After canceling the SPS, Stefan Hoppe explains to Computer&Automation the current status of the work under the umbrella of the OPC Foundation and begins with an overview: "The OPC Foundation continues to grow to currently over 850 members. We used the last year to establish contacts in various regions: With Mike Clark, we now have a contact in North America, which has led very positively to closer cooperation with CESMII and OPAF; OPC China is on its way to operating as an independent NGO and is showing steady growth; the OPC Hubs founded in Singapore for the ASEAN region and India are increasingly operating independently."

After Field now Cloud

Hoppe is passionate about IT and the cloud. He explains the joint activities of the OPC Foundation with the CESMII (Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute), which this week published the OPC UA Cloud Library as an open source reference implementation and Docker container for self-hosting, and quotes the chairman of the UA Cloud Library working group, Erich Barnstedt(Microsoft): "The UA Cloud Library fills the gap to make OPC UA information models available in the cloud on a global scale without the need to connect to the physical machines. It enables the lookup of information models - sometimes referred to as industrial digital twins - to match them with time series data provided by cloud-based analytics software."

Hoppe complains that there is still room for improvement in terms of OPC UA knowledge for cloud scenarios and reports on further collaborations such as the one with DIN on the topic of 'Cloud Federation'. However, offers such as the OPC UA IIoT starter kit as a low-cost open source entry point on RaspberryPI platforms also help to introduce the topic to experts.
Hoppe also admits that there is no getting around the topic of MQTT: "Yes, MQTT is popular because it is so simple! But as a communication option in the cloud alone, it's just as inadequate as Modbus was at field level back then." His conclusion: "MQTT is the set protocol for cloud connections - but we don't want to have to implement different mappings for every customer application and every cloud provider. That's why we support our customers with a standardized semantic information connector for the cloud - and that's exactly what the solution with OPC UA PubSub over MQTT is."

Looking to the future of cloud landscapes, Hoppe concludes: "Why do some people not believe that OPC UA technology will scale to the cloud, as we set out to do many years ago?" The President is positioning his OPC Foundation much more strongly for the future in the cloud environment. In December, the OPC Lab will therefore hold its first plugfest for the first available UA-over-MQTT publishers such as Beckhoff, Siemens and Kuka. Hoppe is delighted with the positive feedback from AWS, GoogleCloud, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Siemens Mindsphere and SAP. "Nowhere else in the world do these companies come together for standardization with the OT world in such a concentrated way," Hoppe is pleased to say and is thinking aloud about an 'OPC UA Cloud Initiative' à la Field Level Communications Initiative.