Wonderware Receives Editors’ Choice Award from Control Engineering Magazine for InTouch 9.0 Software
Wonderware, a business unit of Invensys Systems Inc., today announced that Control Engineering magazine has selected the Wonderware InTouch 9.0 software product for its 2004 “Editors’ Choice Award.” Invensys’ Foxboro and Triconex units also received “Editors’ Choice” awards for their I/A Series Mesh Control Network and Trident technologies, respectively.
The Editors’ Choice Award winners are selected from among new products featured in Control Engineering, Control Engineering Online or one of Control Engineering’s topical e-newsletters. The magazine’s January 2005 edition will spotlight the Editors’ Choice awards and Wonderware’s InTouch 9.0 HMI will be highlighted in the magazine’s special supplement.
“In 2004, a flurry of innovations in the automation, control and instrumentation sectors gave Control Engineering’s editors a larger dose of new products to consider for an Editors’ Choice Award than has been the case for a number of years,” said David Greenfield, Control Engineering editorial director. “The incorporation of object-oriented SmartSymbols for propagation of template changes is a noteworthy advance in HMI technology that makes InTouch 9.0 software stand out among the crowd of this year’s product advances.”
Version 9.0 of InTouch software features innovative Wonderware SmartSymbol technology, which offers considerable savings by significantly reducing application engineering, testing and deployment time. Wonderware SmartSymbols infuse object-oriented technology into InTouch graphics symbols and transforms them into reusable templates. Changes made to the templates automatically propagate throughout an application — even across multiple networked PC nodes. As a result, engineers spend less time creating, modifying, validating and re-validating HMI applications.
InTouch users can deploy an HMI symbol 1,000 times across 100 nodes in minutes. Typically, this type of deployment would take hours to perform. Wonderware SmartSymbol graphics are the key to this significant new capability. Users of previous versions of InTouch software can easily upgrade their HMI toolkits to leverage this technology.
“The selection of InTouch 9.0 software by the editors of Control Engineering is a significant achievement for Wonderware and recognizes the company’s goal of providing the most innovative technologies that are designed to make application deployment easy for users in the plant automation and information market,” said Renee Brandt, visualization product marketing manager for the Wonderware and ArchestrA business units. “Wonderware SmartSymbols are an incredible new development for InTouch customers because SmartSymbols empower them to dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend creating, modifying and deploying applications. Customers can leverage the benefits of Wonderware SmartSymbols throughout their existing applications with minimal effort.”
InTouch 9.0 software enables users to visualize and control industrial processes while providing engineers with an easy-to-use development environment and extensive functionality to rapidly create, test and deploy powerful applications that connect and deliver real-time information to anyone who needs it, anywhere it is needed. In addition, InTouch 9.0 software is “Integrated with ArchestrA,” meaning that it can be used in conjunction with the distributed, Wonderware Industrial Application Server to leverage even more productive integration attributes of ArchestrA technology. This enables increased diagnostics and security capabilities, simplified communications deployment, remote configuration and the unification of the entire supervisory application. The integration benefits offered by ArchestrA technology empower users to define comprehensive application templates including devices, networks, plant equipment, scripting, alarming, historization and associated HMI symbols once, and then use them multiple times during application development, leading to tremendous engineering efficiency.
As one of 40 Editors’ Choice Award winners, Wonderware InTouch 9.0 software will be eligible to win a Control Engineering “Engineers’ Choice Award,” to be announced at National Manufacturing Week in March 2005. Control Engineering will survey its subscribers to select winners for the Engineers’ Choice Award.
About the Wonderware and ArchestrA Business Units and Invensys
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