OPC Activities

OPC Foundation has been active in events and collaborations in 2015.

• A six-city North American seminar tour provided technical information on OPC UA
• We are presenting OPC UA at members’ user meetings
• We exhibited at SPS/IPC/Drives where additional collaborations were announced

North American Seminar Tour

The OPC Foundation recently completed the North American 2015 seminar tour.  Topics on the agenda included the vision and value proposition of OPC UA,  an overview and detailed technical briefing on using and developing OPC UA products, an overview on security and certification, and use cases and success stories about OPC technology in action across a multitude of markets and domains. Over 500 people attended our North American 2015 seminars. We started at the end of September with the first seminar being hosted by MathWorks in Boston, then Toronto and Chicago, then Las Vegas for the PackExpo trade show, next stop was hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California and then we were hosted by National Instruments in Austin Texas. In November we had one more seminar hosted by Siemens in Atlanta. We are currently putting plans in place for 2016 for another exciting North American seminar tour. GE will host one event in their IoT HQ in Santa Clara and Chicago, Raleigh and Toronto will be seminar cities in 2016.

User Group Meetings at Honeywell, ICONICS, National Instruments, and Emerson

Thomas Burke had the unique opportunity to participate and present at many of our OPC member company’s user group events over the past several months.  Here is his report:

I had the exciting opportunity to present multiple times to Honeywell’s audiences (San Antonio, Texas for their North American event, and Madrid, Spain for their European event). In addition to presenting, it was exciting to listen to the Honeywell presenters and their end-users effectively communicating why OPC UA was so important to their architecture and their product portfolio. I also attended and presented at the ICONICS event in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. These guys really know how to choreograph an event. And when they say they are OPC to the core they really mean it! I attended and presented at the National Instruments event in Austin, Texas. Did you know that National Instruments was one of the founding companies of the OPC Foundation? They truly are committed to the OPC UA technology and are actively helping the Foundation with the publish/subscribe extensions to OPC UA including support for TSN. (More on that topic later). I also went to Emerson eXchange in Denver. There was lots of excitement with their end-users and their company concerning adoption of the OPC UA technology in their product portfolio.

SPS/IPC/Drives Show

A year ago, the OPC Foundation announced at the SPS/IPC/Drives a clear objective: OPC UA

should become the worldwide Standard for the Internet of Things between 2017 and 2019. At this year’s Press Conference Stefan Hoppe, Vice President of the OPC Foundation, provided a summary of the last year and gave an outlook on the upcoming activities.

The Demo Wall at the fair is bursting at the seams. OPC UA integrated into the 3S-CodeSys-PLC-solution and in the FESTO controls were pointed out as examples of the increasing adoption.

Companies like Honeywell, General Electric, and National Instruments are the big players in North America who are pushing OPC UA (and not just in North America, but also worldwide). Even more large US automation companies will adopt OPC UA quickly: “The pressure caused by the market increases!” Emerson announced its first products for 2016.  Microsoft is very active in the technical OPC UA working group. The company is actively helping to integrate the message-protocol AMQP as a further transport layer into the OPC UA Stack. After an update of the UA Stack, all existing OPC UA products will be able to exchange data with cloud-systems – a proprietary implementation with elaborate security will not be necessary.