With more than 200 square meters of exhibition space in Hall 9, Booth F60, the OPC Foundation once again hosted one of the largest interoperability showcases at Hannover Messe 2026. The booth served as a central meeting point for end users, technology providers, standards organizations, and industry leaders exploring the future of Industrial Digitalization.
Visitors experienced a broad range of OPC UA-based solutions and live demonstrations presented by our exhibiting partners, including ECOS Technology, evon GmbH, IBHsoftec, Matrikon, Kepware/PTC, o6 Automation GmbH, Prosys OPC, Softing, Siemens, Systerel, Unified Automation, and Yokogawa. Together, these companies demonstrated the breadth of the OPC UA ecosystem—from embedded devices and field connectivity to cloud integration, digital twins, and Industrial AI applications.
We were also pleased to welcome our strategic partners AutomationML and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), highlighting the growing collaboration between interoperability standards, semantic information models, and trusted data-sharing ecosystems.
At Hannover Messe 2026, the OPC Foundation showcased how OPC UA continues to evolve from a communication standard into the foundation for Industrial Digitalization. Highlights included the Fraunhofer FFB Digital Battery Passport demonstrator, illustrating how OPC UA enables interoperable lifecycle data exchange and supports future Digital Product Passport initiatives. Read article here (link)
Industrial AI was another major focus, demonstrating how semantic interoperability and standardized information models provide the trusted context required for scalable AI applications. Visitors also explored the growing ecosystem of OPC UA Companion Specifications, which continue to expand interoperability across industries and domains.
Another key attraction was the continued progress of OPC UA FX (Field eXchange). Live demonstrations showed how OPC UA FX enables vendor-independent, secure, and interoperable communication at the field level, extending OPC UA from IT and cloud environments directly into real-time industrial automation systems. The growing number of implementations and interoperability demonstrations confirmed the strong momentum behind a unified communication architecture from sensors to cloud.
Energy Initiative
The energy transition requires more than new technologies—it requires interoperability. Chris Muench, C-Labs and lead of the OPC Foundation energy initiative presented new OPC UA enabled information models like “OPC UA for Hydrogen”. We are proud, that the OPC Foundation Energy Initiative is bringing together industry leaders to standardize connectivity and semantic information models across energy production, distribution, storage, transformation, and consumption. Download the first edition of the OPC Foundation Energy Initiative and learn why OPC UA is becoming a key enabler for secure, interoperable, and resilient energy systems.
Energy landing page: https://opcfoundation.org/energy/
The strong visitor interest and many valuable discussions throughout the week clearly demonstrated that OPC UA is increasingly recognized as the foundation for secure, semantic interoperability and Industrial Digitalization worldwide.
Automated Certificate Management with OPC UA GDS
At the OPC booth we also addressed the topic cybersecurity: Having security solutions is not enough as managing certificates manually does not scale! OPC UA Global Discovery Services (GDS) enable automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), including certificate provisioning, renewal, revocation, and trust-list management. This helps organizations strengthen cybersecurity while significantly reducing operational effort. See also the recording “Certificate Lifecycle Management with Enterprise PKI and OPC UA GDS“ from Matthias Damm, Unified Automation and Gerald Richter, ECOS Technology https://youtu.be/FphqoE0bhMg
