Westborough, Mass.— Control.com Inc. opened on July 16 its Open Controls Laboratory, an independent testing facility dedicated to advancing interoperability in industrial controls. Located at Control.com's headquarters, the lab will test, characterize, and integrate open control products from suppliers to assess their ability to operate together in an open control environment.

Test results will be published on the web at www.control.com for engineers and integrators concerned about compatibility, and for vendors seeking independent verification of their open products.

The lab will be headed by Peter Wurmsdobler, Ph.D., a leader in real-time Linux for the controls industry, and staffed by control engineers with a range of software, hardware and integration expertise. Dr. Wurmsdobler founded the Real-Time Linux Workshop, an annual international conference of developers, and has led numerous control engineering research projects.

"The manufacturing industry has been struggling to move toward the open control paradigm for over a decade," says Ken Crater, Control.com's president. "As an independent third-party evaluator of industrial control technologies, our goal is to help bring order and predictability to what is currently a somewhat chaotic marketplace. While many companies claim their products are open, the devil remains in the technical details.

"The Open Controls Lab will look beyond marketing hype to provide control engineers with the concrete information they need to make products work together. By providing objective, unbiased information about our findings, we will serve as a trusted third-party testing organization upon which the entire industrial control community can depend."

For more information, Circle 348 or visit www.control.com or www.controleng.com/freeinfo.