Training Events, OPC UA & Collaboration Highlight 2007
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October 23, 2007
Training Events, OPC UA & Collaboration Highlight 2007
Tom Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, looks back on the Foundation’s milestone events in 2007, and looks forward to continued collaborations in 2008 with IEC, MIMOSA, OMAC and ProdML groups.
Welcome to the November 2007 edition of OPConnect, the official newsletter of the OPC Foundation. As we wind down our activities this year, and look forward to events in 2008, I’d like to reflect on some of the highlights of 2007 for the OPC Foundation.
First off, the OPC training events held at various locations in 2007 offered a great opportunity for both end-users and vendors to really network together to maximize their use of the OPC Foundation technology. At the same time, these vendor-neutral sessions provided a solid foundation for end-users to learn the techniques and
tools for OPC-based solutions. First off, the OPC training events held at various locations in 2007 offered a great opportunity for both end-users and vendors to really network together to maximize their use of the OPC Foundation technology. At the same time, these vendor-neutral sessions provided a solid foundation for end-users to learn the techniques and
Next year, the OPC Foundation will host eight of these training events in North America, and potentially an additional four sessions in Europe. These are free events for end-users to learn about OPC, and meet the event sponsors, who are the vendors that develop best-of-breed products using OPC technology in a certified fashion. The OPC Foundation Web site, www.opcfoundation.org, will update important information on these training events, as schedules are completed.
In addition, there have been a
Recently I participated in an embedded human-machine interface (HMI) conference in Frankfurt, Germany. This conference was all about jumpstarting the embedded HMI vendors using the OPC UA technology. At the OPC UA Developers’ Conference that the OPC Foundation held in June in Scottsdale, Arizona, we demonstrated multiple vendors providing OPC UA capabilities in both programmable logic controller (PLC) and distributed control system (DCS) platforms.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen a groundswell of vendors and end-users rallying behind the next-generation OPC technology. I’ve often spoken about collaboration as the foundation of the OPC vision, with respect to secure, reliable interoperability across all facets of automation and beyond. But now collaboration has taken a major leap, with the number of standards consortiums adopting OPC UA as a service-oriented architecture for transporting their information among multiple vendor applications and devices.
In the early days of the Foundation, OPC was really about collaboration among competitors, and was a highly vendor-driven initiative for vendors that wanted to have a standard interface for accessing data from devices on the factory floor, in both discrete and process industries. We learned a lot about competitors working together, and we have modeled this as the fundamental principle that we’ve continued to pursue as we collaborate with other standards organizations. The end-goal of collaboration is to provide secure, reliable, interoperability specifications for the technology, process and certification, so that vendors can deliver shrink-wrap OPC products that dramatically exceed the expectations of their end-users.
Speaking of the shrink wrap concept, OPC has partnered with OMAC for the packaging world, and demonstrated OPC UA with PackML at the Pack Expo Show held last month in Las Vegas . Next year, the OPC Foundation will participate in the Pack Expo Show in Chicago, and we plan to have approximately 20 vendors demonstrating interoperability leveraging the information model of PackML.
Also last month, at the ISA Show in Houston, we had an impressive demonstration showing the collaboration and partnership of the Open Operations & Maintenance (OpenO&M) initiative. I’m really very excited about the work that we have been doing with this group during the past eight years, which demonstrates a true partnership between OPC and MIMOSA.
Coming attractions in 2008
Next year will be the rollout of the products based on the OPC Unified Architecture specification. The OPC Foundation has provided a solid infrastructure to facilitate adoption that is platform-independent and supports a highly scalable architecture for deployment from embedded devices all the way to the enterprise.
We’ve started an initiative with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) where we have formally begun the process of gaining international standardization recognition. A working group has been created under IEC SC65E that is focused on OPC Unified Architecture.
We will continue our focus on collaboration to make sure we provide the solid infrastructure that allows consortiums to obtain secure reliable interoperability for describing and moving ...
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