"I grew up with computers," said McKeel, now 30. "When I was in school, we heard about TCP/IP. But we never talked about proprietary buses. So when I entered the industrial world, I didn't have any preconceived paradigms."

For McKeel, the lack of loyalty to an existing industrial I/O bus has worked in his favor. The reason: He now serves as vice president of operations for GE Cisco, a newly formed company, based in Charlottesville, Va., that plans to leave proprietary industrial buses in the past.

GE Cisco Industrial Networks (www.factoryit.com), launched on June 6th, intends to use Ethernet infrastructure "to bridge the information gap between the factory floor and the rest of the enterprise," thereby becoming the first major industrial firm to move aggressively toward that goal.

The company, formed by the alliance of GE industrial Systems and Cisco Systems, could have a profound effect on industrial controls technology, not only because engineers are already moving toward Ethernet, but because the names GE and Cisco lend credibility to the concept. "This is going to be very significant for the industrial market," said Paul Strauss, senior analyst for International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.). "GE has considerable clout in the factory automation arena. And the very fact that Cisco is focusing on factory automation means that this is a major move."

The concept of bringing Ethernet to the factory floor isn't new, however. But the world's biggest factory automation vendors, such as Rockwell Automation and Siemens Energy and Automation, have been slow to make it happen, mainly because both have huge installed bases of customers who use standard industrial I/O buses, such as DeviceNet or Profibus. Both also have product lines bulging with devices-controllers, motors, drives, sensors, cables and connectors-designed to work with those buses.

Industrial experts say, however, that the migration of Ethernet to the factory is inevitable. The reason is simple economics. "Ethernet is supported by the PC industry, which is a $100 billion annual business," said Tom Bullock, president of Industrial Controls Consulting (Fond du Lac, Wisc.), a marketing consulting firm. "And the proprietary buses are supported by the industrial controls business, which is a $2 billion annual market." So Ethernet products will always have the advantage of high volume to bring their costs down."

The result of that disparity is a vast difference in hardware. Ethernet, for example, offers performance approaching 100 Mbits/second. In contrast, most industrial buses are closer to 500 kbits/s.

Engineers from GE Cisco say that economics will also play into Ethernet's factory success in another way. Manufacturers will benefit financially from concepts such as "vendor-managed inventory," which can't be implemented with proprietary buses that are usually isolated from the front office. "When you link your factory floor to the Internet, you can tie your suppliers directly into your forecast data and your manufacturing data," McKeel said. "So they understand your order rates in real-time and they can stock parts for you to build your products. So both of you are building on demand. And you're not holding inventory."

The ability to link the office to the factory floor will have advantages for manufacturers and their customers, as well. "If I'm a General Motors customer, and I just ordered a blue car, but I want to change it to green, I could connect to the factory and find out if my car has been painted yet," McKeel said.

Manufacturers, however, could benefit even more directly. Tire problems such as those at Ford, for example, could be more easily traced to certain vendor lots or vehicles. As a result, manufacturers could maintain tighter control over their products.

GE Cisco plans to help manufacturers set up systems to enable such capabilities by providing services: network assessment, design, implementation and support. The company, which has approximately 30 employees, sends teams of engineers with automation and networking expertise into manufacturing enterprises, where they analyze existing network infrastructures and data flows. The company also installs network hardware, including cables, switches, routers, hubs and firewalls, as well as configuring network software.

As a result, the company can tie industrial devices, such as motors and drives, to controllers and, ultimately, to front-office software programs that track production. Using the Internet, such systems could even enable executives on one side of the globe to check the status of production machinery thousands of miles away.

Need foreseen

McKeel first saw the need for such services while working as a design engineer for automation controls vendor GE Fanuc (Charlottesville, Va.). After two years of designing Ethernet-enabled programmable logic controllers, McKeel began meeting with customers and seeing first-hand the problems of implementing networks.

"When we went into customer accounts, we saw they were having difficulty making their networks work," he recalled. "And we realized that Ethernet was easier to bring to bear because you're not trying to integrate multiple networks. If you can boil it all down to a single network, you can take away a lot of headaches."

As executives from GE Fanuc recognized this, they began questioning the wisdom of proprietary industrial field buses. Despite the fact that GE had already heavily invested in its own proprietary network, called GEnius, the company's executives decided to find a partner with Ethernet experience.

That partner was Cisco. "We were concerned about a joint venture because they often don't work well," said Bill Rossi, senior director of marketing for Cisco's Desktop Switching Business Unit. "But we believed that Ethernet was the future. And we knew that when people saw the names GE and Cisco, the idea of Ethernet on the factory floor would be legitimized."

One of the keys to overcoming Ethernet's inherent lack of determinism is the development of so-called switch-based networks. Switch-based networks, which are now being used on Ethernet systems, operate in a manner similar to that of telephone switching equipment. They create a dedicated path between two devices-such as a motor and a controller-that are trying to communicate across the network.

"With a switch-based network, you always have a guaranteed path between any two devices," McKeel said.

Another technology-full duplex communication-helps Ethernet networks eliminate data collisions, which many engineers regard as an inherent problem of Ethernet communication. "When you combine full duplex with switch-based networks, Ethernet can absolutely be deterministic," McKeel said.

While engineers iron out the problems of Ethernet-based communications, companies such as GE Fanuc have also taken on the task of building Ethernet-based controllers, drives, motors and other products. By doing so, the two companies hope to create a stable of Ethernet-ready products from which GE Cisco engineers can draw.

No rip-and-replace

In the meantime, the Cisco side of the business continues to work on such technologies as voice-over-IP and video-over-IP. The reason: ultimately, manufacturers hope to use video and voice clips for training of machine operators. With video clips, for example, they could show operators how to fix problems or perform routine maintenance, sort of like a video FAQ. Before they can do that, however, they must first find ways to separate important data from video images or audio signals. "We don't want video images to get in the way of critical operating data," McKeel said.

Such far-flung capabilities aren't high on every customer's priority list, however, and GE Cisco executives know that. Many factories, they say, aren't even ready to switch over to Ethernet yet. "Traditionally, there's always been a ten-year window between the office and the factory floor," McKeel said. "And Ethernet has been in the office for about ten years now, so that window is closing very rapidly."