Appearing on CORDIS technology market place results service has increased business, says German firm
A German firm, b-plus GmbH says that since submitting their results to the CORDIS technology market place results service in 2002, interest in their products has significantly increased. b-plus is a small company that has participated in a number of EU projects in the field of information technology, such as 'reusable application interface for communicating real time kernel' (RACK) and ' network oriented application harmonisation' (NOAH), funded under the Forth Framework Programme (FP4). Thanks to EU funding of 1.15 million euro in RACK, and 2.38 million euro in Noah, as well as national backing and company investment, b-plus has been able to develop a series of innovative process controls and process data communications which have since been commercialised. In particular, b-plus has produced a small board, about the size of a credit card, on which process devices such as measurement gauges, actuators and display can be coupled with commonly used industrial communication bus systems such as Ethernet and Modbus. By developing such a board, b-plus hopes to create a standard that would allow better compatibility between existing process devices and data communication systems. According to b-plus, the response from manufacturers has been very positive: they consider this solution to be a more cost effective way of upgrading their current devices with new data communication paths. As a result of their increased business, b-plus have set up a consultancy service to help manufacturers implement bus connections on their devices. With a monthly average of nearly 50,000 accesses, there is a clear indication that news about the work of the CORDIS results service is spreading. Indeed the free service offers a unique opportunity for project partners to publicise results requiring further development or exploitation support. CORDIS also selects interesting and relevant exploitable research results to promote them as offers in the Technology Marketplace. The b-plus results are currently visible in Technology Marketplace as an offer.