Andrew Bond, Editor, Industrial Automation INSIDER
www.iansider.co.uk
Wizcon rises to Fleet Street pudding challenge
Wizcon marketing director Emmanuel Vitrac was in London last week to explain the relationship between the web-based SCADA vendor and its new parent/partner Elutions to the 'First Friday Club', a group of UK hacks which gathers each month at that most traditional of watering holes, the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, to hear presentation from various companies. Whether the menu, which included both steak and kidney pudding and bread and butter pudding, was deliberately designed to affront his Gallic sensibilities is not known but Vitrac certainly rose to the challenge, declaring himself an enthusiast for English cuisine!
Duncan Fletcher
Supporting him in his endeavour was his recently appointed
UK distributor, Duncan Fletcher, whose company MatriVUE
also distributes the Incuity MES solution and the Innominate
range of 'device attached security' solutions. Fletcher,
readers may recall, was until last year technical director
of UK & Ireland Wonderware distributor Pantek so his
decision to take on the Wizcon distributorship represents
something of a feather in Vitrac's cap and could be read
as an endorsement of the underlying quality of the SCADA
solution, despite the admitted presentational problems posed
by its somewhat chequered history.
Also in attendance was Wizcon's regional account manager
for the UK, Phil Bourne, at one time a leading light in
Intellution's UK team. He however encountered another traditional
aspect of Fleet Street life, having his car broken into
immediately before the presentation. Fortunately - or otherwise
depending on your viewpoint - the thief was sufficiently
discriminating not to take the press kits.
With Wizcon having undergone a succession of name changes,
Vitrac's principal task in the 15 minutes allotted to him
was to re-establish its credentials as a mainstream S CADA
vendor - 50,000 licenses, 18 years track record, growing
at 15% a year and "not the market leader but the leader
in technology innovation" were the claims. Key differentiators
are the ability to publish SCADA data to any browser over
the internet; the CoDeSys IEC 61131 -3 compliant soft PLC;
and the exceptionally wide range of connectivity options
which include BACnet, Oracle, SQL and a library of 160 comms
drivers.
Wireless PLC
One of the latest additions to the portfolio is the WLC
wireless logic controller. This is the first product to
be developed jointly by Wizcon and Elutions, with the one
producing the software and the other the hardware, and provides
local control in geographically dispersed environments,
communicating with the host over a cellular network. Another
recent addition is WizCAD which generates Wizcon building
and facilities management applications from AutoCAD building
drawings. Further enhancements, including video integration,
are planned for Wizcon 9.3, due for release at year end,
and Wizcon 10 which is scheduled for release in 2007.
According to Vitrac, what particularly attracted Elutions
to Wizcon were its ability to fill the gap in its portfolio
between its front line energy management devices and its
higher level managed services and the base it provides in
Europe from which to attack the burgeoning European energy
management market in general and the opportunities created
by power industry deregulation in Europe in particular.
Elutions' Active Energy Management (AEM) offering , explained
Vitrac, addresses both the supply side of the energy management
market in terms of, for example, billing analysis, cost
tracking and allocation and bill validation, and the demand
side through active management of user demand through load
management and load shedding, with a particular emphasis
on managing loads across multiple sites. "Wizcon is
a key element of the energy platform," explained Vitrac.
"It adds real time control and allows AEM to close
control loops through the wide area network."
Just how successful the approach can be is illustrated by
Elutions client Food Lion, part of the Delhaize Group in
the US, which, it is claimed, has reduced its energy bill
by some 23% by actively managing the loads across its 1220
food stores.
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