Parker Wins Design News Golden Mousetrap Award

Interact Xpress HMI software named Best Product of 2008

Rohnert Park, CA, September 22, 2008 – Design News magazine, a key information source for engineers developing products of the future, has named Parker’s CTC-brand Interact Xpress™ as its 2008 Golden Mousetrap Best Product Winner in the Automation category.

Interact Xpress is a Web-published HMI designed for distributed applications and remote support, allowing users and OEMs to easily publish upgrades and applications in real time to any global location with an Internet connection and a Web browser. In addition to offering users online editing capability, development tools can be used offline to work on applications when a live Internet connection is not available. A special landing page at www.parkermotion.com/xpress showcases this award-winning product.

With Parker CTC’s new release of InteractX 3.0 supervisory HMI software, users will be able to take full advantage of the Xpress distributed HMI architecture by pushing screens and data directly into InteractX for monitoring and historical trending from multiple machines and sources. When supervising machines and operator stations running Xpress, InteractX significantly reduces application development time and costs normally associated with supervisory HMI, allowing a much easier migration path from standalone machine HMI to supervisory control.

Named as a Golden Mousetrap Awards finalist this year is Parker CTC’s XPR PowerStation series, a complete family of industrially hardened HMI products designed to run Interact Xpress HMI software. Engineered to operate in the harshest of environments, XPR PowerStations provide everything from a no-display system designed to provide remote Web access to a control panel with a 15" TFT display-based system.

"We are very proud to be recognized with a Golden Mousetrap Award," says Andy Balderson, product sales manager for the Parker CTC family of HMI products. "Interact Xpress is the first HMI product to truly leverage the power of today's Internet technologies, and the fact that Xpress comes pre-installed and bundled with Parker’s XPR PowerStation hardware, which was recognized as a finalist in this year’s awards, makes this honor all the sweeter.”

For more than 20 years, the Design News Awards have recognized the most significant individual and corporate technical achievements in the electronics community. Design News is distributed monthly to more than 170,000 engineers who design products ranging from motion control to spacecraft.

This year, awards were given in four major categories: Electronics, Motion Control/Automation, Hardware/Software, Materials/Fastening/Joining/Assembly and 24 subcategories. Executive Editor Liz Taurasi gathered a record number of entries, distributing them to the magazine’s beat editors for judging. Based on their expertise in each technology area, 75 finalists and 16 winners were selected. The September 22 edition of Design News features this year's winners.

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“Our Golden Mousetrap Awards give innovators the recognition they justly deserve,” says John Dodge, Design News’ editor-in-chief. “The awards span Design News’ five coverage areas, and we extend our sincerest congratulations to the winners and finalists. Their perseverance in these challenging economic times is admirable, indeed.”

Interact Xpress HMI software joins another award-winning supervisory HMI product, InteractX™, and original Interact software to round out the Parker CTC line of HMI solutions, which range from simple pushbutton panel replacement to advanced supervisory control applications.

Winners of this year’s Design News Golden Mousetrap awards can be viewed here: http://www.designnews.com/channel/Golden_Mousetrap_Winners.php; finalists are listed here: http://www.designnews.com/channel/Golden_Mousetrap_Finalists.php .

About Parker Electromechanical Automation
A division of Parker Hannifin Corporation's Automation Group since 1987, Electromechanical Automation is a pioneer, developer and manufacturer of full-spectrum computer-based motion controllers, servo/step motor drives, servo motors and human-machine interfaces, positioning systems, gearheads and gear motors. These products automate the manufacturing of a significant fraction of the world’s goods and services. Electromechanical Automation products are sold via independent authorized Automation Technology Centers—a group of nearly 100 professional, highly trained organizations with more than 135 points-of-presence throughout the world—or directly from Electromechanical Automation by logging on to buy.compumotor.com.

About Parker Hannifin
With annual sales exceeding $10 billion, Parker Hannifin is the world's leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies and systems, providing precision-engineered solutions for a wide variety of commercial, mobile, industrial and aerospace markets. The company employs more than 57,000 people in 43 countries around the world. Parker has increased its annual dividends paid to shareholders for 52 consecutive years, among the top five longest-running dividend-increase records in the S&P 500 index.