Why should system integrators care about this technology? Would deploying this newfangled technology actually help lower expenses, increase revenue, or make life simpler for customers?
Everyone’s talking about connectivity and interoperability with the explosion of devices that keeps rolling out on a daily basis. The value proposition from a business perspective for a system integrator is to keep their customers happy by leveraging technology innovations that make sense to increase the bottom line. Providing information about the operation allows for better ways to do condition-based monitoring and preventive maintenance operations. Providing information about their production and manufacturing is required to make sure that you have all the necessary resources to build your product. Putting information at the customer’s fingertips allows them to make both automated and manual decisions more effectively and efficiently.
But connectivity is not enough to achieve information integration across devices. You need the ability to have connectivity where the data is under stored or standardized or normalized across disparate systems. The data must be generated and consumed in a way the allows both the syntax and semantics of the data to be generically understood across devices, and in a synchronized fashion.
Clients of system integrators, and system integrators themselves, really want information that does not require deciphering mounds of data! By having standardization of the data models and the corresponding metadata behind the data you can actually do intelligent automated analysis, producing consumable information that actually makes business sense. The OPC Foundation is working with a multitude of other standards organizations to achieve information integration through normalization and analysis of standardized data models. Whether you’re dealing with chemical, pharmaceutical, petrochemical or any type of process control or factory automation application, the OPC Foundation provides the complete infrastructure for multivendor, multiplatform, secure and reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the cloud.
For more information, check out the www.OPCfoundation.org.