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. . . but drops ICS Triplex from ISaGRAF Branding | Control Global

ControlGlobal.com
09/16/2008

By Andrew Bond, Industrial Automation Insider

No offence to Australian pump-station management system developer Multitrode, but arguably the most interesting aspect of the August 5 press release from Rockwell announcing that it has adopted ISaGRAF v5 for the latest version of its MultiSmart Pump Station Manager is that Rockwell has dropped any mention of ICS Triplex in the ISaGRAF branding.

ISaGRAF has had something of a chequered history. It started life under the auspices of French company CJ International, was subsequently acquired by the Canadian company Altersys and then, in turn, was acquired in 2003 by U.K. safety systems specialist ICS Triplex and renamed, somewhat inelegantly, ICS Triplex ISaGRAF. Now however, following Rockwell’s acquisition of ICS Triplex in May 2007, the company name has reverted to just plain ISaGRAF, with the tag line, a Rockwell Automation Company.

Despite these complex evolutions, the development of the ISaGRAF product has continued to the point where it is one of the few products to have been TÜV-certified as being compliant with both the IEC 61499 and the IEC 61131 industrial standards. The fact that Rockwell now describes ISaGRAF as “the world’s leading automation software partner” must hold out the hope that it will eventually adopt the product as the standard development environment for its own range of Allen-Bradley PLCs and PACs. Meanwhile, much of the original ISaGRAF development team remains intact at Austrian SCADA vendor CopaData’s French soft-logic subsidiary CopAlp.

And what of Multitrode? They’re using ISaGRAF v5 in the latest version of MultiSmart which provides monitoring and control of water/wastewater lift stations and includes a pump controller, a PLC, an RTU and an intuitive user interface.