It's A Control Issue -- Expanded Feature Set In Empower Software For Agilent Instrument Control And Data Acquisition

It's not a new trend, just one that continues to gather momentum. And that is the effort by major analytical instrument suppliers to provide their customers with chromatography data management software that controls and acquires data from various brands of chromatographic instrumentation. Extending a trend that began in the late 80's with the support of the Agilent® 5890 Gas Chromatograph, Waters multi-vendor instrument control capabilities for its Empower™ chromatography data software now include support for the Agilent 1100 Series Photodiode Array Detector.

Managing data in a busy analytical laboratory is an ever increasing challenge. This daunting task is compounded when labs use a mix of liquid chroma-tographs, gas chromatographs, photodiode array and mass spectrometry detectors from different suppliers, and whose scientists prefer to standardize on Waters software to run them.

One of the most powerful and widely used UV/Vis detectors today is the photodiode array detector. It is the "gold standard" of detectors for LC and is remarkable for the amount and quality of information it can gather from a single injection. More than a decade ago, Waters pioneered photodiode array data analysis with the development of proprietary patented algorithms used to interrogate PDA data in ways never before possible. Beginning in 2003, Waters introduced Agilent photodiode array detector control within Empower Software so they could analyze Agilent PDA data in the same enhanced manner. Using these sophisticated algorithms for peak purity and library matching in Empower Software, scientists can confidently identify sample components and verify spectral homogeneity.

Getting More for Your Investment

Waters Empower Chromatography Software, sold with Waters® brand UPLC and HPLC instrumentation, is a software tool that is more than meets the eye – it acquires data and controls the operation of and processes data from not only Waters brand instrumentation, but Agilent 1100 Series Photodiode Array Detectors, 1100 Series Liquid Chromatographs, and Agilent 5890 and 6890-series Gas Chromatographs.

"There are quite a few CDS products, but you won't find any that can match the feature set of Empower including support for Agilent instrument control and data management," says Pat Martell, Director – Informatics Product Marketing at Waters Corporation.

An early convert to this approach of laboratory data management is Johnson & Johnson. "Since Waters added the full control functionality for Agilent's 1100 LCs and 6890 GCs to it's Millennium®/Empower product, we can again use all our chromatography instrumentation with a software package which is state-of-the-art for both productivity and compliance", says Pascal Maes, Global Analytical Development, Pharmaceutical R&D, Johnson & Johnson, Beerse, Belgium.