Articles and News

Matrikon has acquired Industrial Control Software Limited (ICS), a private company based in Matlock, England. Established in 1989, ICS provides process control software and alarm monitoring and analysis solutions which are complementary to Matrikon's solutions. The purchase price was £1.78 million in cash for all outstanding shares of ICS. The net assets of ICS are estimated at £0.78 million.

Network and cyber security are very important to industrial systems because they can affect the production of the control system. A complex task requires the aid of experts with field experience. They can recommend solutions for each of the security focus areas such as OPC tunneling for firewalls. It is important to begin addressing security risks as soon as possible, before they affect production.

Since OPC was introduced over ten years ago, it has seen a steady rise in popularity within the process control industry. Using OPC, automation professionals can now select from a wide range of client applications to connect to their PLCs and hardware devices.

In response to the growing need to freely communicate with a wide range of devices, protocols that originated in the BA industry have evolved to deliver straightforward access to a broad range of BA devices. Today, many vendor-specific proprietary protocols have given way to a standardized protocol such as BACnet.