May 19, 1998
Golden, Colorado, USA

IEC Announces Partnership with The Trane Company

IEC Intelligent Technologies is pleased to announce The Trane Company will be the initial user of the most revolutionary new technology development since the creation of LONWORKS® - IEC's Peak Components™.

Peak Components Product Overview

In response to requests from many OEMs, System Integrators, and developers, IEC has developed a revolutionary new family of software and hardware products that offers a quantum leap forward in performance, flexibility, and functionality. The Embeddable Network Management Components (ENMC), at the core of IEC's Peak Components product line, are a set of software components that can be used as part of or as a complete system to provide LonTalk® network management functions.

These components can be applied in:

• A PC environment such as a laptop running Windows®
• An embedded environment such as a handheld tool or a building control panel
• A workstation operating over other transport layer protocols such as TCP/IP or BACnet™

Peak Components, a low cost alternative to Echelon®’s LNS, are designed to:

• Deliver much higher performance (speed) to the end user
• Be used in an Embedded, PC, or Workstation environment
• Offer very efficient use of computer resources

Peak Components not only supports a three-tier client/server architecture and multiple LonTalk networks connected to a server, but can also operate stand-alone if required for other control applications. Peak Components provides a subset of Echelon Corporation's LNS functionality appropriate to a tiered architecture and eliminates the need to pay a substantial LNS royalty. Peak Components packages commonly used network management functions into reusable software, for efficiency and reliability in development. The alternative to Peak Components is to create product-specific software to perform these tasks. IEC is providing a low cost, easy to use alternative to developing your own components.

Developers can add their own functionality to Peak Components by writing custom applications that communicate to the LONWORKS network via easy to use C++ function calls. These calls include such functions as add/remove node, add/modify/remove connection, and get/set network variable data to mention a few. For developers using Visual Basic or Delphi, IEC has developed a COM Wrapper compatible with your rapid application development environment.

Peak Components supports three-tier, client/server architecture . Even though Peak Components supports this architecture, the product you develop does not have to implement all of the tiers.

Peak Components Consist of the Following:

• Peak Server which provides all of the network management functions
• Data Server which manages the network variable polls and distributes updates to registered clients
• Peak Client API which provides an interface between the client application and the Peak Server
• COM Wrapper which provides a COM interface to the Peak Client API to simplify tool development
• LonTalk, BACnet, and TCP/IP Interface Managers which takes Peak client/server messages and puts them on the appropriate media
• Your client application(s) which connects to the Peak Server and issues requests to be performed, and the Server carries them out

The Embedded Network Management Components is a member of IEC's Peak Components family of software created to support LONWORKS networks. Peak Components provides the capability to develop and deploy custom applications to manage, visualize and interact with LONWORKS networks.

Peak Components are Designed to:

• Support the LONWORKS environment
• Support three tier client/server architecture
• Be highly modular
• Run on multiple platforms, not only Windows machines
• Be a low cost, high performance alternative to Echelon Corporation's LNS

The Peak Components architecture provides a total, technically superior, low cost, high performance, integrated and flexible solution. Our architecture provides significant performance advantages over other offerings. Peak Components provide the complete solution.

IEC has been dedicated to supporting the market for Echelon Corporation's LONWORKS technology market since 1991. IEC uses our systems engineering expertise to make LONWORKS technology easy to use and have been extremely successful with our systems approach. IEC’s commitment to excellence in the LONWORKS market is evidenced by a diverse and superior product family of software, hardware, and services that contributes to the success of our customers. All IEC products are designed to be compatible and interface with Echelon Corporation's LONWORKS technology and support LONMARK® interoperability standards. Contact IEC Intelligent Technologies for pricing and more information on our complete suite of complementary software, hardware and supporting services at 303.277.1503.