vertical market software packages?

Is anyone (successfully) using industry specific software packages/add ons/etc that work with a more general purpose HMI/SCADA package?

I've only dealt with packages that were written too specifically for some theoretical process. These crappy packages (all by the same vendor) proved to be entirely unworkable.

Wonderware recently released a Water and Wastewater pack to go with InTouch 10 (announcement here). I'm curious as to whether these guys have natively created useful (and editable) objects. It's certainly a smart marketing move to sell to "the top".

I have looked at these type of this around 5 years ago and found that they never meet my requirments.
It wasnt helped that I was developing on different platforms.

I would rather see a lot more development of things like 'Symbol Factory' so I dont have to invent newbitmaps for screen animations.

My system devices usually have coloured states (Grey is idle, green is running, red is fault etc) so I have to create at least 3 bitmaps per item for somthing new which is a pain.

Generally most of my customers want to put their own bells and whistles on a system or use different sub components so these canned solutions dont suit that

Cheers

That's a great point. Symbol Factory is a great tool that's been around as long as I can remember (Reichert's before he joined up with Software Toolbox).

You shouldn't have to create multiple colored bitmaps. The great thing about Symbol Factory, even back years ago, was that it exported files as a vector format (WMF, or you can paste them into a program like Adobe Illustrator and use more common formats like SVG).

Every SCADA package out there (except FactoryPMI and possibly some of the Panelview style applications) primarily store components as basic shapes with few properties (primatives). They usually create cool demos from there (think the Rockwell scene with the blimp). It surprises me that they don't create component palettes (like Symbol Factory objects) natively in their respective HMIs. These would be nothing more than groups of primative shapes that you could mold to do whatever with. It seems that the 3rd party vendors went in the opposite direction with pre-canned ActiveX object plugins. While it has the benefit of being pre-programmed with snazzy animation, it has the huge drawback of not being very customizable (useful) to the average customer. But the vertical market packages that I mentioned are far less general yet - think Batching packages and such. I wonder who makes those decisions...