Microsoft and OPC Foundation: New open platform support for manufacturers
I recently shared with you the exciting announcement we made with the OPC Foundation at Hannover Messe 2016 around our extended support for the OPC standard across IoT offerings, including Azure IoT Suite and Universal Windows Platform.
Today marks an exciting milestone in our open platform journey with the news that Microsoft will contribute a .NET Standard reference stack to the OPC Foundation GitHub open-source. This stack has the benefit of working on all common software platforms in market today, allowing the creation of OPC UA clients, servers and of course “OPC Publishers” on Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, iOS, Linux and Android platforms.
As we continue our support for manufacturers with their Industry 4.0 initiatives, these developments are an important step forward in terms of digitally assisting production, maintenance, and service workers across all device form factors, regardless of platform, with broad access to relevant insights and collaboration tools. This has the potential to vastly increase the share of OPC-enabled devices, open up scenarios in new verticals that leverage powerful capabilities in the cloud, and create a virtuous beneficial cycle across a broad ecosystem.
I encourage you to read more about this exciting news on Sam George’s blog here.
Twitter: @_rohitb
