One of the big announcements at the SPS Fair last week was the increased cooperation between PI and the OPC Foundation. This is benefitting users moving to Industrie 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things. And the increased cooperation will improve that even more.
Remember the FDI Cooperation? PI, OPC, HART, Fieldbus Foundation, and FDT cooperated to establish a method of combining two divergent asset management technologies into one (FDT and EDDL into FDI). Note that no other Industrial Ethernets participated. So when we say “PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) and OPC Foundation have been working cooperatively for years,” we are very serious. (That’s the opening sentence of the press release from the PI press conference at the SPS Fair.)
Users are already befitting from the complementary nature of PROFINET and OPC UA. See the Automation World article “Standards and Protocols for the Industrial Internet of Things.”
The only thing we could do to help this process along is to make the integration of PROFINET and OPC UA even easier. That’s what this increased level of cooperation will do.
Use PROFINET and OPC UA together today and know that we will make it even easier in the future.
–Carl Henning
Of course, my mind jumps immediately to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups when I hear “Better together.” This old commercial shows why.