*This press release is an excerpt of the press release originally issued by congatec (Germany) on June 30, 2026 (local time). Hilmar Panzer, CTO of CODESYS Group, and Konrad Garhammer, COO & CTO of congatec, welcome the strategic cooperation to provide a virtualized real-time control platform for mixed-critical workloads. congatec, a leading vendor of embedded and edge computing technologies, and CODESYS Group, the market leader for hardware-independent control software, today announced the launch of a strategic cooperation. This new partnership will deliver a highly integrated, virtualized real-time control platform for mixed-critical workloads. Such a multifunctional platform for workload consolidation brings a new level of flexibility and efficiency to industrial automation. The strategic alliance aims to combine congatec's proven aReady.VT virtualization technology with the CODESYS Control runtime system. The goal is to transform industrial controllers into full-fledged IEC 61131-3 PLCs for critical automation tasks using software alone. To achieve this, congatec's hypervisor, conga-zones, partitions the embedded computing platform into multiple zones. A general-purpose operating system and the CODESYS PLC-based real-time control run in parallel in dedicated zones, ensuring both deterministic real-time behavior and secure isolation on a single system. The combination of the conga-zones hypervisor and CODESYS PLC provides the reliability, virtualization flexibility, and deterministic performance that are essential as the industry transitions to the virtualization of control technology. "The partnership with CODESYS integrates congatec's conga-zones hypervisor with CODESYS PLC, offering our customers an easy-to-install and cost-effective solution running on standard hardware while guaranteeing strict real-time performance and isolation," says Konrad Garhammer, COO & CTO at congatec. "congatec's hypervisor technology enables seamless integration of CODESYS PLCs wit