Welcome to the June 2015 edition of the OPC Connect newsletter
There are so many great things that are happening in the world of OPC Unified Architecture. OPC UA is getting international recognition as the interoperability platform for everything related to industrial automation, plus other domains, and the system solution for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0.
Some of the more important things that happened during the second quarter of 2015 included a very successful OPC Foundation presence at the Hannover fair in Germany, and an extremely successful OPC-Day Europe hosted by Microsoft in Paris in May 2015 (we had over 180 attendees and 15 sponsors). There were many exciting presentations over the two day event, including a great presentation on how OPC UA is being used for moving information into Microsoft Azure cloud.
OPC Foundation booth at Hannover Fair
The Hannover fair included a very successful press conference with many exciting announcements from SAP, Microsoft, Siemens, KUKA, HARTING and EtherCAT Technology group. Presentations and press releases can be found on the OPC Foundation website. See the picture for a the bird’s eye view into the OPC booth. Also at the fair was the very large exciting Microsoft booth where there was a very important OPC demo, along with many other vendors demonstrating their solutions of OPC UA interoperability.
OPC Foundation Board of Directors
Veronika Schmid-Lutz, Chief Product Owner, SAP
I’m very excited to announce that the OPC Foundation Board of Directors decided to increase the number of board members at the March 2015 board meeting. The Board elected Veronika Schmid-Lutz, Chief Product Owner for manufacturing products at SAP SE to the Board of Directors of the OPC Foundation.
SAP was an early supporter of OPC UA and integrated the standard into its Manufacturing Execution Suite (MES) products in 2008. It also reflects the importance of SAP, one of the world’s leading IT companies, and of the role information technology is playing in extending OPC UA as the accepted standard for Internet of Things (IoT) communications. OPC UA is considered the one and only communication technology for the Industrie 4.0 initiative.