Certification continues to be prominent feature of OPC UA because it provides a high level of assurance that a product complies with the specifications. It assures the product is interoperable, robust, reliable, and efficient with resources. It is without surprise why users, organizations, and standards bodies are adopting OPC UA.
Featured prominently in the OPC North American Seminar Tour was Certification. The tour recently covered 6 cities across the US and Canada. Sponsors of the event demonstrated their Certified products to the attendees. I told a personal story to the audience of how I received a frantic phone support call when a major automobile manufacturer’s production line was completely shut-down; the incident highlighted the importance of how using a Certified product was used to correct the problem.
Interoperability problems continue for users with non-certified products or legacy OPC Classic systems. Quite often the solution is to simply advise the user to request their vendor to pass certification, or to replace with a certified product.
Certification is more than just passing a test: it’s a commitment to your customers that you are delivering a high quality product they can depend on; and a commitment to your company that will protect them from support issues, liabilities, or reputation damage. Contact our compliance department and we will help you to Certify your OPC products today.
Interest continues to grow. 2015 has seen 40 tests with 20 newly certified products from 11 companies. Products include reference implementations from the major toolkit providers, embedded systems, SCADA, and specialized applications. 2016 will be an exciting year as we bring more Certified products to market and deliver new innovative testing techniques and tools to help OPC Foundation members continue to rapidly deliver high quality OPC UA products.
One way we help vendors make certain their products communicate successfully is to invite them to an interoperability workshop (InterOp), where they can try communicating to many products. What are those like? Our next article is a first person account of a recent InterOp: OPC Foundation IOP Europe Workshop: Count Me In!