Hanover, April 17, 2023 – The digital association Bitkom e.V. and the OPC Foundation today announced a collaboration at Hannover Messe 2023. Together, they want to contribute to the establishment and implementation of interoperable interfaces in the context of Industrie 4.0 in a constructive exchange of views. The overall goal of the cooperation is to formulate requirements for interoperability with the digital economy to jointly promote harmonization efforts for machine and plant engineering.
“Lack of interoperability is a key barrier when exchanging data and information between different industrial platforms. OPC UA is an open and vendor-independent standard for the interoperability of systems and devices in industrial and automation technology. Especially in the context of data sharing and thus of data ecosystems, OPC UA can contribute to a uniform standard for the transmission of data between different systems in the context of Industrie 4.0. We are therefore very pleased that we are now entering into a direct exchange with the OPC Foundation through the MoU,” says Susanne Dehmel, member of the Bitkom management board.
“Interoperability is important to ensure seamless collaboration between different systems. The OPC Foundation manages a global standard for secure industrial interoperability for information modeling and data exchange in the context of industry that scales from OT to the IT world. As part of the collaboration with Bitkom, we want to ensure that industrial data aspects can be modeled quickly and accurately, taking into account all the needs of the IT world,” said Stefan Hoppe, President of the OPC Foundation.
Bitkom e.V. and the OPC Foundation will work together on the following topics:
- Promotion of interoperability and other elements
- Discussion of interoperability requirements together
- Derivation of actual interoperability and standardization needs based on specific use cases or business models
- Input on standardization requirements
- Promotion of security and trustworthiness
- Understanding aspects of open source and the relation to reference implementations
- Marketing activities to communicate the collaboration
Stefan Hoppe, OPC Foundation and Angelina Marko, Bitkom e.V.
Bitkom and OPC Foundation intend to share information on the above topics, host exchange formats and establish contacts with stakeholders to support productive collaboration.
About the Bitkom e.V.
Bitkom represents more than 2,000 member companies from the digital economy. They generate annual sales of 190 billion euros with IT and telecommunications services alone, including exports of 50 billion euros. Bitkom members employ more than 2 million people in Germany. Members include more than 1,000 SMEs, over 500 startups and almost all global players. They offer software, IT services, telecommunications or Internet services, manufacture devices and components, are active in the field of digital media or are otherwise part of the digital economy. 80 percent of the companies are headquartered in Germany, 8 percent each come from Europe and the USA, and 4 percent from other regions. Bitkom promotes and drives the digital transformation of the German economy and advocates broad social participation in digital developments. The goal is to make Germany a leading global digital location.
Find more information https://www.bitkom.org/EN
About the OPC Foundation
The OPC Foundation has been promoting the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standard since 1996. As an advocate and steward of these specifications, the OPC Foundation’s mission is to help vendors, end users and software developers achieve interoperability of their manufacturing and automation resources. The OPC Foundation’s mission is to provide the best specifications, technologies, processes, and certification to ensure interoperability between different vendors and different platforms securely and reliably from embedded systems to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation supports over 920 members from around the world in industrial automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical, and smart energy in achieving this goal.
Find more information www.opcfoundation.org
Media Contacts:
Merle Wiez
Press and Public Relations
Bitkom e.V.
m.wiez@bitkom.org
Stefan Hoppe
President and Executive Director
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@OPCFoundation.org
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