Agilent and Shimazu Support Each Others GC Systems
Agilent Technologies and Shimadzu Corp are announcing the release of RapidControl.NET GC Instrument control drivers for their respective Gas Chromatography Data Systems.
Announced last year in May with the aim to preserving customer investments, Agilent and Shimadzu are taking huge steps towards opening their respective systems. Agilent’s OpenLAB CDS will now support Shimadzu’s GC-2010, GC-2010 Plus and GC-2014, while Shimadzu’s LabSolutions will now support Agilent’s 6890, 6850, 7820 and 7890 GC instruments. This is in addition to HPLC support by OpenLAB CDS for Shimadzu’s Prominence and Nexera HPLC lines and LabSolution’s support for Agilent’s 1290, 1260, 1200 and 1100 series.
While this is a step in the right direction to open laboratory analytics systems and ease cost and effort for researchers, it is far from complete without the participation of other competitors. OpenChrom is another alternative available which currently only helps in reading chromatography data files of different formats.
These new and previous drivers are the result of collaboration on Agilent’s RapidControl instrument drivers. RapidControl is an open system environment that allows control of multiple analytical equipments. Combined with an Instrument Control Framework (ICF), it provides complete control over the look and control of the data system or workstation. More information can be found from Agilent’s ICF manual here.