No dream – just reality: OPC Foundation brings IT & OT and the world to one table!
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening – wherever you are in the world!
Welcome to the newest edition of our newsletter – I can’t wait to share incredible “double news” with you: The OPC Foundation Board of Director has been extended with 3 additional member companies AWS, Google Cloud, and Huawei!
Get more information and the CV from the 3 new members here
- This is the first time in the history of the OPC Foundation that a representative of a Chinese member company is on the Board. My special welcome goes to Dr. Jinyli Hu, of Huawei. The OPC Foundation standardizes pre-competitively and brings North America, Europe and Asia together with China and Japan.
- With AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei, Microsoft, and SAP, as well as the who’s who of OT companies on the OPC Foundation board, there is no other association in the field of industrial automation digitalization that brings joint IT and OT forces to the table. For sure, AI is a main technology driver in near future – but, today, OPC UA delivers incredible value with standardized information.
OPC UA WebAPI and China
It was not only a pleasure for me to travel in China – honestly, I was blown away. While we, at the OPC Foundation, had been preparing information about IT related OPC news from the last 6 months to present on a seminar panel for attendees of Hannover Messe, including information about OPC UA WebAPI, to my surprise the people in China had already been finalizing a competition about UA WebAPI ! It was my personal honor to provide First Prize to the winner of this competition, hosted by the Open Atom association and sponsored by Huawei and OPC Foundation. Seven of the 34 participating teams from all ovr China were selected as finalists and I saw their amazing presentations.
Read more here
Past highlights
I would like to highlight three events that have happened since our last newsletter:
- Feb 4-8, 2025 ARC Forum, Orlando, USA
As a gold sponsor, the OPC Foundation provided updates from the OPC Foundation Cloud initiative and addressed security topics discussed among other innovations.
Amine Benammar from Air Liquide, presented on-stage their journey with OPC evolutions.
Read more here - March 11-13, 2025 Embedded World, Nuremberg, Germany
The experts from the sponsors Matrikon, Softing, Systerel, and Unified Automation have shown their solutions during the embedded World
Read more here - March 11-13, 2025 Global Industrie, Lyon, France
OPC Foundation is connected with the French industry at Global Industrie in Lyon, an important event for their market. This time our booth was located in the Cybersecurity Village in Hall 2, highlighting the critical importance of robust security mechanisms in OPC UA technology.
Read more here
Upcoming event: Hannover Messe
The next highlight is the Hannover Messe March 31 – April 4, 2025 with unbelievable news – please join our booth in hall 9 F 30.
Find all OPC Foundation information related to Hannover Messe here
Today, I am happy to share just a few highlights:
- The OPCF cloud initiative, including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei, Microsoft, and SAP is showing for the first time their OPC UA Cloud Reference Architecture!
In addition, the mandatory EU Digital Battery Passport is integrated into the existing demo for Digital Product Passport (DPP) and Product Carbon Footprint (PCF), based on OPC UA modeling technology as a digital twin in the Edge/Cloud. The demo is available as open source based on OPC UA – the stable and backward compatible standard since 2006 (19 years!).
Read the latest news about the Cloud initiative, including extra information for end-users here.
Do not miss the “OPCF cloud conference” on Wednesday, 2nd April 2025 starting at 1:00pm. - The OPCF field initiative shows the C2C demo and OPC UA over 5G and UA Safety
Read the latest news about the FLC initiative from Peter Lutz here
Do not miss the “OPCF field conference on Wednesday, 2nd April 2025 starting at 11:00am.
Certification for APL and the APL roadshow in North America
The four organizations that supported the development of Ethernet-APL (FieldComm Group, ODVA, OPC Foundation, and PROFIBUS and PROFINET International) are exploring the possibility of a joint in-person seminar series (“roadshow”) in North America.
I am glad, that OPC Foundation is also offering the certification of the physical APL layer in our OPC Foundation certification lab!
Read the article from our Certification team here
Collaboration: The success story of standardized domain information models continues
Please follow the link https://opcfoundation.org/news/technology-news and see the incredible number of published companion specs since we’ve released since our last Newsletter in Mid-December 2024.
- Dec 12th, 2024: OPC 34100 Energy Consumption Management – V 1.0.0
- Dec 16th, 2024 OPC 40540 UA for Additive Manufacturing – V 1.00
- Feb 4th, 2025 OPC 40082-3 PlasticsRubber – Peripheral devices – LSR Dosing Systems – V 1.02
- Feb 11th, 2025 OPC 40444 Textile Testing Devices – V 1.0.0
- Feb 18th, 2025 OPC 40210 Geometric Measuring Systems – V 1.00.1
- Feb 24th, 2025 OPC 40570 Wire Harness Manufacturing – V 1.00
- March 5th, 2025 OPC 40740 Process Air Extraction and Filtration Systems – V 1.0.1
Five additional working groups have started a “call for review” already. As you see, the impressive success story of standardized domain information models continues!
Events 2025
OPC Foundation will participate in lots of international trade shows around the globe to demonstrate secure, semantic interoperability, scaling from field to cloud, as well as digital twins.
Please be aware we sold all 14 of the available partner pods at Hannover Messe 2025 – with just a very few open pods remaining available for the SPS show in November.
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 https://opcfoundation.org/events/
Success story: OPC UA helped to produce products of your daily life
Since its establishment in 1837, Procter & Gamble has been headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company’s name originates from the founding fathers, the British William Procter (1801–1884) and his brother-in-law, the Irishman James Gamble (1803–1891). Today, the US consumer goods group operates 450 production sites in over 70 countries, and employs more than 100,000 people. Read more about Jeff Kent, Vice President, Smart Platforms, Product Supply Engineering at Procter & Gamble and his statement “The underlying challenge here is the need for a network communications model that connects the sensors, controllers, the OT, and the cloud. It also needs to enable a bidirectional flow of information. We see no better way than to perform this through OPC Foundation’s introduction of OPC UA and its many different forms.”
Read their success story here
Please stay healthy and think about how to make the world better.
Let’s meet in person during Hannover Messe and think about how to make the world better in the area of digitalization of the industrial automation! I will be at the booth all 5 days.
Stefan Hoppe
President, OPC Foundation
stefan.hoppe[AT]opcfoundation.org