Barco and Primate Technologies cooperative agreement will improve situational awareness in control rooms
Melbourne, FL, USA – Barco and Primate Technologies, Inc. (P-Tech) have agreed to collaboratively develop visual technologies and solutions for control rooms and situation rooms in the energy industry. The cooperative agreement will provide greater situational awareness to the operations staff in 24/7 mission critical control centers.
Real-time control systems in the energy industry contain a wealth of information, but often these valuable data are not available to all of the management and operations staff – even when effective communication of the information would benefit their businesses’ performance. When operational information is presented, it is often done with less efficient technologies. These perceptions were strongly reinforced by the findings of the US August 14 blackout investigation team, where a lack of situational awareness was identified as a primary cause of the blackout. Similar findings occurred after examining other black-outs in Europe.
P-Tech’s GridGuardian™ and BlackBoard™ products help customers improve situational awareness, using sophisticated visualization tools to enable access to information on disparate systems. P-Tech’s solutions for the utility market can be applied to different control room visualization scenarios. P-Tech will provide Barco with competitive differentiators by integrating complementary software products and services into Barco’s portfolio, while promoting P-Tech’s portfolio of visualization tools. Barco’s focus on professional critical mission visualization for businesses makes this cooperation with P-Tech a natural step into offering visualization systems, which is all about efficient use of data and content. “Together, P-Tech and Barco will help utilities identify and visually communicate potential problems to keep the grid more reliable, says Rita Patterson, Vice President of P-Tech. “We are extremely pleased to be working with Barco.”
“P-Tech market knowledge and products allows customers to use the full potential of dynamic data, improving display information, and as such, using the full potential of the high quality screens of Barco. The combination of these technologies, with focus on ergonomics and operational efficiencies, brings Barco’s solutions to the highest innovation level in visualization tools. With the experience of the P-Tech staff, customers in the energy industry will benefit from this cooperation,” says Guy Van Wijmeersch, Market Development Manager for Barco’s Control Rooms division.
Barco is the world's leading expert in visualization solutions for traffic, surveillance, and command and control centers. Barco’s solutions display critical information to operators in control rooms of utilities and production facilities, police, fire brigades and other organizations. Maps with positions, meta data, production data, status data and alternative routes, as well as video feeds, are displayed on screen and communicated to the entire operations staff. Barco’s solutions enable shared situational awareness in real time from the field up to the command level in joint operations centers.
About P-Tech:
P-Tech is a privately held company based in Melbourne, FL, USA. P-Tech supplies practical software solutions for the energy industry. For more information about P-Tech or P-Tech products, please visit P-Tech’s website at http://www.primate-tech.com.
About Barco
Barco, an international company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, provides visualization and display solutions for professional markets. Barco designs and develops solutions for large screen visualization, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection. Barco is active worldwide and has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco is quoted on Euronext Brussels and is a BEL 20 and a Next 150 company (Euronext: BAR; Reuters: BARBt.BR; Bloomberg: BAR BB).
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