Sentient Computing in Western Australia (WA) has bought the rights to the MacroView SCADA/HMI system for use in the coal, oil, gas, mining, production, transportation, environment and power industries.
Originally developed in WA in the early 1990s, MacroView is currently used by big names in the industry including Bluescope Steel, Golden Circle, Public Transport Authority (WA), Queensland Transport, Iluka Resources, Xstrata, Coogee Chemicals, Railcorp NSW and Rio Tinto.
Sentient Computing has been developing, selling and supporting MacroView under license for the past eight years, however the company now holds full ownership rights of the system.
Current users of MacroView can continue to rely on Sentient Computing for after-sales support and services.
“This acquisition is very exciting and is the start of a new era for MacroView,” said Sentient’s managing director, Doug Bester.
Bester was part of the original development team on MacroView, and says the system will be better supported moving forward.
“In early 2000, I saw an opportunity to do something more with MacroView. The owners of MacroView had changed business focus and were moving in a different direction. We believe MacroView is a great SCADA product with a strong customer base and both the product and its customers were being neglected. It is wonderful that we now have full control of the MacroView product,” he said.
Sentient has been responsible for adding new modules and add-on products to MacroView in the past, and will continue to evolve the system. Planned future versions of MacroView will use Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest technology for rich internet application deployment to enable features such as animation, visually-enhanced vector graphics and embedded audio-video playback, according to the company.
“Sentient is a compact, agile company that differentiates itself from the larger international companies, by being responsive, attentive and focused on delivering quality automation software, support and services to our customers. Subsequently as we manage the development of MacroView Version 4.0, we are working with our customers to make sure they will get maximum ROI from the new release,” said Bester.
The largest MacroView installation to date is at Wesfarmers CSBP with more that 180,000 I/O across six sites, according to Sentient.
CSBP is a major chemical and fertiliser manufacturer in WA and uses MacroView as a supervisory and control system for its manufacturing, power distribution and product loading. Macroview is also used as the historian for all of the company’s Distributed Control Systems (DCS).
For more information including videos, brochures and documentation of MacroView is available from Sentient Computing’s website at www.sencom.com.au