I promised in my last blog to give you the run down on the SPS show. Well, first there’s Nurnberg. Nurnberg is an old city that’s about an hour train ride north of Munich, which I think still counts as Southern Germany (Bavaria), though I could be wrong.

Nurnberg seems to be an odd place for this show. Northern Germany is the heart of German Industrial might. While Nurnberg is centrally located, it doesn’t have the manufacturers you would find in Stuttgart or Hannover. I’m glad the show is there though, as it doesn’t have the distractions of Munich and is much prettier than the northern German cities.

Here are my top takeaways from the show:

IT’S HUGE

The first thing about this show is that it is huge. There are twelve halls. Three I think are dedicated to anything and everything having to do with Motion Control. From Motors to systems, if you can’t find it at SPS, no one makes it. But the really weird thing is the shape of the halls. They’re not rectangles. Not even pentagons or octagons. One is a triangle with rounded corners. Another is sort of a rectangle with a ball on the end, and so on. Not only that, but it’s really hard to walk through them because the aisles go in all sorts of odd directions.

THE FOOD

If you like to eat, you’ll love this show. Vendors here aren’t into the logo’d up pen or luggage tag type of giveaways. Here, you eat (and drink). At the high end, the Siemens, Phoenix Contact, and Wago’s of the world have essentially complete restaurants in their booths. You can get sausage dinners or Wiener schnitzel with beer, wine, and cocktails. At the next level, you can get sandwiches, pretzels and some German bakery. At the lowest level, everyone has cookies and candy. Some companies were even handing out Schnapps and other liqueurs.

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

Lots of attendees didn’t speak English. Maybe I’m an Anglophile but I pretty much believed that if you are an Engineer anywhere in the world you have a pretty good command of English. Well, that’s not the case. Lot’s of people moving through our booth were not English speakers. They recognized DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP but that’s about it.

WIRELESS

I didn’t see anywhere near the amount of wireless I expected. Maybe because I am working on wireless everyday now I am more sensitive to it, but it just wasn’t there. I’m not talking about the 803.11 Wireless Ethernet routers and gateways. Everybody has those - it’s old hat. But I barely saw any cellular, Zigbee or other sensor networking, even in the “wireless area” which wasn’t more than two small booths.

STUDENTS

Germans are big into Engineering education. There were many teachers taking students on tours, so a large portion of attendees were much younger than you would see in the US.

WOMEN

This is short. There weren’t any. Almost no women working in booths. A few companies used them to accessorize their booths but they were mostly the typical German style women (I won’t comment further). 98% of the wait staff doing food duty were women, but that was about it. Engineering is a very male dominated profession in the US, but in Germany it appears to be even more so. However, there was one very popular, nearly naked woman for some company in Hall 6 - I’ll post a picture if I get some requests.

EUROPE SALES BARRIERS

Distributor after distributor explained to me how hard it is to sell in Europe across country lines and even within a country. In Switzerland for example if you’re from Lucerne (German part) you have a really tough time selling in Geneva (French part). In France, you have to be French. In Belgium, Holland and other places it’s the same way. If you’re not like me, I don’t buy. I was totally unaware of this problem before the show.

It was a great show, our booth was a success and I am glad I got to experience it - sinus infection and all.

Yes, it’s my fault. I arrived home from SPS 2009 a week or so ago and I still haven’t recapped the show in my blog. I’ve got so much to say about it, but I brought home a pretty massive sinus infection from Germany that has kept me down and out until now. If you’ve been on a plane with any kind of congestion you know how miserable that was. I literally got home, walked into the house and collapsed on my bed without even taking off my coat. What I forgot to do was to take the phone off the hook. My “restful” sleep was interrupted by about 10 phone calls.

I actually developed my sinus infection right there in Nurnberg though not at the show. On Wednesday I decided that a good 20 to 25 minute run through the old town would be fun, so off I went. At home, you see, I run up and down “kettles”. For those of you who are not from Wisconsin – those are hills made by glaciers. I live in the midst of hundreds of them. When I run the next hill is always a short distance away. It’s agonizing but a really good workout.

