October 20, 2003 – Two industry organizations are combine their efforts to push adoption of their respective technologies. The IDA Group, which promotes a multivendor standard for distributed intelligence over TCP/IP, plans to absorb the Modbus Organization, which promotes a comon Ethernet protocol for field device automation. Together the two groups will help create “a seamless interconnection from the simplest field applications up to highly-complex automation architectures,” said IDA president Martin Jetter.