About Opus

Opus Software Limited is a privately owned company, registered in the UK in 1987. We specialize in the design and development of telemetry and SCADA software products for resale to end users, OEMs and system integrators. Our in-house technical expertise enables us to respond quickly to the latest software and hardware advances, and we are committed to our ongoing development program.

Ongoing Development Program

Opus Software Limited has always maintained an ongoing development program devoting large resources to pure research and development work. Such development has always enabled us to remain at the forefront of technology and offer our customers 'state of the art' systems. Furthermore, our ongoing development program and expandability of the software has enabled our customers to upgrade their systems and effectively extend the life span of their telemetry/SCADA systems indefinitely.

Product History

Original Specification, Design and Development

The specification for a new Telemetry and SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) package commenced in 1981. The design of the system was originally influenced by the PICK operating system which placed the database at the heart of the system.

The original specification was finalised in the same year and called for a specially designed fixed schema relational database to sit at the heart of the SCADA system. A high performance DBMS (Database Management System) would be developed to create and maintain the database and control all access to and from the system’s configuration and telemetry data. The design of the system would have to allow for ‘real time’ access and update of the database. The system performance would be largely independent of the size of the system and the number of users accessing the system.

Several prototype packages were developed and tested over the next six years running on a variety of computer systems (mostly HP Development and DEC PDP computer systems). Finally in 1987, with the availability of high performance and relatively lower cost DEC MicroVAX II computer systems, a VAX based package was developed and marketed by Opus Software.

First VAX Based Systems

The original UV2 system was completed in 1987 and intended for use on large systems based on the high performance DEC MicroVAX II computer system running under control of the DEC MicroVMS operating system. These systems used DEC VT and Tektronix terminals to provide a variety of text and graphic man-machine interfaces to the SCADA system.

The high performance and versatility of this software resulted in the systems being used during the construction phase of the Channel Tunnel and featured on the Tomorrow’s World television program. South Staffordshire Water PLC also adopted the VAX based software in 1988 as their standard Telemetry and SCADA system package. Over the years, this system has been extensively upgraded and continually expanded. With over fourteen years of reliable service, the current PC2000 distributed system consists of 21 SCADA Master stations installed at sixteen different sites and supporting over 50 graphic workstation users.

First PC Based Systems and Workstations

With the advent of high performance low cost personal computers Opus Software Limited were one of the first companies to introduce a PC based workstation back in 1988. The original GWS (Graphic Workstation) software was a DOS based package and designed around the standard VGA 640x480 16-colour display. Further improvements in PC performance enabled a PC version of the Master station software to be developed. This package was released in October 1989 for the multitasking IBM OS/2 operating system and offered a low cost alternative to the large VAX based systems. Continued improvements in PC performance allowed this software to supersede the VAX based system in June 1990.