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About AREAL
AREAL is a publisher of automation software. We are the developers of TOPKAPI, a state of the art SCADA software package.
AREAL is committed to the benefits and quality of service our software offers to our clients, focused more particularly on: investments in innovation, R&D product reliability easy implementation ascending compatibility, providing our users with long-term upgrading paths for their tools and ensuring sustainability high quality technical support, offering prompt and effective responses to users
AREAL works with many controllers and RTU manufacturers to improve product interoperability, and is a member of the OPC Foundation, which aims at supporting this interoperability by creating and publicizing open standards.
HISTORY
AREAL was created in 1989 by Sylvain STARCK and Pierre LA MARLE, both graduates from the 'Ecole Centrale de Paris', one of the top French engineering institutes, to develop and market the SCADA software TOPKAPI , and offer a wide range of services in industrial automation and software.
AREAL has an extensive background in
industrial process automation, operating projects including PLCs (Programmable
Logic Controllers) in many fields: manufacturing and process industry, handling,
stockpiling, drinking water and waste water, cement, food industry, etc.
Throughout the years, TOPKAPI’s success grew, leading AREAL to dedicate most of its energy to its development, by focusing investment in R&D and innovations best suited to our long-term strategic vision. As a result of these continuous efforts, TOPKAPI is now internationally known as one of the most advanced, reliable, powerful and easy to use supervisors, flexible and particularly suited to modern interconnected networked architectures.
ACTIVITY
AREAL is currently fully devoted to designing and incorporating new concepts and improvements to TOPKAPI.
However, AREAL maintains a basic activity in automation and systems integration in order to: keep in touch with the field try and test TOPKAPI in real-world conditions leverage our competence by managing complex projects that will generate more R&D efforts related to TOPKAPI.
As an example, in 1994 AREAL overhauled the centralized control system of the Emile Huchet thermal power station, involving 13 PLCs and 9 monitoring computers with full hot link redundancy.
AREAL’s activity may therefore be summed up as follows:
TOPKAPI SCADA software R&D Marketing Training, technical support
Integration services Design and engineering PLC programming Micro-computers and networks Industrial and technical software development (C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, asp, .net, RDBMS)
Supervision TOPKAPI ranges over all fields of supervisory control, from continuous process to manufacturing plants, building automation, etc.
However, TOPKAPI has acquired a strong involvement in some sectors by integrating functions more or less ignored by rival software: Processing of data time-stamped by remote devices (data acquisition through the telephone network, PSTN, GSM, GPRS, SMS) Remote alarm notification, Text-To-Speech, pagers Network true Client/Server architecture, remote monitoring and control Hot backup with data uniqueness (real time and historical data) Summary reports
These original features lead to many applications in the following sectors: Drinkable and waste water Industry Building automation Transport and utilities Client/server networked systems Monitoring of remote equipment
TOPKAPI is used in more than 50 countries. It is available in English, Spanish and French (Runtime and Development). Other languages are available at runtime.
TOPKAPI's technical support
Providing high quality technical support is an absolute priority for AREAL. Users should never have to wait one, two or
even three weeks to have their questions answered... not to mention statements
such as 'this problem will be corrected in the next version'. All around the world, our partners - whether distributors, integrators or users in direct relation with AREAL - are faithful to us as, beyond TOPKAPI’s assets, they get instant replies to their questions, and prompt solutions whenever meeting problems, whether workarounds or software adaptation. In these days and ages of the Internet, nothing is easier than sending an application copy for troubleshooting or an updated communication driver resolving an unexpected problem.
TOPKAPI's technical support team is committed to help you solve your problems in a very short time. It performs all tasks related with software support and user contacts: software tests, quality control operating manual hotline interface analysis and improvement specific programming
Sharing these tasks and multiple skill teams provide the responsiveness and flexibility required for technical support: AREAL offers high availability to help you.
The support team has a detailed knowledge of TOPKAPI’s source files, and has permanent access to it, ensuring our technicians can give you the right information at the right time: in an operating manual, no matter how accurate, you still could miss the particular item of information you need; our staff will tell you what is possible or not possible, how you can resolve or work around a problem, etc.
One of the tasks of technical support is also to help you restart your system when a problem shuts down production:
Operating malfunction: despite all the testing we carry out and the broad use of TOPKAPI, we cannot expect TOPKAPI to be totally free of failures; these may appear in particular conditions related with hardware, functions used, application parameterizing, etc. Our technical support will send you a release within 24 or 48 hours if no immediate solution can be found.
Specific requirements: if you are facing a particular issue, which cannot be handled by TOPKAPI, technical support will put forward a solution matching your requirements. If the corresponding development is considered of general interest, it will be included to the next standard version of TOPKAPI.
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