Hannover Messe

Hannover Messe is as much about partnerships as it is customers, as every global automation company has a presence there. This year was no different.  Interestingly, some new players in the industry were exhibiting for the first time, including global giants Microsoft and Intel.  Both were keen to showcase their solutions for automation, and the partnerships that they have formed.  For Hal Software it was a chance to catch up with existing partners, and to create new ones.  Extremely interesting discussions were had with senior representatives from GE Intelligent Systems, Emerson Process Automation and Siemens, among others.  The standards bodies that are at the heart of Industrie 4.0 were also well represented.  We were delighted that OPC Foundation President and Executive Director Thomas  J. Burke found some time out of his extremely busy schedule to spend an hour at the stand, and we didn’t have far to go to discuss what was happening with the guys at eClass, as they were directly opposite us for the duration of the show (thanks for the food guys!).

Overall, it was a great week, and we were pretty tired by the end of the show.  Next up for Hal Software is ACHEMA (Frankfurt June 15-19), the world forum for chemical engineering and process industry.  We’ll be at stand F5a in Hall 9.2 so come along and say hello if you can make the time.  Cormac will also be presenting at the Praxis Forum on prototyping – in fact, he is the very first speaker for the entire Forum!