Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: A) and Shimadzu Corp. today announced the release of GC instrument control for their respective Chromatography Data Systems (CDS). This provides customers in analytical laboratories with more freedom of choice when selecting a chromatography data system.

Agilent has released drivers for Shimadzu GC-2010, GC-2010 Plus and GC-2014 integrating to Agilent's OpenLAB CDS, and Shimadzu has released drivers to control Agilent 6890, 6850, 7820 and 7890 GC instruments in Shimadzu's LabSolutions. These releases are the result of the joint collaboration--employing RapidControl (RC.NET) instrument drivers--announced in May 2013 to preserve customers' investments in workflows and operating procedures.

"Agilent continues to follow an open systems approach for the laboratory to deliver value to our customers," said Bruce von Herrmann, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Software and Informatics Business. "To reduce costs and enhance the customer experience, we are working with other manufacturers like Shimadzu to enable full and reliable control of lab instrumentation from any CDS. These new releases demonstrate that Rapid Control is the predominant industry standard for analytical instrument control."

"At Shimadzu, we continue to deploy industry standard drivers for instrument control to provide flexible instrumentation and software solutions for our customers," said Masahito Ueda, Shimadzu general manager of GC & TA Business Unit, Analytical & Measuring Instruments Division. "The adoption and support of RC.NET drivers provide a more integrated solution to customers who require a single CDS product to support seamless multi-vendor control of all instruments in their laboratory."

This move expands control of each other's instruments to gas chromatography. Since mid-2013, Agilent's OpenLAB CDS, has supported Shimadzu's Nexera and Prominence HPLC lines and Shimadzu's LabSolutions CDS has supported Agilent's 1100, 1200, 1260 and 1290 series instruments.

more about Shimadzu's LabSolutions chromatography systems

more about OpenLAB CDS