In the early days the OPC foundation actively promoted and encourage adoption of the OPC data access technology without caring who and how implemented the technology, or how they evangelized the OPC technology through the delivery of their products. What we learned was that the end-user satisfaction was compromised by many vendor companies as well is end-users building OPC products that were less than satisfactory with respect to quality and also resulted in many interoperability problems with products that were developed and certified by the OPC foundation members.

The OPC foundation members of which there are a little over 400 of them now deserve better. The OPC foundation has a responsibility to making sure that the support burden by the OPC foundation member companies is significantly lowered as well is the perception of the OPC technology is of the highest quality. It is virtually impossible for the OPC foundation and improve the quality of products from nonmembers of the OPC foundation without knowing who the companies are that are not members of the OPC foundation.

We allowed anyone to download specifications from the OPC foundation based on the rules that we started the OPC foundation with. We frequently see client applications built on the OPC technology by nonmembers being essentially quickly developed and not using the technology in the most efficient fashion resulting in many interoperability problems.

We concluded that the OPC foundation had two alternatives with respect to improving the quality of products. One alternative was to require all companies to become members of the OPC foundation in order to use the OPC technology. This alternative would essentially raise the bar to make sure that it a company was going to use the OPC foundation technology as part of the rules of membership they would have to use it in such a way to clearly demonstrate secure reliable interoperability and quality products being developed and delivered based on the technology.

The other alternative was to actually require companies that were interested in using the technology but did not want to become members of the OPC foundation be required to pay a nominal fee to download the specifications accordingly. By knowing who the companies are we can do some things in a proactive fashion to make sure that the companies that buy the specifications build products that are up to the quality of the OPC foundation standard.

We looked at a number of the other standards organizations and quickly realized that either alternative was a feasible solution as many of the organizations do require membership in order to use the technology from the organization, and in other cases the organizations sell the specifications under the auspice of still being open. What we know is those organizations that sell the specifications basically sell the specifications in such a fashion that the reality is that it is better to become a member of the organization from a cost-effective standpoint from the companies that wish to just buy the specifications without becoming members.

We decided to restrict the downloads as part of our feasibility exercise with respect to the OPC foundation specifications to only members of the OPC foundation on May 1, 2006. We put in place plan is to build a shopping cart to facilitate nonmembers being able to purchase the OPC foundation specifications at a nominal fee.

We will be putting together a form on the OPC foundation web site that will allow organizations and companies to petition the OPC foundation accordingly to be able to evaluate the OPC foundation technology without purchasing the OPC foundation specifications or becoming members of the OPC foundation. We want to make sure that the products that are built based on the OPC technology are of the highest quality.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this…

Thanks in advance

Thomas J Burke

OPC Foundation President & Executive Director