April 28, 2016 — At Hannover Messe 2016 Microsoft Corp. announced it is working with the OPC Foundation to enable industrial Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios through interoperability between the millions of applications and industrial equipment, compliant with the OPC UA standard. Microsoft will further enable its industrial IoT customers to connect a range of manufacturing equipment and software that can span decades of investment with extended support of the OPC UA open source software stack.
Interoperability between devices and assets is critical for today’s factories, which are increasingly bringing new and legacy systems online and modernizing their plants and facilities. OPC UA provides a standardized communication, security, and metadata and semantics abstraction for the majority of industrial equipment. It also serves as a gateway to cloud-enabled industrial equipment, including data and device management, insights, and machine learning capabilities for equipment that was not designed with these capabilities built in.
Microsoft’s support for the OPC UA open source software stack spans its IoT offerings, from local connectivity with Windows devices to cloud connectivity via the Microsoft Azure platform. Integration with Azure IoT allows customers to easily send OPC UA telemetry data to the Azure cloud, as well as to command and control their OPC UA devices remotely from the Azure cloud. In addition, Windows 10 devices running the Universal Windows Platform can connect and openly communicate with other IoT devices via OPC UA.
“OPC UA is widely recognized as a key communication technology for the Industry 4.0 initiative,” said Thomas J. Burke, OPC Foundation president and executive director. “Microsoft’s support for standards that foster IoT innovation, and specifically for OPC and OPC UA, results in easy, direct and more secure communications from programmable logic controllers on the shop floor to the top-floor world of IT.”