Russ Agrusa is the Founder, President and CEO of ICONICS, Inc., in Foxborough, Massachusetts. He has over 25 years of experience in managing software development of HMI/SCADA and control products for the Process Control and Data Acquisition industry. His career began at Westinghouse Electric Corporation, designing software systems for Fossil and Nuclear Power Plant control systems. He worked next at Foxboro Company, leading the HMI development of the "IA" Distributed Control System. Agrusa started ICONICS in 1986 to take advantage of the emerging PC-based automation market and to create off-the-shelf HMI and SCADA software for factory automation. Agrusa, and his team at ICONICS, recognized that OPC was core to the future of Plug and Play software components and produced the first commercially available "OPC-to-the-Core" based HMI/SCADA products. ICONICS has done an enormous amount of volunteer work for the OPC Foundation serving on the Data Access, Alarm/Events and HDA committees. Agrusa himself is a member of the foundation’s Board of Directors, as well as its marketing chairman. Russ has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Buffalo and an MS in Computer Science from Boston University.