Wonderware latest to bridge manufacturing and IT divide, with four new systems

The company has also introduced Internet-based learning entitled ‘Wonderware Breakthrough Experience’, aimed at operations, engineering and IT personnel. The four are: InTouch 10.0 HMI software, Wonderware Development Studio, Wonderware System Platform 3.0 and Wonderware Compact Panel. “These releases represent some of the most significant breakthroughs that Wonderware has delivered in its 20-year history,” says Mike Bradley, Wonderware’s president. “We have invested more than 100 person-years to ensure that these offerings and our channels can deliver on real-world software performance and productivity that will continue to enable our customers to meet some of their toughest operations, engineering and IT challenges.” InTouch 10.0 is the new iteration of Wondeware’s HMI software, adding parent Invensys’ ArchestrA intelligent graphics capability. The company says that, with support for Microsoft .Net technology, it now enables enterprise-wide visualisation for a wide range of real-time applications. It also claims more than 200 new features, including animation, while minimising design and engineering effort. Wonderware Development Studio provides a unified environment that enables IT and engineering teams to collaborate in performing software application modelling, development, change management and deployment across the full range of Wonderware software applications – including InTouch 10.0 HMI, System Platform 3.0 and associated application modules. The company claims that, using the Wonderware Development Studio, applications can now be deployed across a wide range of busienss devices running on Windows Mobile, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 operating environments. Wonderware System Platform 3.0 delivers runtime performance updates to the Wonderware Application Server, including the ability to use multi-core microprocessor technology. The company describes it as providing a rich set of software services for creating, deploying and managing distributed real-time applications, with faster time to value and with lower life-cycle costs. Finally, Wonderware Compact Panel bundles a subset of InTouch 10.0 HMI runtime functionality with the industrial touch screen operator panel operating Windows CE 6.0. A range of screen sizes and industrial environments can be supported including NEMA 4X/IP 66 and Class 1, Div. 2. “The manufacturing community has spoken loud and clear that they expect their automation suppliers to protect their application investments, even if it was a solution deployed in the 1980s on a legacy Windows operating system,” comments Craig Resnick, research director at analyst ARC Advisory Group. “It appears that Wonderware has met this challenge by enabling customers to take an InTouch software application that was developed 20 years ago on Windows 2.0, and have it continue to operate with their latest version of InTouch 10.0 HMI, running on the newest Windows Vista environment, without any significant effort or loss of production time for the manufacturer.”