Wonderware Launches New, Open Approach with Industry Application for Facilities Management

In today’s environment, facility managers are faced with several significant challenges as they struggle to address the needs of their organisations, said John Bishop, industry manager, Wonderware. These managers are experiencing increasing costs for energy, service and maintenance as well as additional and more complex security and regulatory requirements with fewer knowledgeable resources. With all these challenges, customers are constantly looking for ways to streamline operations and reduce costs. Wonderware Industry Application for Facilities Management provides the basic application services needed for an open and modern facilities monitoring system.

When coupled with partner resources from strategic systems integrators, technology companies and developers, Wonderware can effectively meet demands for energy and environmentally friendly solutions for a variety of market spaces such as education, health care, government, transportation and manufacturing, Bishop said.

Customer demands for a more sustainable architecture also have led to the development and adoption of open industry standards. All systems, devices and assets within facilities can be modeled as templates, enabling the development of an entire solution with approved standards that support a robust and sustainable model. Through partnerships with other leaders in the facilities management industry, Wonderware offers data access servers for BACnet®, LonMark and the Echelon i.LON® SmartServer, with utilities specifically addressing application development and automatic network, device and object creation services built in for system integration simplicity.

The Wonderware facilities management solution is provided through an open distribution model which is supported by multiple independent systems integrators offering more competitive choices to customers. This approach provides an alternative to the markets locked distribution model currently available in the facilities management market space. By offering an alternative model, Wonderware enables customers to access more open, robust, scalable and secure solutions that best meet their specific technology requirements.

Most traditional building automation system vendors deliver a costly architecture that typically provides proprietary hardware and software that is supplied by a single vendor, Bishop said. With the Wonderware software solution, the supervisory environment is decoupled from the control environment which unlocks the architecture and offers an open, competitive and consistent supervisory technology solution that enables competitive bids for the control layer. In addition, the Wonderware supervisory software layer is decoupled from the hardware providing the capability to upgrade each software component separately as technology changes and customer needs evolve.