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Iconics Claims to Be First with Windows 7

Industrial Automation Insider
01/06/2010

By Andrew Bond

Iconics is claiming that its Genesis64 HMI/SCADA package is the first manufacturer software certified on Windows 7, Vista and Server 2008. It was also one of the first SCADA vendors, alongside Salzburg, Austria-based Copa-Data, to go for Vista certification back in 2007 and thus to take advantage of the enhanced security capabilities compared with Windows XP. Now, however, with the release of Windows 7, most SCADA and DCS vendors are expected to make an early move to Windows 7 and Server 2008 which may create something of a certification backlog as they seek to provide customers with the assurance that, as Microsoft Windows 7 marketing director Robert Doi explained, their products "have met explicit standards of reliability and quality, and have been tested and proven to deliver a superior experience with Windows 7."

Ease of Use

Technologies supported in Windows 7 and exploited by Genesis64 include the Windows Presentation Foundation graphical subsystem and XAML mark-up language, 3-D hardware acceleration, Multi-touch touch-screen technology and the Silverlight web application framework. "Genesis64 takes advantage of the new Windows 7 Multi-touch ease-of-use capabilities allowing a more natural way to interact with the manufacturer operations," explained Iconics president and CEO Russ Agrusa. "Windows 7 is a game- changing operating system, and we have designed Genesis64 to fully maximize all the features Windows 7 offers to the marketplace."

ARC research director Craig Resnick believes that Iconics is well placed to respond to pent-up demand for solutions that provide increased security and productivity. "End users and OEMs should be moving in the direction of Windows 7-based solutions, as those that are still using Microsoft XP and legacy Microsoft operating systems such as NT and 2000 need to, at a minimum, be upgraded to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities and security risks that Windows 7 is designed to address."

Energy

Meanwhile, Iconics has released the latest component in its BizViz family of analytic solutions. Energy Analytics is designed to assist companies' energy conservation efforts by offering actionable intelligence that allows them to reduce energy consumption, aggregate and summarize energy usage by location and forecast energy costs over time. Supporting seamless integration with other Iconics applications, it provides the means to collect and summarize energy usage data, based on using a powerful metadata concept, and offers a wide variety of charts and reports for intuitive analysis of the resultant information, with data normalized for accurate side-by-side cost-based analysis.

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