Siebe Plc’s Foxboro Co in Foxboro, Massachusetts will bring open systems and RISC to the process control industry under an agreement signed with Sun Microsystems Inc. Foxboro plans to incorporate the Sparc RISC and other Sun computer technologies into its I/A Series industrial process management and control system on an ongoing basis. The agreement also includes an exclusive marketing arrangement under which Foxboro will provide an integrated system to meet the needs of the two companies’ industrial automation customers. The first three products under the agreement, to be available February 1991, will support bidirectional exchange of information between I/A Series systems and Sun’s Sparcstations and servers, MS-DOS personal computers running Sun’s PC-NFS software, and other machines. They are the I/A Series Application Interface Software; the I/A Series Open Application Platform, which bundles the application interface software with a Sparcstation; and the I/A Series Open Information Server Sparcserver-based networked hardwaresoftware combination. The products are designed to give engineers, managers and other supervisors direct access to plant production data, and process operators with any engineering or business data that they need.
