Waters Empower Software for Gas Chromatography New GC Control and Data Management Software is Now Shipping

Waters Corporation has announced that it is shipping Waters® Empower™ Software for Agilent® 6850 Series Gas Chromatographs (GC) giving scientists who favor the features of Empower Software another choice for managing their GC data analysis and instrument control needs. Empower Software is the company's flagship chromatography data management software solution. Sold with Waters Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography™ and HPLC instrumentation, Empower Software lets scientists collect data, control multiple instruments – from Waters as well as third-party vendors – and report on their findings using an intuitive interface for increased productivity. GC and LC instrumentation made by different instrument suppliers run on different software platforms, which is one of the challenges facing many of today's labs. In response to this situation, Waters began offering third-party instrument control of gas chromatographs in 1992 with Millennium® Chromatography Software*. Continuing that trend, today's announcement lets scientists deploy Empower Software for complete control of Agilent 6850 GC instruments. Scientists can standardize instrument control under one central data system for all chromatography labs. For example, new regulations in the fuel ethanol market now require analysis by GC alongside existing LC testing to obtain a certificate of analysis. With one software solution that manages data from many instruments, scientists no longer have to develop the expertise to use multiple software applications, which greatly simplifies the process of acquiring and managing scientific results. According to Patrick Martell, Director of Informatics at Waters Corporation, "By introducing this new feature set in Empower Software, scientists using Agilent GCs now have access to the capabilities of Empower Software that their colleagues using LC have enjoyed." "Control of the 6850 GC using Empower Software allows us to use one chromatography data system for both LC and GC analysis thereby maximizing training effectiveness and minimizing support costs," said Jens Donath, QC Laboratory Manager at the Lonza Group Limited, a life sciences driven company with its major production facilities in Visp, Switzerland. Key Functionality Through customer feedback, Waters has designed a solution tailored to not only increase lab productivity but also reduce training and capital equipment costs. Empower Software lets scientists focus on their research – with their current hardware investments – without experiencing downtime for training, re-engineering their workflow, or setting up new workstations to support new instruments. Waters Empower chromatography data software product acquires, processes and archives data generated by liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and photodiode array instrumentation. A total of 48 of the Top 50 pharmaceutical companies listed in Pharmaceutical Executive magazine's May 2004 issue currently use Empower Software for data management. The company has installed thousands of server networks since the release of its Millennium® software, in 1992, the first such product to feature an embedded Oracle® relational database to simplify the organization and retrieval of scientific data. This feature has given regulated labs competitive advantages in terms of complying with the requirements of 21 CFR Part 11.