Wonderware , a business unit of Invensys announced four major new offerings that are designed to help customers break down barriers to achieve operational excellence across their manufacturing and industrial businesses.
These new offerings coexist and interoperate with existing systems and software from Wonderware and other vendors.
Wonderware is also launching the new Internet-based ‘Wonderware Breakthrough Experience’ to provide operations, engineering and IT personnel with first-hand experience of the capabilities of these new offerings.
Mike Bradley, Wonderware’s president said, “These releases represent some of the most significant breakthroughs that Wonderware has delivered in its 20-year history. 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 software provides new innovative ArchestrA graphics capability. The intelligent graphics capability, along with direct support for Microsoft .NET technology, enables InTouch 10.0 HMI to provide enterprise-wide visualization for a wide range of real-time applications. With more than 200 new features, InTouch 10.0 HMI delivers the latest intuitive graphical interaction and animation techniques for maximum operator response and comprehension, while minimizing design and engineering efforts.
Craig Resnick, research director, ARC Advisory Group said, “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,”
“ARC is a strong advocate of solutions that offer migration from legacy to state-of-the-art functionality while not disrupting a manufacturer’s production schedule or requiring a significant amount of time or work. 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 the 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.”
The new Wonderware Development Studio provides a unified environment, which empowers the collaboration of IT and engineering teams to perform software application modeling, 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. Using the Wonderware Development Studio, applications can now be deployed across a wide range of enterprise devices running on Windows Mobile, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 operating environments.
The Wonderware Development Studio supports the industry’s broadest range of plant floor and business system connectivity products and technologies. It is compatible with more than 325 I/O servers and DA servers, and provides support for OPC, XML, SQL, SAP Netweaver and Microsoft .NET. As a result, users benefit from having one highly productive tool for building, integrating and maintaining virtually all of their manufacturing and industrial operations software applications.
Wonderware System Platform 3.0 delivers major runtime performance updates to the Wonderware Application Server, including the ability to take full advantage of the latest multi-core microprocessor technology.
Wonderware System Platform 3.0 also provides 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.
System Platform 3.0 works seamlessly with InTouch 10.0 software by offering complete integration of ArchestrA application objects with ArchestrA graphics running inside InTouch HMI visualization. Wonderware is offering discounts for customers that upgrade their existing InTouch software licenses to InTouch 10.0 software and additionally purchase the Wonderware System Platform 3.0 and customer support.
The new Wonderware Compact Panel offerings provide unprecedented ease of installation and a new entry price point by bundling a subset of InTouch 10.0 HMI runtime functionality, along with rugged, industrial touch screen operator panels operating Windows Mobile 6.0. A range of screen sizes and industrial environments can be supported with these devices including NEMA 4X/IP 66 and Class 1, Div. 2. Customers can now have a common visualization strategy from the smallest devices to a network of servers and hundreds of clients all utilizing InTouch 10.0 software and the common Wonderware Development Studio.
Chris Colyer, worldwide director, manufacturing operations strategy at Microsoft said, “In collaborative manufacturing, it’s critical to get the right information to the right employees so they get the data and insight needed to do their jobs better on a daily basis. These new offerings from Wonderware leverage the latest technologies from Microsoft to deliver innovative new ways of tying people and information together.”