The user organisation saw a significant increase in the number of visitors to its booth as well as in the quality of contacts compared to the previous year. "Many prospects were already very well informed so that we could explain in depth how the sercos technology and sercos compatible products of member companies can benefit their organizations," said Peter Lutz, Managing Director of sercos international.

Approximately 40% of visitors came from outside Europe, mainly from Asia and the anglo-american region. "We work internationally and have local subsidiaries and agencies in Asia and the US. The high number of visitors coming from these regions shows that sercos is becoming increasingly important in the major automation markets," continues Lutz.

sercos' continuous work to increase the vendor portfolio also contributed to the overall success. More than 20 companies displayed over 80 products at the joint booth. These included new products such as the IO-link gateway from Hilscher, Axioline E and Axioline F from Phoenix Contact's IO-family and the 130A servo drive from Schneider Electric to name but a few.

Additional safety solutions also complemented the sercos portfolio, such as Rexroth solutions with CIP Safety on sercos and the CIP Safety on sercos protocol stack from IXXAT. The AS-i 3.0 sercos Gateway with integrated safety monitor for CIP Safety on sercos from Bihl+Wiedemann will also be launched in the near future. The gateway is ideal for complex applications, e.g., for distributed systems containing various safety networks and many safe signals, or applications where numerous standard signals need to be integrated in the safety configuration.

"Our continuous development and engagement helped us to become an opinion leader for trendsetting topics such as safety and energy and enabled us to bring these topics closer to our customers," commented Lutz.

About sercos international

sercos international is an association of users and manufacturers that is in charge of technical development, standardization, conformance inspection, certification, and marketing for the sercos® automation bus. Conformance tests ensure that the implementation of sercos is in accordance with standards and thus allows the combination and integration of devices from different manufacturers. Based in Germany, the organization presently has more than 70 member companies located around the world, and has liaison offices in North America and Asia.

About sercos

The SErial Realtime COmmunication System, or sercos®, is one of the world's leading digital interfaces for communication between controls, drives, and decentralized peripheral devices. sercos has been used in machine engineering for more than 20˙years and is implemented in over 3.5 million real-time nodes. With its open, manufacturer-independent Ethernet-based architecture, sercos III is a universal bus for all automation solutions.