In Nurnberg there are no hills. Just level ground with beautiful thousand year old castles and eight hundred year old restaurants. It was a fabulous morning run. Right up until I got lost. And I mean not just lost, but really lost. So there I am drenched with sweat, freezing in 40 degree weather, standing on a street corner in Germany trying to figure out if I go forward, backward, left, right or just stand there until someone comes along that will speak English. Well, 45 minutes later, I’m back at the hotel with my Sinus’ preparing for all out war with my head.

Sinus infections are the kind of thing that hit you hard, and keep you down for a while. I was able to answer a few emails but just didn’t have the energy to do much of anything else. Today, it’s a week later and I am just starting to get my old energy back. I even went for a bit of a run yesterday to prove I still had it in me.

Here are my top surprises of the show. I will go through them in detail in the next blog:

1. It’s HUGE – Eleven odd shaped halls with hundreds and hundreds of vendors
2. Their big into food. I’m talking full blown restaurants right there in their tradeshow booths.
3. A lot of Germans haven’t really mastered English – that was a surprise to me
4. Lot’s of Ethernet and not much CAN. In fact, a lot of EtherNet/IP – as much as Profinet IO, which surprised me.
5. Only a little wireless
6. Lot’s of students
7. Few Women
8. European Loyalty

“…There use to be more Leprechauns in Ireland but then the foreigners came and found out they tasted like chicken…”  as told to me by Jerry the Cabbie.

Now Spending a few days in Ireland visiting with various automation people of one sort of another. I’m finding much of the same as I’ve found in England and other places in the world. There is a banking crisis, stock markets are down, the mortgages business is a mess and on and on but the automation business appears strong.

Liam Power of Embedded Labs in Waterford said it best. His opinion is that industrial companies are intent on coming out of this world wide downturn with new products and in position to win in the next boom. I agree. Everywhere I go, I see new product development and companies making investments in the future. 

If you’re in Europe, you should get to know Liam (www.embeddedlabs.com). He and his partner, Shane Robinson, are a terrific embedded design team. They are doing some very impressive developments for lots of major manufacturers in and around Europe and the US. Unfortunately, they are pretty well booked all the way through 2009. You’ll have to get in the “queue”, as they say over here, if you’d like Liam and Shane to do any embedded work for you. And best of all, they’ve used RTA products in their development so they’re familiar with our team. 

Visited the Waterford Crystal factory yesterday. The tour shows you the Master Craftsman making Waterford Crystal the old fashion way and it is very impressive. These people are supreme artists and technicians; A Master Blower that blows air into the crystal to form it, a Master Shaper that adds handles and bases to the piece and Master Engravers that add beautiful artwork to the pieces. These people serve up to 15 years as apprentices before they can do this work. The part of the factory where they make custom pieces in the old fashion way is just incredible.

What they don’t show you on the tour is the rest of the factory. In this part of the factory they turn out thousands of standard pieces with new, modern equipment on a sophisticated assembly line process. That’s where the automation is and I missed that. But I did hit the gift shop and am shipping home some $500 of crystal clocks, shamrocks and other gifts. 

A couple other interesting Ireland notes:

1. Like everywhere else, the cab drivers are fascinating sources of information. I sometimes just get a cab to see what I can learn.
2. There is apparently still some trouble in Northern Ireland even though we don’t hear about it in the states. Eddie, last nites cabbie, thinks it will take another 2 or 3 hundred years to resolve!
3. The Irish country side IS the most beautiful shade of green I’ve ever seen.
4. Even though the country is experiencing negative economic news, there is still lots of commerce going on and people are continuing to buy.

Oh, and one more note. I’ve been trying to catch a leprechaun during this visit. I figured out early in my visit that I’d have a much better chance catching a leprechaun than one of these very pretty blonde Irish lasses!