PI North America was founded as PROFIBUS Trade Organization in 1994 and was generally known as just PTO. Although an autonomous non-profit trade organization, PTO renamed itself to PI North America to more closely identify with the international umbrella organization, PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI). PI North America is dedicated to showing industry the beneficial results of using fieldbuses and industrial Ethernet in general, and PROFIBUS and PROFINET in particular. It is dedicated to supporting the factory automation and process control industries in achieving beneficial results using these networks, while also assisting device vendors throughout North America in the development and marketing of their products. PI's standardization efforts and commitment to openness have guaranteed leading-edge, certified-interchangeable products from an enormous range of suppliers. It has been doing business with PROFIBUS since 1989 and a measure of its success is that there are over 55 million PROFIBUS devices installed, and the total number of PROFINET devices installed now exceeds 15 million. Members of PI North America include vendors of hardware, software and systems as well as end users and operators, scientific institutes, universities, distributors, and system integrators.