Good morning, good afternoon, good evening – wherever you are in the world!
It’s my pleasure to not only summarize lot’s of information, but also alert you to important information with this Christmas edition:
Important Information: Updates Bylaws, new affiliate policy, new member fee classes
- Bylaws & Affiliate Policy
New bylaws, approved by the Board of Directors, will come into effect on January 1st, 2025.Larger enterprises with affiliated companies will be happy: Affiliates of OPC Foundation members are now categorized into two categories: “Conventional Affiliate” and “Independent affiliate” member. All affiliates are automatically considered “Conventional Affiliate” providing a clean legal operational background for large enterprises. “Independent Affiliate” are identical to independent “Corporate members”. To streamline the bylaws, the affiliate rules have been extracted and defined in a separate document called the “Affiliate Participation Policy.”
Read more information here - Member fees & support for startup companies
The existing member fees have not been modified since 2013 and we are sensitive to the global economic situation today. Please remember that, up until now, member companies with world revenues over >$100M have been the highest member category defined since the early years of the OPC Foundation. I believe that this is no longer fair (especially with affiliates now automatically included!), since there are companies with world revenue in different dimensions as members of the OPC Foundation. In short: If a member company has a world revenue <$1B (as is the case with 92% of all OPCF members), nothing happens; no membership fees will increase; however, for the 8% of companies (not including end-users!), with revenue exceeding >$1B, we have created two new categories of member fees for “Class AA” and “Class AAA” starting in 2026.
Furthermore, as OPC UA technology is attractive for Startup companies, I am happy to announce yet another new member category for Startups.
Read more information here
Lot of information:
Board of Director (BoD) news & seat election results
Dr. Holger Kenn, Microsoft and Chairperson of the OPCF BoD has switched employment from Microsoft to Analog Devices (who are also a Class A OPCF member). The OPC Foundation says “THANK YOU” Holger for your efforts and inspiring us with new WGs like the AI WG (which he will continue to lead). The newly appointed OPC Foundation Chairperson is Shinji Oda, of Yokogawa – congrats!
Shinji Oda, Yokogawa, the new OPC Foundation Chairperson
The new Microsoft representative on the BoD, replacing Holger Kenn, is Christoph Berlin, VP of Engineering. His name sounds German (which is true) but more important Christoph is located in Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, US – that’s why we feel an “even closer connection”. Welcome Christoph! Find more information about Christoph Berlin here
Please find more information about the BoD election process and the results here
General Assembly Meeting 2024 – Recording
In case you prefer listening, instead reading, you might enjoy listening to the 71-minute recording of the OPC Foundation General Assembly, 2024. The aim is to provide an overview of the election of the Board of Directors, the financial report, OPC UA technology and certification, and marketing.
Download the presented slides here – the first slide contains a link to the 71-minute recording.
History: OPC Success Journey
The “OPC Success Journey – Setting the Standard for Interoperability since 1990″ has been chronicled on a 10 metre-wide (30’) wall, which has been updated, significantly. The basis for the OPC UA standard was laid out in only three years and, as a result, OPC UA v1.00 was released in 2006, with sustained stability over almost two decades and, incredibly, never losing backward compatibility.
Please download the PDF here and let us know if you can contribute to the story!
Highlights from SPS trade show
Let’s continue with other highlights announced and celebrated at the SPS trade show:
- OPC UA for Field: Certification Lab for UAFX-enabled products is now prepared
The Field Level Communication initiative provided an update of the status with an event “Learn@Lunch” during the SPS 2024 show: Two additional companies, CODESYS and Weidmüller joined the FLC Steering Committee (Welcome!) and we are proud to announce the addition of OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) capabilities to our certification program.
I wonder which company will be honored to be listed on the “History of success wall” as the one providing the world’s first OPC UA device supporting UAFX!
Get more details here - OPC UA for Cloud: Google Cloud joins along with 11 End-Users
The OPC Foundation Cloud Initiative, which was launched at Hannover Messe 2024, aims to accelerate interoperability of IT and cloud applications using OPC UA, and has made significant strides since its inception.We are proud that Google Cloud joined the Steering Committee, including prominent cloud suppliers, such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and SAP Cloud. Additionally, leading industrial automation companies like ABB, Beckhoff, Honeywell, Mitsubishi Electric, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Yokogawa are actively participating.Twenty-five companies participated in the kickoff meeting of the End-User Counsel, including Boehringer Ingelheim, ContiTech, Danone, Equinor, L’Oreal Operations, Miele, Mondelez, Renault-Group, Japan Tobacco International (JTI), Tetra Pak, and Volkswagen.Additional interested End-Users are welcome; please contact office@opcfoundation.org. These end-users are working together to create and harmonize their IT and cloud environment requirements, aiming to achieve standardized and harmonized interoperability solutions between providers and users, ultimately reducing integration and runtime costs.
Get more details here - Joint forces for Digital Product Passport (DPP) combining OPC UA and AAS
Major standardization associations and initiatives have now partnered to create the best-of-breed system architecture to support the upcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP)by combining the best aspects of the Asset Administration Shell and OPC UA.My personal respect goes to experts like Erich Barnstedt, Microsoft and Thomas Hahn, Siemens – that’s why I provided them with a symbolic “Nobel Peace Prize for standardization in industrial automation”.In super-short summary, the DPP architecture is about REST-API calls (both from AAS and OPC UA) that will be handled in the background by OPC UA modeling-based infrastructure with AAS semantic. I personally believe these joint forces have the potential to let the DPP become reality in a worldwide accepted mix of technologies.
