No Grafton, MA (August 9, 2005): At its June 2005 Annual Meeting, Modbus-IDA expanded its Board of Directors and elected two new members, bringing the total number of Directors to eight. Serge Bassem, CEO of ACT’L sa, and Komal Mehta, Senior Product Manager of the new Industrial Communications and Power Network Division of Harting, Inc., join Kenneth Crater, Fred Cohn, James Moyne, Jean-Jeaque Poubeau, David Skelton, and Feng Xiaosheng on the Modbus-IDA Board.Serge Bassem co-founded ACT’L sa in 1993 with colleague Pierre Crokaert, launching the Belgian firm as an electronics and industrial engineering company. Today the company offers design analysis, software and hardware design, systems integration, commissioning, and support.
Its Modbus-compatible eWON product family of industrial network gateways includes three different versions covering a wide scope of requirements. Bassem completed his Civil Electro-Mechanical Engineering degree at the Free University of Brussels.At Harting North America, Komal Mehta is responsible for leading the organization in its migration from component sales to providing system solutions. Prior to joining Harting, Mehta was a product manager at Motorola. She holds a BSEE from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MBA from the Keller Graduate School of Management.
Her experience includes system integration and test, business development, and product management in several fields including IT, broadband communications, and industrial communications. “The organization benefits tremendously when the Modbus-IDA Board includes leaders from our broad consituency. Mr. Bassem and Ms Mehta bring technical strengths and new perspectives, coming from different types of suppliers in the industrial automation arena.
We look forward to their contributions enhancing Modbus-IDA’s vision and our ability to serve our members as well as the huge population of Modbus users worldwide,” noted Ken Crater, president of Modbus-IDA.Modbus-IDA is headquartered in the United States. The organization 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 provides the infrastructure to obtain and share information about the protocols, their application and certification to simplify implementation by users.Additional information about Modbus-IDA may be found on the organization’s website: www.modbus-ida.org .
