Monday, March 23, 2009
The OPC Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2009 North American Interoperability Workshop engaged the largest number of vendors committed to the development of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) to date. Twelve major OPC vendors participated, reinforcing their commitment to the new OPC UA specification by submitting fifteen OPC Servers and seventeen OPC Clients for open interoperability testing which took place March 2nd through March 6th in Boca Raton, Florida.
The purpose of this interoperability workshop was to validate the interoperability of OPC products by members of the OPC Foundation. These workshops are critical for the continuation of maintaining true open standards in OPC communications, and empowering end-users with the ability to truly build best of breed architectures. Being restricted to a single vendors technology is truly a thing of the past, and with the successful testing of so many OPC UA products, the interoperability of future OPC technology is truly limitless.
The OPC Foundation is committed to its vision of maintaining secure, reliable interoperability standards for the members of the OPC Foundation, said Tom Burke, OPC Foundation President and Executive Director. The road to the successful implementation of OPC UA has been a long one, but we are now seeing the fruits of our labors. We are seeing vendors truly embrace OPC UA, and the number of products tested at this Interoperability Workshop is a testament to their commitment. The products tested here were truly world class, robust, and designed to easily facilitate the building of complex systems.
Vendors who tested OPC Servers and OPC Clients at the North American Interoperability Workshop included:
The OPC Foundation Unified Architecture is a technology that builds on, and expands, current OPC technology. It facilitates the integration of complex devices easily and efficiently, to provide end-users with complete interoperable solutions. The OPC Unified Architecture Specification achieves such integration by providing a base set of services for discovery, read/write and subscription capabilities focused on information modeling. Products tested at the Interoperability Workshop can be used together to seamlessly provide an infrastructure for integration of both simple and complex information architectures.
About the OPC Foundation The OPC Foundation, dedicated to interoperability in automation and enterprise computing, is an independent, non-profit organization that comprises leading manufacturers and solution providers in factory and process automation as well as providers of enterprise solutions. The OPC Foundation's charter is to develop worldwide industry standards for data transfer necessary in the manufacturing and process industries, by leveraging open computing technologies. Board members and officers are unpaid volunteers. Development of specifications is undertaken by volunteers from 440+ members worldwide. For more information about the OPC Foundation visit http://www.opcfoundation.org
OPC Training Institute Media Contact: +1-780-784-4444 info@opcti.com www.opcti.com
The OPC Foundation is dedicated to ensuring interoperability in automation by creating and maintaining open specifications that standardize the communication of acquired process data, alarm and event records, historical data, and batch data to multi-vendor enterprise systems and between production devices. Production devices include sensors, instruments, PLCs, RTUs, DCSs, HMIs, historians, trending subsystems, alarm subsystems, and more as used in the process industry, manufacturing, and in acquiring and transporting oil, gas, and minerals.
The OPC Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors elected by the membership. The Board, in turn, appoints the Foundation's Officers and the OPC Chief Architect. A Marketing Committee and A Technical Steering Committee have been established, as have various working groups.