The Sparkplug Compatibility Program is designed to provide integrators and end users with an easy way to procure devices and software products that are compatible with the Sparkplug specification. This ensures that their solutions can be seamlessly integrated into the most common IIoT devices and networks. To be accepted into the program, products must pass a series of open source tests that confirm compliance with the specification. These tests are based on the Sparkplug Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). Successfully tested products are added to the official list of compatible products on the Sparkplug Working Group website. Licensed vendors can also visibly market their compatibility to the outside world by using the Sparkplug Compatible logo.

"MQTT has already established itself as the de facto standard for messaging in the IT and OT industries," said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. "However, it does not specify the content of its payloads, making interoperability in IIoT a challenge. Sparkplug, which acts as the HTML of IIoT, is the industry's best solution to this problem and is already being used in numerous industries. With our new program, industrial companies will know if their suppliers' systems are compatible with Sparkplug."

About Sparkplug and MQTT

The MQTT specification does not prescribe a topic namespace or payload encoding. However, as the IIoT and other architectures that use the publish-subscribe model are adopted by original equipment manufacturers in the industrial environment, which have different topic namespaces and payload encodings, this can lead to impaired interoperability for the end user.

Sparkplug provides an open and freely available specification for the bidirectional communication of Edge of Network (EoN) gateways or native MQTT-enabled devices and MQTT applications within an MQTT infrastructure. MQTT has been proven to be used in a variety of use cases and in a wide range of network topologies. Therefore, the Sparkplug specification includes the following components within an MQTT infrastructure:

• Sparkplug defines an OT-oriented topic namespace.
• Sparkplug defines an OT-oriented payload definition optimized for industrial process variables.
• Sparkplug defines an MQTT session state management for real-time OT SCADA systems.

Organizations wishing to participate in the compatibility program are invited to join the Eclipse Foundation and the Sparkplug Working Group.