Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Automation Companies Rally Around Microsoft Platforms A trickle of announcements about automation company support of Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista, surely precedes the coming flood of announcements that will be coming over the next few months. National Instruments has been working on moving its software over to the Vista platform and has also been working on articles explaining what this new operating system will mean to automation pros. I hope to have some more indepth reporting in Automation World in the coming months. Moxa, a networking connectivity supplier, proclaims that it is the first company to have Vista-certified multi-port serial board and serial device server products. It says it has received approval from the Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Laboratories for Windows Vista x86 and x64 editions. According to the company, Vista will contain more stringent security measures that will make it more difficult on the x86 platform or impossible on the x64 platform to install non-certified hardware. This certification gives Moxa the ability to provide products as soon as Vista becomes readily available early next year. In other Microsoft-related news, automation supplier Beckhoff Automation has won Gold Partner status within the Microsoft Windows Embedded program. The company's TwinCat product works under both Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE. 10:12:11 AM    comment []