Remote CONTROL

`People are sick to death that they have to buy control and monitoring products from a single supplier for their legacy systems,' contends Andrew Ballard, UK general manager of Intellution. As one of the founder companies of the OPC standard, Intellution offers its customers the flexibility they are demanding to mix and match, Ballard claims.

`We want customers to spend their money putting new equipment into plant, rather than on constantly having to upgrade their software. We offer free upgrades under our ESS programme.'

In the control and monitoring sectors, the industry is moving towards a core software-based backplane, using the OPC standard (OLE for Process Control) and other industry standards such as Activex controls. `There are many OPC compliant products available. If people install an OPC compliant product there should be no problem about whether it will support the functionality of other customers' products.

`We worked closely with Microsoft on the OPC standard. If we want to bring out new software, we need to bring it with standards. We cannot survive by bringing out proprietary systems.'

Two months ago, Intellution brought out its Fix Broadcast Network software. This allows remote operators to receive customised operations information, and real-time and historical reports and data - via the Internet. This will support Fix Scada, Visual Batch and Intellution's soft logic applications.

What has not been available hitherto - but is on the cards - is remote process control across the Internet. This is one promise of Intellution's yet to be unveiled (and renamed) next generation product, codenamed Raptor.

Ballard tells PE: `In early 1998 we will be bringing it to market with the aim of improving productivity tenfold, by increasing the speed of routeing applications and of upgrading them. Plug-and-play is the way ahead, to ease addition of functions.'

Traditionally, stages of control have been supported from the business system through to the controller by MES, Batch and Scada. OPC enables data to flow from business system to MES to graphical configuration/Scada, thence directly to process control. The essence of the new approach is a central communications core to which all of the applications are attached with universal connectivity.

Ballard is excited about its potential: `Every company we do business with today would be interested in this type of development. When we are fully Internet-enabled, customers will not have to buy an Intellution view package. Instead, they will be able to view their data via Explorer, Netscape and other similar packages - which all have the added advantage of being free!'

In essence, view clients will be replaced by the Internet-enabled products.

The need for this flexibility to support sometimes competing products is that customers themselves are having to demonstrate ever greater flexibility. Take, for example, the brewing industry, a typical user of Intellution systems. The advent of alcopops was sudden and their growth unexpected. It required versatile monitoring and control packages, such as will be offered by `Raptor'.

During the last year, Intellution has carried out a survey of its customers worldwide, including focus groups, interviews and a developers conference with 400 Fix users. As well as the expected company needs for their systems of lower costs, reliability, quality, flexibility and productivity, there was a new request: open architecture; a backplane to which any product can be attached.