This week I spent in Nuremburg, Germany at the SPS Drive Show. It was a three day show going Tuesday through Thursday, November 24 through November 26. Although I missed the Thanksgiving holiday in the US on Thursday, November 26 it was definitely worth it from a professional perspective.
The show was extremely busy all week long with so much traffic in the aisles you couldn't even navigate to get from one place to the other without bumping into someone. The show ran until seven o'clock in the evening on two of the days, and on the last day it ran until five o'clock, and even on the last day at 530 there were people still talking to the vendors.
There was a lot of excitement with respect to OPC UA from the european community specifically with the announcements from the vendors Softing & Unified Automation about their toolkit products and support for non-Microsoft platforms.
The partnership between the OPC Foundation and PLCopen could not have been better with the great demonstration and the amount of traffic that came by the joint between the respective organizations. My good friend, Eelco Van der Wal did an excellent presentation in one of the theaters on the value proposition and technical overview of the OPC UA/PLCopen integration. For those of you that don't know I encourage you to check the OPC Foundation website as well as PLCopen, and check out the white papers, presentations, and the actual draft specification for the information model that was developed as a companion specification for OPC UA. There was also a press conference presented by Eelco Van der Wal and Stefan Hoppe(Beckhoff), that gave over 30 editors an excellent perspective on the importance of collaboration and what was done in a very short period of time both developing the companion specification and the plug-and-play ease of integration between five visualization vendors and five server vendors.(Complete details on who the vendors are can be found on the OPC Foundation website press release).
There were so many booths that had the OPC Foundation logo and were talking about OPC products as part of their portfolio I couldn't begin to mention all of them with the risk of excluding some that I didn't get the opportunity to be aware of during my attempts to navigate through the crowds at the show.
A number of people approach the OPC Foundation booth, and wanted to get engaged in OPC UA adoption from both the end user and vendor perspective. Clearly the demonstration, showing the information model definitely paid off. Now we have both the PLCopen information model and the ABI information model that vendors can implement with OPC UA, and soon to come will be the fruits of the labor from FDI.
On another note I discovered that there were a number of vendors that have implemented OPC UA for EDDL. I saw a demonstration in the ifak booth that shows exactly how it worked with OPC UA essentially plugging in a DTM. It was done in such a fashion that is a toolkit you would be able to take a DTM from any other vendor and instantly have plug-and-play interoperability with any OPC UA client application.
The last thing I will tell you as a couple people approach me and they were talking about building various strange tools inclusive of a Microsoft Excel add-in for OPC UA. Stay tuned for more excitement.