Get more details here - First time the OPC Foundation hosted the IoT Used Case members on our booth for their yearly networking event – it was a pleasure for us to meet about 120 people from this community in person as we believe OPC UA is a great solution for most IoT use cases.
Pictures from the booth and more impressions from the networking event can be found here
Technology News: 45 Publications in 2024! Call for Reviews and Participation
In 2024, we have already published an incredible 45 specifications! (in 2023, that number was only 29) This shows the HUGE activities of members inside the OPC Foundation and their willingness to cooperate!
My BIG THANK YOU to the OPC UA community around the world!
This page shows the great work of the community in a very simple and transparent way – please subscribe to the “Technology newsletter”.
https://opcfoundation.org/news/technology-news
Companion Specifications
In total, the OPC Foundation hosts over 151 information models, at the conclusion of 2024, and the number is constantly growing. The new landing page allows an easy search with special filters. (Link here)
At this time, I would like to highlight the Electrolyzer WG (by OPCF / VDMA) :
These multiple energy working groups are coordinated and harmonized by their initiators; Espen Krogh of Prediktor/TGS and by Chris Muench of Enapter. THANK YOU, so much, for your passioned work! I was able to listen to Espen’s presentation during the OPC Day Norway and was impressed with all of these activities: Saving the world from CO2 point of view requires more green energy – more and quicker green energy requires worldwide, reliable standards for better scalability.
The Northern Lights Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project:
Congrats to Norway for developing the world’s first open-source CO2 transport and storage infrastructure to accelerate decarbonization
Historic day for CCS: On Sept 26th, 2024, the Northern Lights JV unveiled the completed CO2 terminal facilities at Øygarden, Norway. The onshore and offshore infrastructure has been delivered on time for customers, and within budget, and is now ready to receive CO2 from both the Norwegian and European industry. Northern Lights is the first to offer commercial CO2 transport and storage as a service.
It was a pleasure for me to participate next to hundreds of guests from the local community, as well as policymakers and industry leaders from across Europe, to celebrate this important milestone.
I was impressed listening to Matt Kerner, Corporate VP Industry Cloud announcing that Microsoft will compensate all historic CO2 emissions.
Get more details here
Events 2025
OPC Foundation will participate in lots of international trade shows around the globe in order to demonstrate the secure, semantic interoperability, scaling from field to cloud, as well as digital twins. I invite you to have a look at the 2025 international events posted on the OPCF website:
Call for sponsors https://opcfoundation.org/advertising/
List of activities Jan-March 2025 – see details here https://opcfoundation.org/events/
- Feb 9th, 2025 ARC Industry Forum, Orlando, USA
- March 11th, 2025 Embedded World, Nuremberg, Germany
- March 11th, 2025 Global Industrie, Lyon, France
- March 16th, 2025 Industry of Things World, Boston USA
- March 17th, 2025 OPC Interoperability Workshop 2025, North America, Andover, Massachusetts, USA
- March 19th, 2025 Smart Manufacturing World Summit, Stuttgart, Germany
OPCF members will get a 50% off the current rate online (SM ticket discount code: STUTTGART-EVENT-2025) – it expires at the end of December. - March 31st, 2025, Hannover Messe, Hannover Germany
Hate entering technology
In politics, it looks to be more and more “common” that hate and lies (sounding positively labeled as “alternative facts”) are part of daily life! I was always proud that, in technical business, we are “different” (perhaps the better humans?) as we can measure everything and can clearly differentiate “true” or “false” facts.
I noticed that hate is also joining our technical world: When the proud employees from Airbus together with the OPC Foundation published the “OPC UA in the research rocket” success story (Link here) there has been hate on LinkedIn, “Looking forward to a crashing rocket because of OPC UA…” with statements of complete nonsense. To be crisp and clear, not everybody needs to love our activities! If you love your own designed MQTT messaging, because it generates 2 bytes less traffic on the wire: I believe you (because it can be measured!), so please remain happy and positive with your achievement! At the OPC Foundation, we are a community addressing far more use cases, including secure onboarding, flexible certificate management, which has been received by German, France, Norway and US security experts, and has deep adoption from all major PLC suppliers and all large cloud suppliers, who also support OPC UA over MQTT. In short, this is the world’s largest ecosystem for standardized, secure exchange of information. Furthermore, this is also a true statement; “it can be measured!” All these statements are facts, yet we are always open to receive constructive feedback to optimize our specs and make the world better. But, please, no more senseless hate and lies: Is this the only way you are able to increase your click-rate? Really? To my point, it does not make our lives better.
Slow down
This newsletter is more than just fully packed! All the articles show the huge number of OPC UA related activities around the world. I mentioned earlier that sometimes OPC UA is more than just a technology connecting machines and services, instead, it’s a movement that is also connecting people.
What I wish for all of us: More love(!), at least more respect! Secondly, stay healthy; including your families and friends, and have a few days of peace while the earth keeps spinning, even though many of us are taking time off.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Stefan Hoppe
President OPC Foundation
Stefan.hoppe@opcfoundation.org
| Karola Wauro Administration karola.wauro[at]opcfoundation.org |
Stefan Hoppe President, OPC Foundation stefan.hoppe[AT]opcfoundation.org |