Even early on, Microsoft knew how important it would be for manufacturers to connect and communicate across disparate systems. That’s why they’ve built support for the OPC UA standard into their full spectrum of IIoT solutions. This frees manufacturers to choose the equipment and tools that best fit their needs, knowing those solutions will integrate with their stack.
Welcome! Not only is Christmas is coming unexpectedly fast – also for me personally the first year as President that started in October 2018 has passed incredibly fast! So, let’s first look back a little on what happened and then look to the future. Enjoy this issue of OPC Connect!
Microsoft is 100% committed to OPC UA. In fact, Microsoft was the first cloud vendor to embrace OPC UA back in 2015, and has contributed more open-source code to the OPC Foundation than everyone else combined by a factor of 10. So why do we do it? Well, it fits perfectly into our openness strategy.
Reimagining the Control Loop: thanks to the standardization success of OPC UA, the bi-directional integration between Information Technology (IT – Business Context) and the Operational Technology (OT – Physical Components and their Control Functions) is nowadays much less complex and costly than in the past.
Since the OPC Data Logger from Software Toolbox natively supports OPC UA, it’s incredibly easy to connect directly to the embedded OPC UA Server in an S7-1500 and log process data efficiently and securely.
Welcome to OPC Connect September 2019! I hope that you have relaxed during the summer holidays and that you are fully prepared for the next challenges ahead. Before we look to the future, let me briefly summarize what has happened since our last issue in June. A lot is going on around the world and there have been great successes with various Companion Specifications. Read on to learn more!
With umati, the machine tool industry, for the first time, has a vendor-neutral communication interface specification. In addition, because OPC UA is its underlying technology, umati will be capable of being deployed in future end-to-end solutions spanning entire process chains in the manufacturing industry.
In early 2018, Part 14 of the OPC UA Standard, aka “Publish-Subscribe” or “PubSub” was released, helping to encourage further interaction between OPC UA and communications protocols such as MQTT.
No matter in which part of the world you are, as a representative of the OPC Foundation you are always welcomed, since the challenge of industrial interoperability exists worldwide and can only be solved together. Global cooperation and harmonization are key tasks for the OPC Foundation going forward -not just across borders but inside vertical industries as well.
Connecting OPC Classic clients and servers when the Windows computers are not on the same version, not in an Active Directory or domain, and having everything work well takes skill, and keeping it secure involves a lot of details. OPC UA makes such situations infinitely more workable by taking the limitations, pitfalls, and inconsistencies of DCOM out of the equation. However, the security of an OPC UA connection is only as good as the encryption algorithm being used to encrypt it.
It is an honor and I am happy to send you my first “President’s Welcome” greeting! We all are pleased to announce that OPC UA is omnipresent in magazine articles, industry fairs, manufacturer events, conference contributions, social media, and more. OPC UA is rightly being called the key or enabler for Industrie 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the various initiatives from the USA (IIC), China (Made in China 2025), Korea (Manufacturing Industry Innovation 3.0), Japan (Industrial Value Chain Initiative) and others. I am therefore looking forward to the exciting times ahead and working together with you.
Intel recently rejoined the OPC Foundation to participate in the OPC UA Field Level Communication Steering Committee and help develop specifications that will enable OPC UA to seamlessly communicate with field devices. We view OPC UA as well positioned to provide communications solutions for smart manufacturing as well as other verticals.
One of our more popular posts was our OPC Frequently Asked Questions article. Since publishing that story, we have heard from readers with additional questions and challenges they were facing, so we thought it was time we share a “V2” with some more common questions and answers.