Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) have announced a formal agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to exchange instrument controls to improve the productivity and user experience of customers using software and instruments from both companies.

Under the new agreement, Agilent and Thermo Fisher are exchanging instrument-control driver documentation and software for liquid chromatographs, gas chromatographs, capillary electrophoresis and ion chromatographs. The companies are also providing technical assistance to each other's software development groups for full and reliable control of Agilent instruments in the Thermo Scientific Chromeleon software and Thermo Scientific instruments in the Agilent OpenLAB CDS software.

The agreement also defines terms for licensing and redistribution of instrument control software as well as formal escalation mechanisms to jointly drive technical issue resolution for their mutual customers.

"Agilent continues to pursue its open systems strategy for laboratory informatics to maximize productivity for our customers and protect their investment in lab systems and the results they deliver," said John Sadler, Agilent vice president and general manager of software and informatics. "We are collaborating with all major and many smaller analytical instrument manufacturers to support Agilent instruments in their data systems, and to support their instruments in Agilent's data systems. Our aim is to help our mutual customers deliver the highest productivity and lowest total cost of ownership in their labs."

"Thermo Fisher is committed to meeting the full needs of our customers, and that includes strong connectivity to all software and instruments in their laboratories," said Dan Shine, president, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher. "With agreements such as this, our teams can continue to collaborate toward driving the highest productivity and enhanced user experience."

The instrument control exchange agreement reflects the increasing importance of manufacturer collaboration to achieve interoperability and standardization of multivendor instrument control so that analytical laboratories can increase productivity while minimizing technical and regulatory risks and validation costs.

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