PROFINET draws on more than 20 years of IT and manufacturing experience to introduce ‘Industrial Ethernet’ into the world of automation. It supports advanced plant automation strategies and helps them merge easily with the enterprise and beyond. For the production line it provides comparable functionality to PROFIBUS, using techniques that are familiar to both Engineering and IT and Management personnel. Web-based operations and Internet connectivity combine to make access and deployment easy, with almost unlimited flexibility and scalability. PROFINET capitalizes on the PROFIBUS experience by using common technology wherever possible, a policy to ensure that legacy assets remain useful. PROFINET can embrace any existing fieldbus – not just PROFIBUS - ensuring easy migration and full investment protection regardless of which current fieldbus is used. A Component Based approach to engineering offers big advantages for larger OEMs. PROFINET’s crowning virtue is a unique solution for advanced multi-axis Motion Control.