Today the acronym OPC stands for Open Platform Communications.

March 10, 2025 – The OPC Foundation Board of Directors has been expanded to include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Huawei, reflecting the growing role of OPC UA in IT and Industrial Cloud.

The OPC Foundation is a partner of Hannover Messe 2025 (March 31st – April 04th, 2025), and has planned a  series of events during the exhibition week:

·OPCF Press Conference at Hannover Messe on Monday, 31. March 2025 from 10:00am – 10:45pm

·OPCF Field Conference at Hannover Messe on Wednesday, 02. April 2025 from 11.00am – 01:00pm

·OPCF Cloud Conference at Hannover Messe on Wednesday, 02. April 2025 from 01.00pm – 03:00pm

Extending OPC UA down to the field including TSN & 5G.

Learn about OPC UA FX and the impact it has on the future of industrial communication. OPC UA FX helps OPC UA to scale from the field to the cloud by addressing field level communication use cases in an interoperable way with a large ecosystem of field device manufacturers. Listen to industry experts that share insights about the OPC UA FX value propositions. The Agenda is currently under preparation.

OPC is the interoperability standard for the secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space and in other industries. It is platform independent and ensures the seamless flow of information among devices from multiple vendors. The OPC Foundation is responsible for the development and maintenance of this standard.

The OPC standard is a series of specifications developed by industry vendors, end-users and software developers. These specifications define the interface between Clients and Servers, as well as Servers and Servers, including access to real-time data, monitoring of alarms and events, access to historical data and other applications.

When the standard was first released in 1996, its purpose was to abstract PLC specific protocols (such as Modbus, Profibus, etc.), into a standardised interface allowing HMI/SCADA systems to interface with a “middle-man” who would convert generic-OPC read/write requests into device-specific requests and vice-versa. As a result, an entire cottage industry of products emerged allowing end-users to implement systems using best-of-breed products all seamlessly interacting via OPC.

Initially, the OPC standard was restricted to the Windows operating system. As such, the acronym OPC was borne from OLE (object linking and embedding) for Process Control. These specifications, which are now known as OPC Classic, have enjoyed widespread adoption across multiple industries, including manufacturing, building automation, oil and gas, renewable energy and utilities, among others.

With the introduction of service-oriented architectures in manufacturing systems came new challenges in security and data modeling. The OPC Foundation developed the OPC UA specifications to address these needs and at the same time provided a feature-rich technology open-platform architecture that was future-proof, scalable and extensible.