It is great pleasure for me to give you the PROFIsafe Technology updates and its strong position in the market after the first introduction around 15 years ago. Functional safety gets more attention and provides the feasibility to implement safety in machines and at plants. Safety fieldbus communication makes the engineer’s life easier by reducing the complexity of safety engineering and electrical wiring. With more than 4 million installed nodes PROFIsafe technology has established itself in the leading position in the network safety market.
This issue of PROFINEWS includes several 
success stories which show that PROFIsafe is actively used to fulfill safety requirements in industry.
So far a big step has been attained in establishing the PROFIsafe standard, but there is a lot more to do to educate users about the technology: exhibiting at industry trade shows, providing training, and conducting workshops. As the new Functional Safety standards (IEC 62061 & ISO 13849) are currently being merged, the importance of safety communication is unavoidable. This new era requires future automation projects to consider safety communication before engineering the machine, like the shift from safety relays to safety controllers (F-PLC).
The Ethernet based fieldbuses are gaining wider acceptance which adds extra momentum to safety protocols. Among all the safety protocols, only PROFIsafe has been well-received by many well-known OEMs due to its interoperability and easy integration.
PI is continuously working towards future demands of international customers’ safety requirements. These demands are of foremost importance while continuing the PROFIsafe profile standards preparation.
In September, PI is going to conduct a Workshop at Oppenweiler, Germany, with two focus streams: OEMs and Component Manufacturers. Due to overwhelming response, the workshop is already fully booked. This is giving us extra motivation to organize more of such workshops worldwide in the near future.
Of course, international fairs like Hanover Fair and SPS/IPC/Drives Fair showed us that more visitors at our stand have great concern about safety communication and its implementation in all phases of machine building. By using the same infrastructure of PROFIBUS and PROFINET one’s life is much simpler. This has been explained at the fair with the PROFIsafe live demo.
I am very eager to get your feedback and concerns in any form of communication to improve and develop the best in class safety fieldbus communication profile for the future demand of safety requirements in the wider range of industry segments.
Dipl.-Ing. Rajesham Kurapati,
Working Group Leader Marketing PROFIsafe
Functional Safety Expert of Danfoss
rajesham.kurapati@nulldanfoss.com
+49 721 96 58 590