When the OPC Foundation first created OPC, the target audience was really system vendors, those that created OPC products.   The focus has always been to provide specifications, testing tools and compliance certification processes that would increase interoperability among these various vendor products.   As OPC became more prevalent and systems grew in size and complexity more and more system integrators and distributors are implementing OPC systems.  Many of these projects make use of custom applications, automation interfaces or scripting components or other custom OPC pieces.   The OPC Foundation has created a new program to provide a mechanism and membership class for system integrators and distributors to design, develop and certify these custom software bits.  This new membership option is called the SI&D (System Integrators and Distributors) category.

The SI&D membership category has a fixed fee of $1500.  SI&D members get access to the OPC specifications and reference implementations (sample code) and the Compliance Test Tools needed to self-certify OPC components. A special listing of SI&D members will be kept and end users will be actively encouraged to use these members for their projects.

With OPC UA becoming a more concrete reality every day, having a trusted OPC implementer that truly understands compliant OPC products and can implement complex OPC architectures at all levels of the enterprise will become even more important than it is today.   As Tom said in the press release; “We especially urge companies thinking of implementing an OPC Unified Architecture system to join us now so that end users do not become disillusioned with our next ambitious step into the future.”

What are your reactions to this idea?  Is forming the SI&D membership option good news for integrators? End-users?  Will having a particular targeted process on integration raise the bar in terms of implementing OPC projects?  Let’s hear from you.