Good morning, good afternoon, good evening – wherever you are in the world!
This time, I would like to begin with a more personal report from my vacation — one that was quite different from previous years. To explain, I have to go back 19 years. In 2006, I read a book by the German comedian Hape Kerkeling about his pilgrimage along the Camino Francés (BTW: With more than four million copies sold, the book is considered the most successful German-language non-fiction book.) Since then, walking the Camino has been on my personal bucket list.
This year, 2025, marks my 30th anniversary in business. To celebrate this milestone, I decided to take a true break — a complete reset, entirely offline (no emails, no phone calls, no social media) — and finally embark on this journey.
I started on June 8th, 2025 in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, and walked nearly 800 km to Santiago de Compostela. From there, I continued another 100 km to Fisterra on the Atlantic coast. In total, 880 km over 38 days, including 3 rest days.
Before sharing more, I want to express my gratitude to the OPC Foundation team. Thanks to their strength and professionalism, everything was well-coordinated during my absence. It gave me the peace of mind to be fully present on the Camino.
The Camino is unique. Unlike my usual business trips around the world, where I meet people in formal settings, here I met travelers from across the globe — from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia — all walking for their own reasons. Titles, jobs, and politics faded into the background.
It’s important to say: there is no single “Camino”. First, there are many different ways coming together in Santiago. Some people walk only the last 100 km, others split the route across multiple vacations, some send their backpacks ahead by taxi, and some pre-book all accommodations. My way was to keep things simple and without any pre-schedule: start walking around 5:30 a.m., listen to the birds, enjoy breakfast and lunch wherever I found them, and stop for the night when it felt right.
Even now, two months later, I still feel transformed — much more resilient, refreshed, and mentally clear. I highly recommend it: Find your own way of doing it, but do it.
The Business World Keeps Moving
While I’ve shared my personal story above, I also want to give you a brief update on key activities that have shaped our work at the OPC Foundation since June:
- Regulatory requirements such as the Digital Product Passport present new challenges for mechanical engineering. Open data spaces and standards like OPC UA provide the foundation to digitally connect manufacturing, supply chains, and customer processes — and to ensure long-term competitiveness. [Read more about our collaboration with Catena-X here.]
- Adoption drives success. We are pleased to see growing utilization of the Compliance Test Tool (CTT) by machine vendors, many of whom are being driven by automotive end users now mandating OPC UA interfaces for all their suppliers. [Read more here.]
- Face-to-face collaboration matters. Peter Lutz has published a detailed report on numerous FLC F2F meetings held in North America and Europe. I wonder when they will meet in Asia also? [Read more here.]
- Strong engagement in North America. Mike Clark, our Director of OPC Foundation North America, successfully organized three interoperability seminars in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago in cooperation with CESMII, NEMA, and VDMA. [Read more here.]
Upcoming Webinars
Face-to-face collaboration is essential for defining new standards — but virtual webinars are a powerful way to share knowledge globally, at scale. I would like to highlight two important upcoming sessions:
A purely OT- or IT-focused perspective is not enough to meet the challenges of digitalization. Only by working together, across organizations, can we create consistent data models and exchange scenarios. This is why the OPC Foundation collaborates with partners such as Catena-X, DIN, IDSA, IDTA, VDA, VDMA, and ZVEI. Our shared goal is to establish a technical foundation that enables secure and semantically interoperable data exchange across companies and industries.
This approach also empowers small and mid-sized machine builders to share data with customers, suppliers, or partners — in a sovereign and controlled way. At the core, OPC UA serves as the unifying element. Recognized internationally as a meta-modeling language, OPC UA already supports seamless conversion of models from AAS and Catena-X at the push of a button. The result: consistent models without media breaks, where machine and plant data flow directly into digital supply chains.
Please take the opportunity to join these two joint webinars to dive deeper into the topic:
- “Joint Forces to Enable Seamless Industrial Data Exchange for the Digital Product Passport”
Catena-X and OPC Foundation Joint Webinar
October 14, 2025
See details and register here - “Unifying AAS and OPC UA: Common Communication Proof of Concept”
IDTA and OPC Foundation Joint Webinar
October 15, 2025
See details and register here
Election of the OPC Foundation Board of Directors 2026/2007
The Foundation is 100 percent independent and cannot be dominated by a single company and the voice of a small company is just as important as that of a global corporation. This independence, along with the transparency of the ecosystem for solutions of UA technology, is the Foundation’s greatest strength – and, at the same time, the only way to achieve worldwide acceptance among companies from a wide variety of industrial sectors. Being an open and democratic organization, the members of the Board of Directors are elected by each appointed representative of the corporate members of the OPCF. Each year, the members elect half of the seats on the Board of Directors for a period of two years based on a list of proposed candidates.
For the 2026/2027 period, we are in the process of collecting nominations. Voting will begin early November 2025, when the nominated representatives will receive an email to participate in the electronic vote. The results will be publicly presented during the OPC Foundation General Assembly on December 3rd, 2025 – please register here.
10 Year anniversary
This time I am not talking about a technology anniversary – and people know, that OPC UA is on the market since 2006 and will celebrate 20-year anniversary next year. This time I like to say a BIG THANK YOU to our colleague Karola Wauro – [Read more here.]
In the OPC Foundation there have been many key people active for many years some of them even multiple decades. We are very proud to have such long standing experts and officials since this not only shows the passion for the OPC Technology and OPC Foundation of those individuals but also allows us to maintain stability in the fast changing world of industrial automation. They usually work quietly in the background, but we are taking Karola Wauro’s anniversary as an opportunity to thank her and to introduce exciting personalities related to OPC UA in future newsletters.
With this transparent overview of the next activities, I wish you a lot of fun and insight with this newsletter edition.
Stefan Hoppe
President OPC Foundation