OPC is making the connection

At the end of the day it is all about connectivity which means having disparate systems being able to communicate to one another and share data.
That was the message today at the MatrikonOPC user group meeting in Houston.
“Reliability, security and total interoperability has to happen,” said Tom Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. “We want you to be able to look at information that allows you to work more efficiently.”
“The goal is to provide the transport to move the information from the factory floor to the enterprise,” Burke said.
The main mission for manufacturers these days is to garner as much information from the factory floor as possible. Engineers on the floor cannot live in isolation.
Burke harkened back to the days when the fieldbus wars were gong on. There were at least 8 different protocols in one standard to get devices to talk to one another.
“In 2001, I wanted to do away with the fieldbus wars. I was naive. Now we are much closer to doing that (with OPC).”
OPC continues its growth trend and Sean Leonard, director of OPC at Matrikon said this is a global movement.
“OPC is not limited to just the United States. It is being used around the world. In addition, all different industries are using OPC.”
OPC is a series of standards specifications. The first standard (originally called the OPC Specification and now called the Data Access Specification) resulted from the collaboration of automation suppliers working in cooperation with Microsoft. Originally based on Microsoft's OLE COM (component object model) and DCOM (distributed component object model) technologies, the specification defined a standard set of objects, interfaces and methods for use in process control and manufacturing automation applications to facilitate interoperability. Essentially, the technology allows different systems to talk to one another to provide data.
In today’s legacy environment, where different systems must be able to talk and share information, “OPC allows for multi vendor interconnectivity,” Leonard said.