An AutomatedBuildings.com interview with Tom Burke of the OPC Foundation and Sean Leonard of Matrikon.http://www.automatedbuildings.com/news/jun08/interviews/080527031642opc.htm
The interesting thing to me is how similar building automation is to industrial automation, yet how "stove piped" their respective products have been. Even the protocols, Leonard mentions "BACnet, Johnson Controls, and LonWorks", are totally different.
The interview rolls the grandiose OPC UA ambition into our sister industries, in addition to the direction you're used to, "up", namely Enterprise Integration. It focuses on OPC campaigning, providing interesting insight on what The Foundation is focusing on.
Good to see things moving forward. Early OPC UA buy in is going to be important.
1 comment:
Thank you very much for this posting of the informative article on where we are trying to go to expand the horizon of OPC into other areas outside of industrial automation. Over the last 14 years that I've been involved in OPC we have seen a lot of opportunities and changes in the industry.
One of the critical things is the consumer electronics market and the expectations that have been set. The whole model is based on multivendor interoperability.
Then you go to other areas like industrial automation and single vendor basically pounds their chest and advocates buying all products from their one company as the preferred integration and interoperability solution.
The question gets raised would you buy all of your products from a single vendor in the consumer electronics world?
The engineers today and the engineers of tomorrow already have their expectations set the multivendor interoperability is an absolute requirement. Therefore the industrial automation single vendor approach is seriously being challenged.
I'm proud to say that OPC is so widely adopted that I can't even keep track of all the shrink-wrapped products that have been built on both Classic OPC and are beginning to be built on the new OPC unified architecture.
Thank you for listening to my comment.
Best regards,
Thomas J. Burke
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