Welcome to OPC Connect September 2015
The month of September through November for the OPC Foundation is always a very, very busy time of year. The end of September is the beginning of the North American seminar tour, and the OPC Foundation Booth at PackExpo in Las Vegas. The SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg, Germany takes place in November. There are also regional events in Finland and Belgium this year. I highly encourage you to take time out from your busy schedule and visit OPC at one of these numerous venues, and learn where OPC is going. Check out all the the OPC Foundation events on the OPC Foundation Website.
Technology & Collaboration
From a technology perspective we have a number of initiatives underway. Collaboration and developing solutions for many vertical markets is the vision of the OPC Foundation. Our circle of partnerships is growing dramatically with many active OPC UA working groups developing companion specifications (and many are already released) for their information models. We are actively working with the Industrial Internet consortium (IIC), and OMG and you will soon see very important liaisons between the OPC Foundation and these organizations. We are actively working on finalizing the licensing infrastructure necessary for the OPC UA .NET technology to be available as open shared source. We plan to have the first release of the open shared source repository publicly available by the time this newsletter is distributed.
Events
I’ve been also personally engaged over the last several months presenting at many of the vendor end user events, including Honeywell, ICONICS, and National Instruments. We also regularly do webinars with OPC Foundation members promoting the OPC marketing and technology message. Please contact me if you’re interested in having the OPC Foundation participate in one of your events.
The OPC Foundation joined the ARC Advisory Service, to leverage their expertise researching and analyzing the marketplace to facilitate increasing awareness about the OPC UA technology and navigating the landscape for additional market opportunities.
Internet of Everything
Some people have been using the phrase ‘Internet of Everything’ as the combination of M2M, Industrie 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the Internet of Things (IoT). The focus of the OPC Foundation is to provide the enabling technology to facilitate information integration and interoperability in the Internet-enabled world. OPC Unified Architecture has already been recognized by Industrie 4.0 as the enabling technology. We are actively working at extending the OPC UA technology to include a publish / subscribe architecture which will provide the solid infrastructure necessary for the Internet of Everything. We are working on integrating TSN (time sensitive network) into the OPC UA portfolio. We recently created a new working group to address the creation of an OPC Unified Architecture companion specification for IEC 61850.
Membership
One of the most important benefits of membership in the OPC Foundation is helping our members increase awareness about their products and services and spread the word about members’ success stories of OPC in action. This edition features a number of key articles that show OPC reaching out beyond industrial automation. Tell us about how your products with OPC UA technology are being used from your customer’s perspective, and make sure your company is featured in the next edition of our newsletter! We look forward to your suggestions and comments and contributions for December’s issue of OPC Connect.
Thank you very much for taking time out from your busy schedule to read this edition of the newsletter and we look forward to meeting up with you (either virtually or in person) at an OPC Foundation event.