ARCOM CONTROL SYSTEMS ANNOUNCE FIRST END-TO-END TELEMETRY INTEGRATION SOLUTION WITH SUPPORT FOR IBM WEBSPHERE MQ INTEGRATOR

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ARCOM CONTROL SYSTEMS ANNOUNCE FIRST END-TO-END TELEMETRY INTEGRATION SOLUTION WITH SUPPORT FOR IBM WEBSPHERE MQ INTEGRATOR
02 March 2002 - Arcom

To improve the rate of growth of any business in today's competitive marketplace, streamlining the process of collecting, distributing and utilizing information from operations, separates the market leaders. Data is now just as much a commodity as the actual products being produced and it is essential that this data is readily available to the whole business. Minimizing the time and costs of data acquisition while maximizing the utilization across multiple applications will improve business performance.

This ultimately means delivering data efficiently from field devices as diverse as flow meters and pressure sensors in the process control environment to batch counters and check weighers in a factory production line, directly into back-office applications. Arcom Control Systems is pleased to announce an architecture that offers an information bridge between front end business operations and the IT based enterprise applications. Arcom have teamed up with IBM to offer the first end-to-end telemetry integration solution for IBM WebSphere MQ Integrator (WMQI).

Arcom and IBM's Development Laboratories in Hursley, England developed the new lightweight TCP/IP based protocol to deliver data directly from remote devices and data producers into the WMQI publish and subscribe 'integration broker'. From the broker, information can be distributed on a 'one-to-many' basis and delivered directly to multiple applications using the MQSeries messaging 'middleware'. This solution supplies event driven, real time data to any application within the enterprise such as SAP based ERP, billing, scheduling or even the trading floors. This new architecture compliments MQSeries Everyplace™, which provides a secure messaging infrastructure for PDA and mobile telephony applications

The protocol is called MQIsdp, MQ Integrator SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) device protocol. Following extensive industry consultation, the protocol has been carefully designed to meet the demands of a new generation of 'network connected field device'. MQIsdp is designed to minimize the required communication bandwidth by using a protocol with very low overhead, and providing three levels of delivery assurance or 'quality of service' (QoS). The QoS for each data message can be selected by the system programmer on the basis of its importance to the enterprise applications or because of bandwidth constraints.

By using TCP/IP as a 'transport' layer, MQIsdp guarantees universal acceptance within today's intranet and Internet infrastructure. The low data overhead ensures it has very little impact on existing local area networks and is also cost effective over dial up, radio or satellite communication channels. (The trend for telecommunication operators which offer GPRS and satellite based data services is to bill user traffic on a 'per byte' basis.)

To retain and utilize current infrastructure, Arcom now offers MQIsdp client services as standard on all of the Director Series line of 'Industrial Network Gateway' products. These serve as data routers, collecting data from the field devices and sending it as an MQIsdp message over TCP/IP via Ethernet or a PPP serial connection. The Director provides an important first step in routing data from proprietary or legacy field devices into the WebSphere MQ Integrator broker.

'IBM is pleased to incorporate the MQIsdp protocol into the WebSphere MQ Integrator development tools and offer a reliable mechanism to achieve true end to end business integration, including remote telemetry devices' said Jeff Henry, Director of IBM WebSphere Integration Middleware Marketing. Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM MQSeries Technology Staff Member added, 'Arcom's development support, SCADA experience and protocol integration skills have meant that we can provide rapid support for this TCP/IP-enabled data delivery standard. The Director unit offers a powerful mechanism to connect telemetry data directly into enterprise applications.'

Arcom is also launching a series of hardware/software development kits which already incorporate the MQIsdp and MQSeries Everyplace client services. This will offer rapid application development and a proven integration path for users of Arcom's embedded controller boards. The development kits offer highly scalable solutions to meet the broad range of requirements from very low end sensors and actuators, to sophisticated embedded industrial PC systems using wired and wireless Ethernet.

Arcom is also pleased to announce that it is now an IBM Advanced Business Partner for Developers in the IBM PartnerWorld™ program. This is a result of several years of joint development and successful deployment of MQIsdp technology into a variety of end user applications.

Arcom offer a Design Service to integrate the MQIsdp protocol into field devices and communication equipment, and also the ability to design and manufacture complete application specific solutions.

About IBM WebSphere MQSeries (www.ibm.com/mqseries)
IBM WebSphere MQ, part of the WebSphere family and the most widely used message-queuing software on the market, enables users to exchange information between applications across more than 35 different platforms, from mainframes to PCs. This award-winning software enables business integration throughout the enterprise, allowing companies to maximize e-business opportunities by leveraging existing resources to improve speed-to-market and anticipate IT changes as their business changes. IBM's Business Integration with WebSphere MQ family of products, which includes IBM's MQSeries Everyplace and MQSeries Integrator, addresses the critical areas of IT management: messaging, application and information integration and business process automation.

About IBM (www.ibm.com)
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate.

IBM is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

http://www.arcom.com

About: Arcom
Founded in Cambridge in 1982, Arcom has grown to become one of the leading suppliers of embedded computer and communications processors.

Arcom's embedded software development and support capabilities are second-to-none in the industry. Our engineering and support teams in Kansas City (US) and Cambridge (UK) have an enormous depth of experience and knowledge in the field of embedded operating systems, communications protocols, and system design. We pride ourselves on being able to provide comprehensive development tools and excellent support to our OEM customers as they bring their products to the market.

Development Kits - we lead the embedded market with our strategy for new product introduction based on the 'blue-box' development kits. By combining new hardware solutions with the leading embedded operating systems we offer our customers a complete and rapid application development environment.

Embedded Boards - our range of embedded processor boards (x86 and XScale), PC/104 I/O modules, ISAbus and PCI add-on cards are all designed and manufactured by Arcom. This gives our customers fast and easy access to the highest level of technical support. All products are supported by a clearly defined life cycle and a commitment for long term availability.

PCs & Enclosures - we also recognize that customers need products to ease the integration of our embedded boards. Arcom's design team includes mechanical engineers who have developed a number of off the shelf enclosure solutions for stand alone and rack mounted systems.

Industrial Networking - since 1992, we have been actively involved in the integration and deployment of data acquisitions systems for the process control markets. Working with our key technology partners we now offer products and expertise to provide guaranteed data delivery from your field devices straight into your enterprise level applications.

Design & Build - we understand the drive to cost reduce products for high volume applications and to combine this with a 'complete technical solution'. We accept contracts to produce custom solutions which focus on the design of dedicated hardware, developing optimized operating system configurations or complete packaged system solutions.

Through a focused approach to innovative design backed by comprehensive development platforms, global marketing and low cost manufacturing, Arcom pursues an aggressive expansion of its customer base in North America, UK and France.

Arcom is a subsidiary of Spectris plc, the precision instrumentation and controls company.

Our business processes are accredited to the international QA standard ISO 9001 and our products hold all relevant certification.

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