A ballot for this election has been sent to all eligible Designated Representatives on November 3, 2016. Please complete this ballot and send via email before December 2, 2016 at 5:00 pm MST. The candidates for this election are:
Russ Agrusa, ICONICS
Russ Agrusa is the founder, president and CEO of ICONICS, Inc., a world-leading software developer of open-connectivity and standards-based visualization software, HMI/SCADA and MES solutions for manufacturing and building automation. With more than 300,000 installations worldwide, ICONICS counts 70 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies as its customers. Russ has served on the OPC Foundation Board of Directors since 2006.
Matthias Damm, Ascolab
Matthias Damm is founder and executive director of ascolab, the leading consulting and service provider for OPC Unified Architecture. Matthias is member of the OPC Foundation technical advisory council and one of the editors in the OPC UA working group. In addition he is active in several OPC UA collaboration working groups. Matthias has served on the OPC Foundation Board of Directors for the past two years.
Stefan Hoppe, Beckhoff
Stefan Hoppe has been the OPC Foundation Global Vice President for the past two years. Prior to his election to the Board of Directors in 2015, he also served as the President of OPC Foundation Europe for five years while working as the Beckhoff TwinCAT Product Manager. Currently Stefan is the chairman of the PLCopen Working Group and he is responsible for all global marketing activities of the OPC Foundation.
Espen Krogh, Prediktor
Espen Krogh is Chairman of the Board of Prediktor AS and CEO of Prediktor Medical. He joined Prediktor in 1997 and pursued Prediktor membership in the OPC Foundation the same year. Prediktor is based in Norway and has a subsidiary in China. Espen was the key architect behind Prediktor’s industrial IT platform, APIS. The platform incorporated the three central OPC classic protocols DA, HDA and AE and later added broad OPC UA support. Espen has been the principal presenter and creator of Prediktor’s OPC courses. Open-, closed- and university courses have been held regularly since 1998. In the last six years, these courses have emphasized the importance of the semantic modelling capabilities of OPC UA. Through this evangelism, Espen has contributed to the introduction of OPC technology in Oil & Gas, Healthcare and now Medical Devices.
Veronika Schmid-Lutz, SAP
Veronika Schmid-Lutz is Chief Product Owner for manufacturing at SAP AG and in this role is accountable for manufacturing products of SAP. Veronika joined SAP in 1995 as a developer in manufacturing and contributed to several applications in ERP Production Planning (PP) and Advanced Planning & Optimization (APO). After leading various development organizations within SAP Veronika took over the role of Director Solution Management and Development Industry Business Unit Mill Products in 2004. In 2009 Veronika assumed the role of Head of Delivery Management Manufacturing. Veronika has served on the OPC Foundation Board of Directors for the past two years.
Thoralf Schulz, ABB
Thoralf Schulz has a Degree in Electrical Engineering (specialization Information Technology) and also holds a Master of Business Administration. After finishing his studies in Electrical Engineering he joined ABB as a product manager in the area of Process Control Systems. Since then he has held various position in product management, project management and product development within ABB’s process automation business. From 1997 to 2010 he worked for ABB in the US as R&D manager for North America for Process Automation. Since 2010 he has been the global technology manager for Control Technologies in Process Automation located in Mannheim Germany.
Keith Staninger, Rockwell Automation
Keith Staninger, global business director at Rockwell Automation, is responsible for leading the Control & Visualization (CVB) hardware business. His business portfolio includes the controllers, I/O, critical safety control, networking and security, visualization and industrial computers. He is responsible for the strategic direction of the hardware portfolio and leading the hardware product management organization. Keith has a diverse background in his 15 years with Rockwell Automation, which includes field service engineering, global account management, technology strategy and business management. He started his career as an application engineer and progressed through engineering management, global account management and sales leadership. In 2011, he relocated to Cleveland to lead the system and technology strategy team for the architecture products before moving to the business management team.
