The OPC Foundation just got serious about certification. The organization's mission to create seamless connectivity between factory floor hardware and software has been marred by an informal certification process that has resulted in many so-called "OPC-compliant" products that haven't been tested properly. Unfortunately, it's the end users who pay the price for half-baked solutions that must be reconfigured after the fact.
No more. From now on, any vendor claiming "OPC Compliance Certified" must put its product through a rigorous weeklong test at an OPC lab, said Tom Burke, the OPC Foundation's president and executive director.
The first test lab, which took six months to build, opened in Germany in February. Two additional labs, in Japan and North America, will follow over the next year, Burke said. Each lab will be outfitted with certified OPC products hand-picked by the foundation to serve as the baseline for interoperability testing.
One of the first products certified and selected as a technology against which others will be tested is Kepware Technologies' KEPServerEX, which allows communication between equipment and control systems. KEPServerEX supports more than 130 protocols, connects to thousands of devices, and has set the standard in support of OPC for Data Access (OPC DA).