From the press release:
exida Purchases Safety Lifecycle Tools Supplier ‘Asset Integrity Management’
Sellersville, PA - February 25, 2008 - exida.com®, LLC (exida), a privately held leading consulting and certification company to the process safety community, today announced it has completed the purchase of Asset Integrity Management (AIM) of Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K.
Dr. William Goble, exida’s principal partner says, “AIM and exida have been working under a mutually beneficial licensing agreement for quite some time. During that time we have demonstrated to our clients and ourselves how much the strengths of AIM’s SILSuite™ complement the strengths of exida’s exSILentia® product offering. However, we each came to the realization that in order to deliver end users a more tightly integrated software solution, one that is designed to encompass the IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 safety standards life-cycle model, we needed to become one company.”
The feasibility of using software tools that assist users in consistently, efficiently, and cost effectively applying the various phases of the IEC safety standards life-cycle model has been thoroughly reviewed and discussed among users, consultants, and suppliers for several years. However, most commercially available safety system software tools available today have been developed to assist with only a portion of the safety life-cycle model. Though these tools generally will support import/export capabilities, the differing database toxicology of each application frequently results in significant pre-import data manipulation as data-sets are passed from application to application.
A few suppliers, including AIM and exida, have developed suites of software applications but even such software application suites have not covered all aspects and all phases of the safety life-cycle model.
Goble says that exida is fully committed to supporting existing AIM and exida products while it aggressively engages in taking the best of both and integrating them into a robust, tightly integrated software suite that is specifically designed to assist users at all phases of the safety system life-cycle model.
Providing a hint of exida’s future plans, Goble said, “Once we have completed the integration of SILSuite and exSILentia we have already begun formulating plans for additional modules. Our goal is to produce a software suite that ensures accuracy and promotes consistency while lessening the user’s burden of conforming to IEC standards.”
Chevron’s Dennis Zetterberg, a user of both AIM and exida products says, “We have worked with both SILSuite and exSILentia and agree that a software solution that combines the strengths of both of these would help us reduce costs by streamlining the various phases of the safety lifecycle as well as achieve consistency in our Safety Instrumented System design, implementation, operation, testing and maintenance throughout our global facilities.”
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