About Maximillian Kon A U.S. citizen born in Memphis, Tennessee, with residency in Argentina and Brazil, Max is founder and CEO of WisePlant HQ. He is an Electronics Engineer with specialization in control systems and telecommunications and has developed his professional career mostly in South America, with more than 20 years of experience in industrial and critical systems in all types of industries, including oil, gas, energy, food, pharmaceutical, chemical, petrochemical, water, paper, metallurgy, mining, smart buildings, and others.

He joined the ISA99 Industrial Cybersecurity Committee in 2006. Today, with almost one thousand professional members on the committee at that time, only 30 professionals had. Max has been accompanying the development of the IEC-62443 series of standards since then, having participated in multiple working groups and ISA Secure. He has collaborated with ISA Training in the creation and development of the professional training and certification program and is currently the official instructor of the program especially for the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets. Although, he also sometimes develops training courses in English.

Active member of the ISA99 Committee – Working Group 8
Active member of the ISA Secure Committee
Director of the WiseSecurity Services Consulting Division
Official ISA RTP Training Instructor for Industrial Cybersecurity – Certificate

Max collaborated with ISA at the early beginning in the creation and the development of the most popular industrial cybersecurity certificate program, known by its IC32, IC33, IC34, and IC37 courses. After participating in several ISA99 working groups, witnessing the development of the ISA/IEC-62443 series of standards, he was invited by ISA to collaborate with other experienced professionals to create the certificate program. He has been collaborating with ISA until today.

Max also participated and leaded many industrial cybersecurity assessments to the largest industrial corporations in several segment industries, such as energy, upstream, midstream, downstream, food, pharmaceutical, metals, and mining. He already trained more than 1000 students. Most of them already obtained their professional certificates.

Knowledge & Experience

Specialized in industrial process control and telecommunications.
OP/MOM/MES – Manufacturing Executions Systems.
Industrial Networks and protocols (OPC, …)
ISA/IEC-62443 series of standards for industrial cybersecurity.
ISA88 standards for BMS – Batch Process Control Standard.
ISA-95 Enterprise-Control System Integration standards.
ANSI/ISA-5.1, Instrumentation Symbols and Identification.
ISA-18.2, Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries.
ISO 9000 Quality Management Systems
ANSI/IACET Standard for Continuing Education and Training.

Previous Experience

Max began his career in Foxboro’s (now part of Schneider Electric) engineering department as part of the project teams implementing I/A’s distributed control systems (DCS), and Triconex Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) in large plants.

After 5 years, he switched to SCADA systems to develop as a product manager for Intellution (now GE Proficy). He was responsible for the creation of ILA Group, in which he remained for almost 8 years as Regional Manager, having participated in the most important automation projects in the region.

After ILA Group (Intellution Latin America) he became general manager at Argentina, formerly working at Yokogawa América Do Sul Brazil for about 5 years. His boss, Nelson Ninin, encouraged him to join the ISA as a section leader.