Growing adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0 is driving requirements for open and secure connectivity between devices (e.g., machine-to-machine) and edge-to-cloud solutions.
Those who deploy the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) will be able to better leverage plant floor to enterprise communications as a vehicle to participate in IIoT applications. The goal for OPC is to be a standard for interoperability for moving information vertically through the enterprise of multi-vendor systems as well as providing interoperability between devices on different industrial networks from different vendors.
Since OPC UA serves as a key data connectivity standard for industrial automation, vendors are seeking to enable their new and existing products with this technology to compete on the IIoT/Industrie 4.0 landscape.