A warm welcome to you all,
An incredible amount has happened in the last few months. I’ll start immediately to give an overview. There are multiple changes to the Board of Directors, including a new Chairperson. Trade show activities have ramped up from 0 to 100. And collaboration is top-of-mind with more announcements to come later in the year.
The growing diversity of the OPC Foundation Board of Directors reflects the expanding role OPC UA plays in OT and IT. Dr. Holger Kenn, Microsoft, has been elected as Chairperson.
The OPC UA “Global Positioning” joint working group has been created together with AutoID (AIM) and omlox (PI). The OPC UA “Power Consumption Management” working group has been created together with ODVA, PI, and VDMA. And a webinar covering OPC UA and Industrial 5G was held on June 22.
Major IoT vendors including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and SIEMENS leverage secure, standardized information exchange in edge-to-cloud applications based on OPC UA.
Each year the membership elects Board Members to serve a two-year term; staggered to elect half of the seats per election. In August a nomination request was sent to the membership for the five (5) seats up for election. Now concluded, we congratulate and welcome the directors, with a look towards working together in the coming years.
On November 23, 2021 the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) and the OPC Foundation launched the UA Cloud Library as an open-source reference implementation and Docker container for self-hosting, thereby reducing machine-to-cloud connection efforts.
First, the VDMA has founded a new centralized department focusing on OPC UA interface development as the basis for its umati initiative. Second, the latest addition to the OPC UA for Machinery Specification standardizes the status of all machines -harmonizing a previously heterogeneous set of solutions.
In the past few years, OPC UA has been growing as a major trend around the globe and becoming one of the primary solutions for industrial systems and companies. Last year, together with adapting to our new reality and transferring our workshops and events to the online format, Prosys started working on their first self-paced Introduction to OPC UA Online Course.
Matrikon shares product news on its OPC UA Tunneller, Data Broker v1.4, and its FLEX v5 -which now supports OPC UA PubSub over MQTT. Also available are virtual training courses; either instructor-led or self-paced.