Wonderware upgrades flagship HMI software

Time is money and if Wonderware has its way, it plans to save their customers quite a bit.
Billed as the most significant launch in the 20-year history of the Lake Forest, Calif.-based software provide, Wonderware Wednesday hit the market with its new version of InTouch 10.0, System Platform 3.0 software, and its Compact Panels, Development Studio.
“With this release we are focused on ease of use and total cost of ownership,” said Mike Bradley Sr., Wonderware’s president.
“We really want to own the real time space in manufacturing and in industrial facilities and infrastructure. We want to provide real time information for people in virtually every industry in virtually every country across the globe.”
The traditional software view of the world has level 2 and level 3, the HMI/SCADA and the MES EMI levels, but Bradley said this introduction will do away with those layers.
“What users want is a common real time system platform in visualization – a common framework so they can look at all their information from any system right to the hardware, right to the software.”
Users also want to implement software and hardware module by module.
“They don’t want a giant hairball of software to implement every piece at one time,” Bradley said.
Even a skeptical bunch, system integrators, remain upbeat about the launch because they think it will really boost end users' bottom lines.
“I believe there will be a 25% savings in development,” said Bill Sherwood, president of Progressive Software Solutions.
Some of the product highlights include:
It’s all about graphics in the industry these days and InTouch 10.0 HMI software adds in Invensys’ ArchestrA graphics capability. This capability, along with direct support for Microsoft .NET technology, gives the software the potential to provide enterprise-wide visualization for real-time applications. This upgrade, which is now running on the Microsoft Vista operating system but it can run with other Windows systems, has over 200 new features, including intuitive graphical interaction and animation techniques.
Development Studio brings together the engineering and IT departments to perform software application modeling, development, change management and deployment across InTouch, System Platform 3.0 and application modules. Development Studio can now deploy across devices running on Windows Mobile, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003.
System Platform 3.0 works with InTouch 10.0 by offering complete integration of ArchestrA application objects with ArchestrA graphics running inside InTouch HMI visualization.
Compact Panel provides a low cost bundle of InTouch 10.0 HMI runtime functionality, along with industrial touch screen operator panels operating Windows Mobile 6.0.
As an incentive to give the new offering a try, 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.
To get people to test drive the software, Wonderware created a web site that allows users to walk through demo showing off capabilities, www.experience.wonderware.com.