Aspen Rolls Out New Products, More Acquisitions
Aspen Technology, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.), seems to want to exceed its considerable commercial success with greater prominence in the industry media. On the heels of a flurry of announcements last week (See AspenTech Extends Its Reach in Europe, and Lab Markets), it has produced another pile of paper, detailing its acquisition of Iisys, Inc., neural network enhancements of several of its control products, and new versions of two of its key products, InfoPlus.21 and Process Explorer. Each announcement is significant in its own right; collectively, they are bound to give industry editors headaches making sense of it all.
Incredibly, there is more to come from the Cambridge, Mass., company that dominates process-design and advanced-control software markets in the process industries. "Look for us to make some significant announcements in the next few months in the area of batch process automation," hinted Toni Lee Rudniki, Aspen marketing manager, in an interview with Chemical Online. "We're gong to make batch industries like pharmaceutical and agchem core markets of Aspen, just as chemical and refining are," she said.
The news of the moment, though, is Aspen IQ, a module for its DMCplus program, and Aspen Multivariate, a module for InfoPlus.21. IQ and Multivariate represent the integration of the neural networking technology that Aspen obtained last year when it bought Neuralware, Inc. The modules allow for on- or offline modeling, analysis and inferential calculations, based on process data developed by InfoPlus.21 and DMCplus. DMCplus, an advanced-control product, is being further enhanced by a combination of software and consulting services called Aspen Watch and Aspen Sustained Performance. Watch allows plant operators, or Aspen consultants, to monitor plant operating conditions, onsite or remotely, to use constraint-, performance- or event-based control methodologies to keep process plants running optimally. (Watch is the enabling software; Sustained Performance is the consulting service. Watch can be purchased independently of the consulting.)
Along the way, Aspen also unveiled version 10 of Aspen Pims, a plant-information management system that was obtained when the company bought Bechtel Pims. The new version allows code from Aspen's design and optimization programs to embedded in Pims.
Iisys, which was bought for a combination of $10 million in cash and acquired debt, has been a player in the yield-management software field. Yield accounting and management allows companies with complex feedstocks and products, such as refineries, to optimize their economic performance, and to keep a closer handle on actual production runs. Iisys' main product, Advisor, uses a knowledge-based reconciliation algorithm to track inventory and material movements. With it, manufacturers can more accurately report production data to their ERP and other business systems. IISYS customers include Shell Services Co., Texaco Refining & Marketing, Inc., and other leading petroleum companies.
Collectively, the product upgrades provide an extension of Aspen's overall product and technology suite, which it calls Plantelligence. A key part of Plantelligence is Process Explorer, a user interface that brings all these control and production data to the plant manager's desktop. Aspen is also announcing version 2.0 of Explorer, with enhanced statistical process control capabilities and expanded batch-reporting features. The company has nearly completed its transition to a completely Windows NT-based software architecture, and Rudniki says that it is in the process of obtained "Designed for Windows 95" certification from the company that Microsoft has set up to perform such evaluations.
By Nick Basta