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Company Background
Wonderware, a business unit of British-based Invensys plc, was established in April 1987, to develop and market human-machine interface (HMI) software products for use on IBM PC and compatible computers in industrial and process automation applications.
The founders' design goals were to create object-oriented, graphical tools that adhered strictly to the Microsoft Windows standard and provided the ease of use, sophisticated graphics and animation, product performance, quality and reliability previously unavailable in HMI products.
As the pioneer in the use of Windows in factory automation, Wonderware fundamentally changed application development for manufacturing users and transcended the competition to become the leading independent supplier of software for industrial automation. From the introduction of its flagship HMI product in 1989 until early 1993, the company had no Windows-based competition.
The Industry's First Integrated Suite
As other vendors subsequently began offering Windows-based HMI products, Wonderware began a program to develop and offer complementary products that enabled users to handle additional automation tasks.
By 1996, Wonderware had grown from a single-product company to a supplier of a broad range of compatible, Windows-based products for applications, which offer:
- HMI
- Resource management
- Work-in-progress (WIP) tracking
- Batch management
- PC-based control
- Real-time data management
- Remote application viewing tools
- The industry's largest family of I/O and OPC servers for interfacing plant floor devices.
In 1997, the company surpassed its competition by offering its entire product line as a single toolset. This cost-effective bundle of products was modeled after the concept of the Microsoft Office suite of office automation programs. The Wonderware toolset provided the industry's first integrated set of application programs for developing most any application in manufacturing, continuous process and batch industries.
Find out more about the Wonderware advantage.
