With the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie4.0, the need for secure enterprise wide data visibility has fast become a key requirement for companies to remain competitive. While many of the new IIoT technologies coming from the IT sector (machine learning, big data analytics, and direct-to-cloud communications) promise great benefits to the discrete, process, and hybrid industries – the reality is that facilitating  IIoT era access to OT data systems requires solutions that: 

• Adhere to IT cyber security best practices since security threads continue to grow  
  
• Comply with  OT best practices to maximize up-time, quality, efficiency, and safety 
• Enable new technologies to be phased in while maximizing and modernizing existing infrastructure  
• Simplify architectures to reduce cost and training needed to maintain them 
• Express data context in a common format across 3rd party systems 

This presentation introduces the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard from the OPC Foundation, discusses how the standard meets the above requirements, and touches on how OPC UA has come to play a central role in virtually every IIoT/I4.0 standard globally.  

Darek Kominek
Marketing Director at Matrikon (Honeywell)

As the Marketing Director at Matrikon (Honeywell), Darek helps vendors, system integrators, and end-users best leverage Matrikon OPC UA technology as the data connectivity foundation for their products, projects, and infrastructures respectively. He also leads the Matirkon Solutions Consulting team that develops OPC based solution architectures and to assists with Proof of Concept (PoC) projects.