OPC Foundation 2008 Status Update 

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Happy New Year !

I wanted to start the year off right, and start the process of communicating what are some of the important events and happenings from the OPC Foundation in 2008.

The vision of the OPC Foundation for 2008 and beyond is really to provide specifications and technology to facilitate a service-oriented architecture focused at secure reliable interoperability that is platform-independent.

To put it in more simple terms we want to provide a standardized reliable services architecture that encapsulates all the existing OPC functionality from the mid-90s through today that was deployed as OPC COM/DCOM products.  It's all about integration of data/information from devices and applications at the lowest tiers(and it keeps getting lower as the cost of devices and the functionality they are capable of doing changes) to the highest tier in the enterprise.

Okay let's try and make this even simpler.  OPC wants to be the USB for plug-and-play interoperability between anything !  We are talking about providing the services necessary for discovering and exchanging data/information between multivendor components, where a component could be hardware or software...

Success is measured by the level of adoption of the technology.  OPC is not interested in developing specifications that are not worth the paper they're printed on.  In order to get successful adoption of the technology OPC has taken on the strategy of providing product quality reference implementations that go far beyond where the paper specifications begin.  Working with a volunteer army of dedicated resources from over 50 companies in our industry is a daunting task.  But one of the best strategies to facilitate vendor adoption of the technology is to make the companies an integral part of the development team.

So what is the OPC Foundation primary focus for 2008?

To provide the best-of-breed specifications and technology, that all vendors will be able to easily adopt as standard technology to be deployed into real-world products that exceed the end user's expectations for interoperability and integration in a multivendor scenario.

First it's about completing the delivery and facilitating deployment of the OPC UA specifications and corresponding multiplatform reference implementations.  It's about building a distribution channel to maintain and support the deliverables of the OPC Foundation providing product quality deliverables to facilitate plug-and-play interoperability of the OPC UA technology by the OPC Foundation members.

We are also continuing to focus on certification.  One of the top projects that we have on the horizon to be completed and opened this year is an independent certification test lab in Europe on February 1, 2008 followed by an independent certification test lab to be opened in North America on or before July 1, 2008.  We are also currently looking at an opportunity to open an independent certification test lab in Asia.  The independent certification test lab is based on the popular successful independent certification test labs of the industrial Ethernet consortiums.

Collaboration with other consortiums in the interest of providing a solid infrastructure for multivendor interoperability for complex information data models is far more than being strategic to the OPC Foundation and the other consortiums. 

We continue to work proactively with EDDL/FDT/FDI, and we currently are in the final stages of rolling out OPC UA with EDDL allowing for seamless configuration, diagnostic and runtime operation for devices that reside on the industrial networking technology of FF, Profibus/Profinet and Hart.  This is a very important collaboration between OPC and these respective three organizations that provide a best-of-breed networking technology in our industry.

We are actively working with our collaboration focused on the enterprise information integration.  This is called OpenO&M, which is a partnership/collaboration between OPC, Mimosa, ISA, and Oagi.  There are vendors and end users already in phases of deploying total business solutions based on this collaborative effort, leveraging multivendor products in a plug-and-play scenario.

 
Posted by Thomas Burke on 16-Jan-08
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Comments


the USB for plug-and-play interoperability between anything? commented on Monday, 21-Jan-2008
Tom - this vision would be so much more convincing if you could find a way to make the specs open again - like the USB specs! I firmly believe the time has gone when closed specs could command that level of support. The original OPC would not have been such a dramatic success if the specs had been restricted, and neither would USB. I encourage you to raise your horizons and envision the possibilities that open OPC specifications would allow.

UA - will it ever become a success commented on Tuesday, 22-Jan-2008
As we are all still waiting to see some real UA based applications I want to comment on the current OPC status. When I first heard about UA - i thought it was THE idea for integration industrial automation. Meanwhile I don't believe anymore that UA will ever become a success. There seem to be two major problems: 1) It seems to be much to complicated (taking the long time to develop an initial stable version). Industry adoption will take even much longer (COM based OPC itself needed quite a while until it was accpted as a widespread standard). 2) The community is restricted to OPC members. If the goal is to achieve fast and widespread usage of UA OPC should make the standards public available and even license the source as open source. (Certification still could be used to garantee the required interoperability and stability). I believe that opening the standards would allow a public discussion about the promised benefits of UA and this would lead to the required pressure from industry to adopt UA. The benefit for the OPC members should be to provide more capable and robust applications their customers, instead of owning a wonderful proprietary technology hidden in some shelve. Just some crumbs from an early COM OPC adaptor.

