Agilent Technologies and Shimadzu have announced a partnership which will enable them to control the GC instruments for their respective chromatography data systems. The move provides customers in analytical laboratories with more freedom of choice when selecting a chromatography data system.

Agilent has released drivers for the Shimadzu GC-2010, GC-2010 Plus and GC-2014 integrating it to Agilent's OpenLAB CDS;while Shimadzu has released drivers to control Agilent 6890, 6850, 7820, and 7890 GC instruments in Shimadzu's Lab Solutions. These releases are the result of the joint collaboration employing Rapid Control (RC.NET) instrument drivers, which the companies announced last year.

"Agilent continues to follow an open-system approach for the laboratory to deliver value to our customers," said Mr Bruce von Herrmann, vice president and general manager of Agilent's software and informatics business. He added, "To reduce costs and enhance customer experience, we are working with other manufacturers, such as 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."

Mr Masahito Ueda, general manager of the GC and TA business Unit, analytical and measuring instruments division, Shimadzu said, "At Shimadzu, we continue to deploy industry-standard drivers for instrument control to provide flexible instrumentation and software solutions for our customers. 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."