Press Release

Canary Labs Attends 14th Consecutive OPC Interoperability Workshop

Martinsburg PA —April 11, 2011— Canary Labs will be attending the North American Interoperability Workshop for the 14th consecutive year. This year’s workshop is being held in Scottsdale, Arizona from May 16th to May 20th, 2011. The purpose of the Interoperability Workshop is to make sure that OPC products work together according to the OPC specification. The workshop brings together many different companies and their OPC products to a single location where live testing is done. Attending this workshop allows software vendors to debug, diagnose and repair any interoperability problems that may be discovered with other vendors that are participating. These workshops provide an invaluable opportunity to work with other companies to validate OPC interoperability capabilities across products and platforms.

Canary Labs is committed to OPC Interoperability. In addition to the OPC Interoperability Workshops, Canary products have been certified by an independent OPC test lab. The following characteristics are checked and verified by independent OPC test labs: Compliance, Interoperability, Robustness, Performance, Best Practices, and Usability.

Canary Labs is also involved in the Compliance Working Group which is comprised of OPC Foundation member companies to assist with providing transparency, checks and balances to ensure that compliance remains credible and objective. Products that pass the benchmarks receive the “Certified for Compliance” logo which is a guarantee to customers that the product is fully compliant with the OPC specification. As part of our ongoing commitment to OPC standards, Canary Labs has provided the Test Lab Reference Product for the current UA certification. Every program tested in the OPC test lab will be tested against this product.

“Not all products touted as “OPC Compliant” are truly compliant,” says Gary Stern, President of Canary Labs. “When a customer runs into a problem using another company’s product, often it’s because that product hasn’t followed the OPC specification exactly.” Stern recommends that potential customers of OPC products carefully select their software vendors and products by asking these questions:

• Has the product been self-tested by the vendor and did it pass? Has the vendor published these results to the OPC Foundation web site?
• How many OPC interoperability workshops has the vendor attended?
• How many OPC products has the vendor tested against (other than their own)?
• If there is a problem, can the vendor identify and fix the problem quickly? Is the vendor willing to work with a potential competitor to resolve an issue?
• Do the vendors’ products (client or server) work with their competitors’ products? Why or why not?
• Are the vendors’ products scalable and responsive to large amounts of data?
• What are the expected CPU and memory usage requirements? Can the vendor provide performance benchmarks?

About Canary Labs

Since 1985, Canary Labs has been focused on delivering best in class historian trending tools and solutions on a global scale. Our client base has grown since our inception, to over 12,000 implementations in over 26 countries around the world. We believe our success is driven by our focus on developing our solutions from the end user's perspective, with scale in mind. Our Trend Viewer is the viewer of choice for our clients across all industries due to the flexibility and control provided at the end user level without the need to involve IT. Large enterprises have come to rely on Canary Labs' scalable architecture and performance, enabling our clients to collect millions of process data tags utilizing the smallest hardware requirements in the industry.

OPC Interoperability Testing Session - Deerfield Beach Florida, USA. May 2007.