After years of loyal committed service to the Bristol organization, the Network 3000/3530 product family has decided to retire and enjoy of the fruits of their labor. With nearly 20 years of services, this comes as no surprise, as the past few years have been dedicated to a transfer of knowledge to the next company leader, the ControlWave product family. ControlWave has humbly risen through the ranks since 2001 and has gained all of the experience necessary to replace the Network 3000, with the same loyalty and dedication as its predecessor.

On a serious note, making light of a very difficult decision helps to emphasize the requirement for this action and recognize the stability that we have enjoyed for many years. The Network 3000/3530 products have aged gracefully and still remain serviceable. However, the recent announcement by Intel that they are discontinuing the processors used in 33XX and 3530 has signaled that the time has finally come to honor the past and embrace the future.

Since the 33XX/3530 products have performed so nobly throughout their career, we want to ensure they depart with grace and dignity. Retirement will begin slowly March 31, 2007 coincident with the processor end of life announced by Intel. We will continue to carry inventory necessary to manufacture new units through September of 2009. We will continue to manufacture I/O cards, Communication cards and power supplies, indefinitely, in order to meet our commitment of long term product support. We will continue to repair, service or replace CPU boards through our repair department and service exchange stock through at least June 2011.

While many of our customers have already transitioned to the ControlWave architecture, we are making this announcement now in order to allow all of our valued customers sufficient time to orchestrate a smooth transition.

ControlWave was born of the experience of our in-house engineering staff, most of which were part of the teams that created the most stable and efficient line of Distributed Process Controllers in the marketplace – The Network 3000. Using the latest processor and memory designs and years worth of experience, we have created a product line to seamlessly transition our customer’s infrastructure without the burdening costs of new installations. We proudly release this news to you and look forward to providing you with functionality to carry you into the foreseeable future.

Since the first introduction of ControlWave in 2001, the family of products has grown and matured to include a full line of PLCs, RTUs, and flow measurement products. As a result, the ControlWave architecture has become tremendously successful. Now with ControlWave widely accepted throughout the industry, many people have asked about the future of Network 3000, which includes the popular 33XX and TeleProduct RTU and flow computer lines. The success of these products, first introduced in 1984, is a result of providing unique capabilities while maintaining continuity across the Network 3000 product line. ControlWave has adopted and expanded those same unique capabilities. ControlWave has been developed to allow our customers to take advantage of the advanced technology that is available today while maintaining continuity through the migration from Network 3000 to the ControlWave product line. Leveraging state of the art technology allows us to deliver significantly greater functionality with ControlWave at a lower price to our customers.

ControlWave has been designed specifically to meet the need for high performance, open architecture products in our core natural gas and water & wastewater markets, and to satisfy the growing demand in the international marketplace for control products that utilize the IEC 61131-3 software standards. The convergence of Network 3000 and ControlWave is based on the stability of ACCOL and BSAP as the common thread in the evolution process.

ControlWave Designer with ACCOL III and BSAP allow ControlWave to fit seamlessly into existing Network 3000 systems. We have developed the ACCOL Translator to make the transition from ACCOL Workbench to ControlWave Designer with ACCOL III a simpler, more familiar process for our existing customers. We have also added the alarm and historical functions that are so important to both in-plant and remote SCADA systems. The new IEC 61131-3 programming, configuration tools, and communication interfaces are incorporated into the OpenBSI software product to provide a common system environment for both ControlWave and Network 3000. For years, Bristol has maintained compatibility between generations of product, allowing our customers to preserve their engineering and material investment. That same philosophy continues with ControlWave.

Over time, ControlWave has increasingly replaced Network 3000 as the hardware platform of choice by existing and new customers.

As mentioned earlier, Intel has announced that they are discontinuing their line of X86 embedded processors in March 2007. We do expect that these components will continue to be available through after market suppliers for some time to come. As a result of this development, we are announcing our product family succession plans to allow our existing customers to align their strategic plans with ours for a seamless transition to the future. Fortunately, Bristol has been pro-active in addressing the eventual transition by escalating the ControlWave development and ensuring a compatible migration path from Network 3000. In addition, even in retirement, Network 3000 will continue to be a productive member of our technical society.

Bristol will continue the manufacture of new 33XX and TeleProduct offered as part of our Network 3000 family of products for the next three years. And, as always, we will continue to provide support and repair service for several years after the last unit is shipped. We are committed to our philosophy of offering our customers long term stability through generation compatibility, a clear migration strategy and continued product support.

In summary, Bristol will provide a family of products that support existing customers who utilize ACCOL and BSAP as well as new and existing customers who prefer the characteristics of the new ControlWave technology. We are convinced, as are many of our customers, that the ControlWave family of products will continue to set the standard in the process control industry for openness, flexibility, functionality and cost-effectiveness.

Migration Options

Updated Wednesday, September 05, 2007