A recent survey found that 58% of IT professionals considered interoperability – the ability of various enterprise systems to interact with other systems within the enterprise – to be their greatest challenge.
During my 10 years of selling industrial computer products, I have found that there are more legacy applications being run today than one would think. The switch over to updated software with accommodating hardware is not only costly but time consuming and unrealistic in some I/O instances. All of this has resulted in an Interoperability Challenge.
While IT pros may prefer to focus on the technical aspects of interoperability alone, enterprise interoperability also involves the integration of business processes as well as human resources. Meeting the interoperability challenge requires coordination and cooperation among business units composed of real people. Enterprise interoperability is as much a people problem as it is a technical challenge. Successful strategies address the look and feel of integration solutions to individual users as well as the challenges faced within the various organizational structures.
L-Tron Corporation partners with Advantech because they manufacturer a quality product that is custom-configurable and their product EOL from origin is at least 4-5 years. Their platforms accommodate legacy applications and the price point of their product is aggressive, to say the least.
Many test rackmount and desktop PCs still run on legacy ISA and PCI applications. We have the ability to look at the requirements and specifications to create a system that not only adheres to them, but allows the user to update their application, I/O and OS. We also provide ISA/PCI/PCIe ATX motherboard and single board computer/passive backplane configurations, PICMG 1.0 & PICMG 1.3 compatibility along with Windows XP, XPE and Windows 7 32/64 bit availability.
These systems are a proven contributor to industrial application interoperability and will continue to be designed as such going forward as Advantech masters the interoperability challenge.