Australian software developer Mainpac Pty Ltd has thrown its support behind the maintenance and asset management discipline by becoming the principal sponsor of the 2005 Australian Maintenance Engineering Excellence Awards (AMEEA).

Modbus-IDA and CAN in Automation e.V. (CiA) have announced a licensing agreement, resulting in Specification CiA DSP 309-2: Part 2: Modbus/TCP Mapping. CiA DSP 309-2 provides a standardised mapping of CANopen data for transport on Modbus TCP networks.

The wireless infrastructure industry is in a period of metamorphosis, according to ABI research. It is characterised by a shift from a hardware-based base station manufacturing industry to one based on software and services.

Consisting of over 150 free events, National Instruments' seminars and workshops will take place in capital cities across Australia and New Zealand throughout the year, allowing scientists and engineers to keep abreast of the latest technologies and trends in measurement and automation.

On 10 March 2005, TUV certified the compliance of the Yokogawa ProSafe-RS Safety System with the IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 international standards and approved its use in SIL3 applications.

ABB has been awarded a contract to supply an Industrial IT Direct Drive system to Norske Skog Albury site's sole paper machine PM1 and the winder.

Visiting three cities in one week, the Regional Roadshow Series will bring the latest in automation and control technology and training to key industrial centres, starting off in North Queensland in June.

Pavilion Technologies has been selected as an official supplier to Emirates Team New Zealand to help in the quest to bring the America's Cup back to New Zealand in 2007.

Schneider Electric and Citect will jointly promote, deliver and support automation solutions throughout Australia.

The number of broadband, but especially ADSL, connections has grown strongly in Australia over the past 12 months, greatly enhancing communications between businesses to create a proper platform for next-generation services such as VoIP to flourish.

In China, automation business is growing three times faster than the GDP. The Chinese economy is headed for a banner year despite the earlier disruption caused by SARS.

National Instruments announced the acquisition of Toronto, Canada-based Electronics Workbench, a supplier of electronics design automation software.

Intel Corporation has completed initial production runs of dual-core processors and provided further details about its multi-core plans to its customers, signalling the beginning of an era when PCs will have two or more 'brains' inside.

Texas Memory Systems has announced four significant interoperability certifications for its flagship RamSan-325 Fibre Channel solid-state disk. The certifications include Microsoft Designed for Windows Server 2003, Sun Solaris Ready, IBM TotalStorage Proven and McData OpenReady. Each of these certifications is awarded as a result of testing with the related platform.

Gartner Research expects overall global PC demand in 2005 to slow compared with last year.