The FDT Group announces the immediate public availability of the new FDT 2.0 specification. The membership of the FDT Group recently completed its first technical review of the standard clearing the wayfor final membership adoption by October of 2011. “We are delighted to reach this significant technical milestone in the advancement of the FDT standard,” states Glenn Schulz, Managing Director of the FDT Group, AISBL. “This new standard retains backward compatibility to the large installed base of FDT supported products while delivering significant performance and feature enhancements requested by our end user and supplier community.”

The new FDT 2.0 standard maintains backward compatibility to the installed base, offers significant speed and performance enhancements, improves support and deployment in distributed applications, supports a full client / server environment, enhances security, ensures FDI compatibility, and provides a rich set of new features and capabilities for the benefit of the end users. The FDT Group is complimenting its support of the new standard for companies making FDT 2.0 compliant products by offering common components that deliver pre-engineered and tested FDT 2.0 interfaces. The FDT Group non-profit organization has also released the new FDTExpressTM integrated development environment for Microsoft Visual Studio.

The new FDT 2.0 standard is the subject of a recently released ARCView by ARC entitled “FDT 2.0 Takes Flight”. Wil Chin, Research Director, ARC Advisory Group recently commented, “The remarkable growth of the FDT standard in terms of vendor support and end user adoption is ensuring its continued success. The additional capabilities of FDT 2.0 make it the appropriate platform for process and factory automation applications regardless of network types and device configuration methods.”

The first FDT 2.0 compatible products are anticipated in the market by the end of 2011. Companies wishing to receive a copy of the draft standard should contact the FDT Group business office for assistance.