It seems that the ISA Expo Exhibition and Conference seems to shrink a bit each year. Major vendors had relatively small booths. A few people told me this will be the last year ISA holds this big event and moves to emphasize regional events. From a control system security perspective, it was only five or six years ago when ISA Expo was THE show. Times change, but I must say the Security Lounge during the Tuesday evening cocktail hour was good fun seeing so many familiar faces.

In years past, the buzz of ISA Expo was wireless, but at that time it was vendors putting down a stake saying they were working on wireless. Then it seemed to recede a bit last year. This year the floor is full of wireless enabled products you can buy, wireless protocols and security to consider, and all other things wireless. Wireless antennas were visible even in the few booths where wireless was not a big buzzword on the signs.

A few other odds and ends from the floor:

• Industrial Defender was promoting their recently introduced Compliance Manager. This will check patch status and configuration settings against a benchmark from a central console. In some cases it will use an ID deployed agent on the computer, but non-agent capabilities are also supported.
• Alert Enterprise was the only other security company with a booth. Sandia is here for Lemnos and OPSAID. INL is here in force as well supporting various USG programs. Marty Edwards pinch hit for Sean McGurk as a keynote.
• I was intrigued by the Geist Technology booth where they were promoting their “low cost web servers”. An open source OS and there internally developed web server. It had been implemented in some instruments.
• There are a number of companies offering ruggedized or “industrial” network infrastructure, e.g. routers / switches – - Garrett, Moxa, n-Tron and RuggedCom. RuggedCom introduced a backbone router with a higher density 96-port switch and hot swappable power supplies and modules; Also have a wimax product coming.