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President’s Welcome – Sept 2016

    Welcome to the September 2016 edition of the OPC Connect newsletter! Our September edition of the newsletter features numerous exciting announcements from our sponsors, the OPC community and the OPC Foundation itself. There are many sensational things that have happened since the June edition of our newsletter, and a set of even more exciting things to happen through the balance of this year!

    September is the beginning of our North American roadshows. By the time you read this we will have visited Montréal, Detroit, and Chicago, with Houston and Raleigh scheduled for November. What a great opportunity for everyone to learn about OPC and all that is happening in the world in terms of technology deployment by many end-users, as well as how suppliers are delivering OPC UA enabled products. It’s an opportunity to meet up with Stefan Hoppe and me as we travel throughout North America.

    Besides the roadshows, I will be presenting at Inductive Automation Conference in California on September 21st and then will be doing a keynote presentation at Smart industry in Chicago on September 28th, as well as participating on a panel there on September 27th, talking about Standards and the Industrial Internet of Things.

    The OPC Foundation will be sponsoring a booth in November at PACK Expo, in Chicago. We have an active collaboration between OMAC and PLCopen building an impressive demonstration of our latest work together.

    In October, The OPC Foundation Board of Directors will be meeting in Germany. Stefan Hoppe, Michael Bryant and I will be in China at the end of October until the beginning of November. The SPS trade show is at the end of November, and we have an impressive booth, a wall full of OPC UA enabled devices, and an informative press conference planned.

    Check out the OPC Foundation website under Events to see all events in which OPC is engaged. Please make sure you regularly check the OPC Foundation Events page for the many OPC marketing and training events throughout the year.

    On a technical front, significant progress is being made on the OPC UA publish / subscribe architecture, with planned release before the end of 2016. There is exciting work happening on the OPC UA security extensions, and initial developments for OPC UA support of TSN.

    There are numerous OPC companion specifications under development, with many already released inclusive of BACnet, PLCopen, FDT, and MTConnect.

    Answers to the questions below can be found in the OPC Foundation website!

    • Did you know that Microsoft has developed an OPC UA implementation for the Windows 10 IOT core?
    • Did you know there are many OPC working groups underway in which YOUR Company can participate?
    • Did you know that OPC UA is actively working with a multitude of vendors to develop testbeds for IIC?
    • Did you know this is the 20-year anniversary of the OPC Foundation?
    • Do you know about the exciting things happening at SPS in November 2016?

    This is just a sample of the information that you can discover on the OPC Foundation website and through subscribing to our OPC monthly newsletter community outreach program.

    Thank you very much for taking time out from your busy day to read this edition of the OPC Foundation OPC Connect newsletter!

    Thomas J. Burke
    OPC Foundation President & Executive Director