I'm very excited and proud to announce that the OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab will be  opening in 5 weeks (September 1, 2010) in Scottsdale Arizona at the OPC Foundation headquarters; and to acknowledge the great work that has been going on to development of OPC UA certification tools.  The OPC Certification effort is being led by my distinguished colleague Nathan Pocock who is the Director of Certification for the OPC Foundation. 

The OPC UA certification team is a dedicated team of volunteers that focused on the development of test cases and test scripts based on intense analysis of the OPC UA specifications in order to provide a very robust certification tool and certification process to enable all of our vendors to certify their products. 

Now is the time for all of our vendors to schedule a time to have their products tested and certified.   I encourage you to check out the OPC Foundation website compliance material @OPC Compliance.

One of the significant benefits of testing in the OPC Foundation Certification Lab is the objective testing that is performed with the compliance testing tools as well as validating interoperability against a slate of reference products. Products that pass through a Certification Test Lab demonstrate the highest quality in interoperability and robustness, which end-users demand.

We are actively soliciting companies to provide reference products that other products would be measured against with respect to interoperability. We provide some significant benefits to those companies that provide reference products for the OPC Foundation to use in the lab. (If you are interested contact myself or Nathan for more information about how your company can take advantage of this unique opportunity)