At its March board meeting, the Modbus-IDA board of directors elected Fred Cohn to succeed retiring president Kenneth Crater
As Modbus-IDA enters its fourth year, the organisation finds itself growing in membership and expanding its services.
Fred Cohn will be Modbus-IDA's second president and plans to lead the organisation to capitalise on its growing popularity.
Fred Cohn commented, "I am delighted to be able to take over the leadership of Modbus-IDA at this time in the organisation's life".
"I want to thank Ken for his tireless work in forming this organisation and leading it through its formative years".
"Under Ken's stewardship, Modbus-IDA's membership has grown steadily since its inception in 2003".
"Modbus-IDA succeeded in establishing two conformance test labs; one in the USA and one in China where Modbus was declared a National Standard".
"We anticipate the next few years to be busy ones - developing additional conformance laboratories in Europe, Asia and the United States; growth in our Modbus device directory; and further expansion of our membership." Cohn began his career in 1980 with Westinghouse Electric in the industrial sales and marketing group and held various positions at Westinghouse in the automation group responsible for PLCs and HMI products.
In 1986, Cohn joined Gould-Modicon and went on to lead the business unit team for large modular systems in North Andover after AEG purchased Gould and then merged with Schneider Electric.
After a brief stint at start-up Accent Color Sciences, Cohn returned to Schneider to take responsibility for strategic marketing in the automation group.
Since 2004, Cohn has headed the ethernet systems business team responsible for product management and product direction for ethernet products in Schneider Electric.
Cohn holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Babson College.
Headquartered in North Grafton, Massachusetts, Modbus-IDA is a group of independent users and suppliers of automation devices that seeks to drive the adoption of the Modbus communication protocol suite and the evolution to address architectures for distributed automation systems across multiple market segments.
Modbus-IDA will also provide the infrastructure to obtain and share information about the protocols, their application and certification to simplify implementation by users resulting in reduced costs.
