June 25, 2020 – The OPC Foundation welcomed Google Cloud as the latest addition to its 773 member community. Google Cloud delivers enterprise-grade cloud solutions that leverage Google’s technology with interoperability, infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions. In line with its Industrie 4.0 effort, Google Cloud will use the OPC UA open standard to incorporate machine data into analytics and AI solutions. Because of its versatility and manufacturer independence, OPC UA is already used today in many different industrial applications.
However, OPC UA is more than a data exchange protocol in the traditional sense. Instead, OPC UA is an industrial, protocol-agnostic framework for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0 that contains mechanisms for secure, reliable, manufacturer and platform-independent information exchange, as well as options for semantic information modeling and self-description of devices. OPC UA scales from the sensor across all levels to MES / ERP and also into the cloud including cyber security mechanism built from start.