UA - will it ever become a success commented on Tuesday, 22-Jan-2008
As we are all still waiting to see some real UA based applications I want to comment on the current OPC status. When I first heard about UA - i thought it was THE idea for integration industrial automation. Meanwhile I don't believe anymore that UA will ever become a success. There seem to be two major problems: 1) It seems to be much to complicated (taking the long time to develop an initial stable version). Industry adoption will take even much longer (COM based OPC itself needed quite a while until it was accpted as a widespread standard). 2) The community is restricted to OPC members. If the goal is to achieve fast and widespread usage of UA OPC should make the standards public available and even license the source as open source. (Certification still could be used to garantee the required interoperability and stability). I believe that opening the standards would allow a public discussion about the promised benefits of UA and this would lead to the required pressure from industry to adopt UA. The benefit for the OPC members should be to provide more capable and robust applications their customers, instead of owning a wonderful proprietary technology hidden in some shelve. Just some crumbs from an early COM OPC adaptor.

UA - will it ever become a success commented on Tuesday, 22-Jan-2008
As we are all still waiting to see some real UA based applications I want to comment on the current OPC status. When I first heard about UA - i thought it was THE idea for integration industrial automation. Meanwhile I don't believe anymore that UA will ever become a success. There seem to be two major problems: 1) It seems to be much to complicated (taking the long time to develop an initial stable version). Industry adoption will take even much longer (COM based OPC itself needed quite a while until it was accpted as a widespread standard). 2) The community is restricted to OPC members. If the goal is to achieve fast and widespread usage of UA OPC should make the standards public available and even license the source as open source. (Certification still could be used to garantee the required interoperability and stability). I believe that opening the standards would allow a public discussion about the promised benefits of UA and this would lead to the required pressure from industry to adopt UA. The benefit for the OPC members should be to provide more capable and robust applications their customers, instead of owning a wonderful proprietary technology hidden in some shelve. Just some crumbs from an early COM OPC adaptor.

RE: the USB for plug-and-play interoperability between anything? commented on Tuesday, 29-Jan-2008
With respect to making the specifications open to non-members, I totally understand, and for the most part agree with you. When we started OPC in 1995 it was all about doing everything in our power to get the technology adopted. We let everyone and their brother go try their hand at developing an OPC something. Life was good until we realized the complications we had with companies not designing and rather taking the approach of hacking to get a simple OPC component out in the marketplace, and the effects that it had with respect to lack of interoperability and reliability with other products from vendors that lived and breathe the true meaning of OPC. If I had a dollar every time someone said that they were having complications of reliability and instability with some vendors OPC implementation, and when some of these people couldn't even spell OPC, I would be spending all my time counting money... I am most interested in getting OPC UA adopted and for companies that want the OPC specifications without the cost of becoming a member of the OPC Foundation we are more than happy to do that on the exception basis. I just don't want to have a free-for-all and end up with anyone in their brother again trying to build OPC UA products in ending up with chaos in the marketplace with products that far fall short of the end-user expectation of high quality and reliability in their quest for multivendor integrated interoperable solutions. But to further this point I have been working on making our OPC UA specifications available to nonmembers, returning to the state of how we initially developed OPC and allowing anyone without being known to the OPC Foundation to download the specifications, and try their hand at building an OPC UA-based product. The only requirement we have is to create an account on the OPC Foundation website, whereby we can use your e-mail address to come back to you later on to tell you that we've uploaded or made changes to OPC specifications or OPC deliverables. Further to this point we are currently investigating an opportunity where we will take our reference implementations which are far more than just sample code than we've ever done before and provide a solid infrastructure for open sourcing all the deliverables to both members and nonmembers of the OPC Foundation. Stay tuned as we continue to work out the details of making that a reality. I'm very interested in your thoughts and feedback to make sure that the OPC Foundation is doing the right set of things. We measure success by the level of adoption of the technology, and obviously doing everything we can to do facilitate everyone successfully building quality products based on the OPC Technology. At the same time it's very important that we have a strategy that allows us to get the highest quality products built by our vendors and corresponding system integrators. Part of our strategy is all about certification so that may be our best avenue to still get the technology adopted in an open market and then to certify the products for the best of breed quality reliable products to be deployed in the field.
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