4.0 Solutions Podcast OPC Foundation With the Former President!
Jun 19, 2024
Tom Burke, a longtime industry standards leader and former president of the OPC Foundation, shares his insights on the evolution and challenges of the OPC standards. He discusses the foundation's initial goals and the importance of interoperability, recounts key moments like the formation of the OPC Task Force, and the decision to use OLE for credibility. Burke highlights the complexities of migrating to UA, the fragmentation of standards, and suggests that a simplification and focus on adoption are crucial for the foundation's future.
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How OPC Started Fast
- Tom Burke recounts forming the OPC task force with Rockwell, Opto 22, Fisher-Rosemont and others to build a data-access standard.
- They wrote the first OPC Data Access draft in six months and took it to ISA to form a foundation.
Open Standards Grow Ecosystems
- Early OPC created a cottage industry where third-party OPC servers outperformed vendor-native servers.
- That market outcome proved open standards can accelerate ecosystems beyond original vendor intent.
Why OPC UA Was Invented
- Tom explains the genesis of OPC UA as a push for embedding, structured data and vendor-neutral communication beyond Microsoft stacks.
- He stressed UA was designed so devices could push knowledge downward rather than relying on Windows servers.