Rambling thoughts from the OPC foundation president's office(which is generally in a hotel someplace on the road)

One of the most important things of developing an industry standard is not the development itself is making sure that the standard solves a problem that the end-users and vendors want accordingly. My vision since the beginning of OPC has always been making sure we develop standards that the vendors want to adopt and that they solve critical problems that the end-users really need.

I've often been quoted that I never want to develop a standard that's not worth the paper it's printed on.  The complication is the more difficult the problem that needs to be solved in interoperability though harder it is to develop the specification and then work with the corresponding vendor community to adopt the specification and technology, and developer components that results in solutions for the complicated problem that we started off with.

The early days of OPC data access were trivial in comparison to the problems we face today collaborating with multiple organizations focusing on secure reliable interoperability moving data/information from the factory floor to the enterprise.  All vendors need to do in the early day was adopt a simple interface that we provided called OPC data access.   This was the classic driver problem where there were multitudes of hardware devices that all had different “interfaces” from the device to the first tier application OPC data access came to the rescue by defining a simple specification that became the servers 

The OPC foundation unified architecture DevCon2006 team worked fast and furious this week developing, refining, and finalizing the presentations and reference implementations that will be presented at the most strategic event in the OPC foundation 10 year history preparing for the OPC Unified Architecture DevCon2006 that is being held October 10-12 in Munich.  As of today there are over 75 companies that have registered for the event and 170 people.

The vision of the OPC foundation is to provide the best technology and facilitate vendors and end-users easily adopting and using the technology in the most effective fashion.  The OPC Unified Architecture DevCon2006 is intended to provide a jumpstart of the technology that will be followed up with the delivery of components that vendors will be able to used to plug into their respective products providing seamless OPC Unified Architecture connectivity.

The OPC foundation shall provide wrappers enabling the existing installed base of OPC DCOM based products to be OPC Unified Architecture enabled.

The next article will talk about the OPC foundation philosophy with respect to improving the quality of the products by restricting access to the technology to those that clearly showed their dedication to interoperability.