PTO to Step Up Profinet Promotion

With the older, Profibus fieldbus now well-established in the industrial market, the Profibus Trade Organization will turn its attention to boosting Profinet, its open industrial Ethernet standard.

Profibus Trade Organization (PTO) will be putting more emphasis on promoting Profinet in the coming months. In the past, the trade group worked to balance its push of both Profibus and Profinet. But PTO members attending the group’s annual General Assembly Meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz., Aug. 5-7 made it clear that they want the organization’s leaders to concentrate on promoting Profinet—the open Ethernet version of the Profi family of networks. This is a switch from past years, when members expected the PTO to promote Profibus and Profinet equally.

The subject prompted a lively discussion among attendees. Mike Bryant, the PTO’s executive director was quick to embrace the challenge, while noting that this was a sea change for the trade group. The change in view among members was clearly based on the recognition that Profibus has become well established in the vendor community and installed base.

According to PTO calculations, the number of installed Profibus and Profinet nodes has grown considerably in the past year. Profibus now claims a 47 percent share of installed fieldbus nodes. Next in line is Interbus with 22 percent of installed nodes and DeviceNet with 10 percent. CCLink, Foundation Fieldbus, Modbus TCP and EtherNet/IP all showed up in single-digit percentages. The installed base of Profinet is 2 percent. With that accomplished, members are now asking the PTO to emphasize Profinet.