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.
Foxconn Industrial Internet (Fii), a leading intelligent manufacturing solution provider standardizes on OPC UA to harness the power of the Industrial IoT. Brand Cheng, Fii CEO remarked, “By leveraging OPC UA, Fii is set to deliver more value to Industry 4.0 solutions with agile development in industrial applications.”
ICONICS has announced an agreement with Takebishi Corporation to integrate the Takebishi DeviceXPlorer OPC Server with its own OPC-based automation software solutions. “ICONICS automation software is OPC-to-the-Core,” said Russ Agrusa, President and CEO of ICONICS.
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.
B&R is among the first manufacturers to introduce controllers with OPC UA over TSN communication technology and Intel Apollo Lake I processors. The new X20 controllers are distinguished by significantly higher performance, additional RAM and integrated onboard flash memory.