OPC is the interoperability standard for secure and reliable information exchange in industrial automation and the enterprise. The original OPC specification was developed in the mid-1990s by a group of automation industry vendors to standardize data exchange between software applications and industrial automation hardware devices.
The OPC specifications define an interface between clients and servers, and servers-to-servers, so system components like PLCs, HMIs and any OPC-aware device can share data without having to develop custom software device interface applications.