The OPC Foundation Board of Directors is at full strength with the December 1st election of new board members Matthias Damm and Stefan Hoppe and the re-election of board member Russ Agrusa, for the 2015-2016 term. “We’re delighted to welcome Matthias and Stefan and to welcome back Russ to the OPC board. Each has been instrumental in shaping the development of OPC over many years and we look forward to their continuing support and guidance in the work of the OPC Foundation,” said OPC Foundation President Thomas J. Burke. “They bring many years of leadership and experience to their roles as board members.”
Matthias Damm is founder and executive director of ascolab, a leading consulting and service provider for OPC United Architecture. He is a member of the OPC Foundation Technical Advisory Council and he is active in several OPC UA collaboration working groups.
Damm is chairman of both the OPC Device Integration working group and the OPC UA for BACnet working group. He also serves as editor for the OPC UA/IEC 61131-1 (PLCopen) working group. He supports other working groups, including OPC UA for AutoID, OPC UA for Automation ML and OPC UA for FDT, as an OPC UA expert.
Damm, who formed ascolab with two colleagues in 2003, worked as team leader of an OPC development team at Siemens Industrial Services. He earned his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Schweinfurt, Germany.
Stefan Hoppe has been president of OPC Europe within the OPC Foundation since January 2010. During the first OPC Unified Architecture (UA) developer’s conference in 2006, he proposed the design of PLCopen/OPC UA Client Function Blocks and he was named chairman of the PLCopen/OPC Foundation common working group in 2008. He led a team of competitive companies working collaboratively to develop the specification, which was released in March 2014.
Since 1995, Hoppe has worked for Beckhoff Automation, starting as a software developer in the TwinCAT software group and implementing the OPC-DA Server into TwinCAT. Today he is a lead TwinCAT product manager with a focus on TwinCAT 3, connectivity and embedded software products.
A graduate from the University of Dortmund, Germany with a degree in electrical engineering, Hoppe worked on automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) at Fraunhofer Institute IML, Dortmund, before joining Beckhoff. Microsoft has awarded him with MVP (most valuable professional) status for embedded software since 2009 for his role as a speaker at international developer conferences.
Russ Agrusa is 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.
Agrusa started ICONICS in 1986 to take advantage of the emerging PC-based automation market. Recognizing that OPC was central to the future of automation, he led the company to produce the first commercially available HMI/SCADA “OPC-to-the-core” based product. He has been a member of the board of directors of the OPC Foundation since 2003.
He began his career at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and then joined the Foxboro Company, where he led HMI product development for the Foxboro Intelligent Architecture series distributed control systems.
Agrusa, Damm and Hoppe join Thomas Hahn, Siemens AG, Ziad Kaakani, Honeywell Process Solutions, Nobuaki Konishi, Yokogawa, and OPC Foundation President Thomas Burke on the Board of Directors.
The OPC Foundation, founded in 1996 and dedicated to interoperability in automation and enterprise computing, is an independent, non-profit organization that comprises leading manufacturers and solution providers in factory and process automation as well as enterprise solutions. The OPC Foundation’s charter is to develop worldwide industry standards for data transfer offering multivendor interoperability and seamless connectivity of devices, systems, networks and enterprise computing solutions. Volunteers from more than 400 members worldwide undertake development and publication of specifications.
