VTScada faithful celebrate 40 years of inclusive innovation

Users and developers of Trihedral Engineering’s VTScada platform gathered in Orlando in late March to collaborate and share best practices and recent developments, but perhaps most significantly to mark the 40th anniversary of the company’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software. Indeed, the ScadaFest conference keynote session kicked off with a video revisiting the software’s very first installation, a water treatment application for the Canadian City of Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island.

Michael Pigott, supervisor of the City of Charlottetown’s water and sewer utility, commented on the VTScada application that has been in operation since 1986, when it first enabled remote visibility into the plant’s controls and instrumentation systems, eliminating the need for in-person investigations.

“We do what we do to improve productivity, increase the speed to solutions that are faster and easier to both develop and maintain,” said Glenn Wadden, president of Nova Scotia-based Trihedral Engineering. But in 1986, Wadden was a frontline project engineer for Surfline Engineering Ltd. He had dabbled in state logic during his days at university and used its principles as the basis to develop VTScada. State logic was an exclusive innovation for software development at the time and remains an exclusive feature of VTScada today.

State logic a consistent enabler, differentiator

I first learned from Wadden what it was that made state logic special when I attended my first ScadaFest back in 2022. First, it’s important to understand that software performance is inherently dependent on the number of variables interacting, Wadden explained during a session explaining the software’s origins. Classical software programming is based on input-process-output, but data is changing, time is passing, and the more variables interact, the more things can go wrong. In fact, the number of interactions rises with the square of the number of variables, so complexity can quickly escalate, Wadden explained.

State logic, on the other hand, “restricts the view to the things that matter, looking only at what effects a change propagates,” Wadden added. Similar to reporting by exception, this event-driven approach means the program need deal with fewer variables within an organized hierarchy. In the end, this translates to simplified code, with fewer bugs, that executes faster. “Performance is no longer dependent on scale,” Wadden added, “but how many things change.”

Fast forward to today, and the software provider continues to aim for 100% uptime and to minimize the custom code that leads to technical debt, said Wadden. And that can’t be easy for a system with 40 million lines of code. “We have implemented 13,000 changes over the years without interruption,” he added. “Once a feature is added, it has to work forever.”

New features, consistent focus

Shifting to what’s new for 2026, Wadden acknowledged that the application activation server methodology currently used to prevent unauthorized use was to be discontinued in favor of easier, more straightforward methods. “We’ll be deactivating the activation servers to make you more productive, event at the risk of unauthorized use,” Wadden said.

2026 also marks five years since the company was acquired by Taiwan-based Delta Electronics, during which period Trihedral Engineering has doubled in size, by measure of revenue, employees and attendance at ScadaFest, too. “Delta is a world leader in power electronics,” said Wadden, “and its 88,000 people are doing innovative things with VTScada.”

Trihedral continues to raise the bar on VTScada performance, and today that means real-time data and protocols, immersive visualization and interactive design, added Barry Baker, vice president, Trihedral Engineering, who joined Wadden on stage. “But at the core we’re about making things better. Helping others is what we do at Trihedral.”

Next up was Devraj Sen, chief technology office. He highlighted other new VTScada features in development for release later this year, including a refreshed Report Studio with new user interface and layouts, new calculation and SQL data capabilities, and new ability on the notes and printing front.

Other new developments include:

• Realm page menus (a side benefit of Report Studio enhancements);
• Enterprise level OPC-UA server, featuring high performance and low overhead; and,
• Historian data compression that promises 40% better performance and the ability to extend storage across multiple servers, so historical data can be moved to slower drives.

“Our main focus going forward will be making bigger systems easier to develop and maintain,” said Wadden in conclusion. “And if big systems are easier to develop and maintain, so are the smaller ones.”