Control.com partners with SCADAware

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Sep 14, 2001

Control.com partners with SCADAware to develop series of fully-supported open control systems.

Open systems overcome limitations of closed, proprietary architectures; provide increased performance, programming flexibility Control.com, the global online community for control professionals, today announced at ISA/2001 in Houston, Texas, that it is partnering with SCADAware, to develop a new series of open systems for industrial automation and control.

The new open control systems will provide manufacturers with a powerful set of modular components that can be mixed and matched to solve a variety of data acquisition, process control, and motion control applications.

Control.com will provide the open systems technology, including hardware, software, and compatibility testing, while SCADAware, a leading control systems integration firm, will provide on-site, applications-level development and support.

"Control.com and SCADAware are joined by a common philosophy of multi-vendor open control," stated Ken Crater, CEO of Control.com.

"The long-standing limitations of the PLC's proprietary architecture have left today's control engineers facing innumerable problems.

Open control is the answer for delivering increased performance, communications, programming flexibility, and capacity.

Our goal is to transform the controls industry from its current moribund state to something approaching the dynamism of the computer and software industries." Control.com and SCADAware will deliver truly open systems, as measured by manufacturers' business requirements.

All open control systems will provide: Wide array of popular interfaces Compatible environment for commercial off-the-shelf software Multi-vendor control architectures Rapid adaptation of business protocols and communications standards Such systems, based on open-source standards, reduce the user's risk when purchasing any one component as many plug-compatible and software-compatible equivalents will be available.

This frees the user to select best-in-class components in each product category and opens the market to new suppliers offering better products.

"Control.com and SCADAware are of one mind when it comes to open control and we practice what we preach," said Rick Caldwell, President of SCADAware.

"Control.com supports the open systems paradigm through its Web-based community of control engineers and the new Open Control Laboratory.

SCADAware is putting open control to work in many industries, such as our recently completed installation at Caterpillar, Using a variety of open hardware components and an underlying real-time kernel with PC-based software, we have developed sophisticated cell control systems that interact with and provide high-level control to local machine controllers, bar-code readers, even articulated parts-handling robots.

This is open control in action." All systems development efforts will be performed in conjunction with Control.com's Open Control Laboratory.

The Lab will test, characterize, and integrate open control products from many different suppliers to assess their ability to operate together in an open control environment.

The Lab will determine how hardware and software components operate with other products and systems, and establish standards for performance and ease of integration.

Once this determination has been made, Control.com and SCADAware will use the highest rated components as part of their customers' open control systems.