Based on the feedback I get both on and off-line, the audience of the blog really consists of two main groups of OPC users.  Those that know OPC and are interested in how others are using OPC in their systems and keeping abreast of what’s happeing with OPC and OPC UA.  The other large segment are those new to OPC and looking for general information or an answer to a specific question.  To better address the needs of the latter group, we’ve added a new resource section to the blog “Ask The Experts”

Here’s the list of the first ten questions, and others will be added over the next little while.

1. What do the letters “O-P-C” stand for?
2. What is OPC?
3. What is OPC UA?
4. Because OPC is a standard, does that imply that all OPC Servers for a specific protocol are the same?
5. What size is a typical OPC tag structure byte?
6. Where do OPC timestamps they come from?
7. What is the difference between OPC and DCOM?
8. What is the “6 Minute DCOM Timeout”?
9. How does OPC compare to DDE?
10. Can I use OPC or DDE on Windows Vista?

As always if you have any OPC questions, drop me a comment or an e-mail.

I’m talking about the service (or lack thereof) provided by United Air on my recent trip to the OPC Expo.  (Shame you if you thought I was talking about OPC UA Services.  They are of course robust, reliable and secure. OPC UA is definitely not broken J )

I’m usually not a ‘ranter’ by nature, but I recently watched saw the video of Seth Godin’s talk “This is Broken” and this experience comes hard on the heels of my last air travel experience.  Here’s the story

<rant>  My flight to San Jose involved a connection in Denver.  When I checked in at Edmonton I was told ‘all connections out of Denver are on-time’ (this was at 3:00 pm).  As we began our extremely turbulent approach into Denver around 5:00 pm they announced the San Jose flight would be leaving from gate 15, but please check the monitors for conformation. All well and good so far.

Upon arriving at the airport we all dutifully checked the monitors to find that none of the departure gate information had been updated since around 12:00 that afternoon, and many of the flights listed had been delayed (primarily due to the Tornado like weather patterns we rollercoaster-ed through on the way in).  None of this info seems to be sent to incoming planes or departure cites, who brightly tell you everything is running on-time.  Broken.

The information monitors had obviously been down for 5 hours.  There were no personnel available at the monitors to give passengers information or direct them to manned service desks or information centers.  Broken.

Lacking any better info, I headed to gate 15 as announced on my incoming flight.  Gate 15 was waiting to board a delayed flight to Oakland, and the desk personnel only knew the San Jose flight was not leaving from this gate, but could not say what gate it was supposed to leave from.  Broken.   I randomly choose a check-in desk along the concourse and waited in line to find the San Jose flight would depart Gate 38 at 8:30  (it was supposed to be a 6:45 departure).  No reason was given (Broken) but everyone assumed it was weather related.  We can’t control the weather, so we settled in to wait out the delay.

15 minutes past our posted boarding time, the gate announced the in bound plane was delayed but would arrive in 15 minutes, be serviced and ready to board. Yeah. The plane pulls up to the gate, passengers are disembarking, everyone starts packing up to board.  8:35 the gate announces.  The flight from San Jose will NOT depart from Gate 38, it has been moved to Gate 57!!!!  Please go there now to board.  End of transmission.  So VERY broken.

The sheep herd shuffles angrily to our THIRD gate of the day.  Gate 57 displays San Jose. Yeah.  No one is boarding. 20 minutes later a new announcement.  “Maintenance crew is still working on the oil pressure problem, and will make a decision at 9:30”. End of transmission. SO un-freaking-believably Broken.  ‘Still working on the oil pressure problem?’  What oil problem? My connection has been delayed almost 3 hours now and why are we not boarding the plane at gate 38? What does ‘make a decision’ mean? What is the alternative here?  The Staff leave the service desk.  Broken.

9:30 comes.  No announcement.  No desk staff.  Broken.  9:45 the phone rings repeatly at the service desk.  9:50 a new announcement.  “Maintenance crew is still working.  A new decision will be made at 10:30”.  Need I say Broken?  Is it realistic to believe they will fix the problem they have been working on presumably for hours in the next 15 minutes?  Do I want to fly on a plane with an ‘under pressure’ fix? Is a new plane coming?  Broken.

10:45 we see the plane roll away from the gate. No announcement.  11:00 a new plane rolls in.  (Obviously the decision was made a while back, but no one though to inform the muttering, exasperated crowd in the waiting room.)  Finally an announcement.  We have a plane, and will begin boarding immediately. We will endeavor to get you underway as soon as possible.  Weak cheer from the room.  Everyone scurries to line up (being a pessimist I keep reading in my ‘comfy’ chair).  10 minutes go by and no one has been allowed to board yet.  Give me a B. Give me a R…..

New announcement.  “The original seating chart was for an Airbus 319.  This plane is a Airbus 320 and the seat do not match exactly.  We can not board until we receive the new seating chart.  Hopefully it will only take a few minutes”.  I-am-now-climbing-the-bell-tower-Broken.   Could you not keep track of seats with a blank piece of paper and a Sharpie!!!.  

Another 10 minutes go by, and they begin calling passengers to the front desk for their new seat assignments.  At 11:45 pm my 6:45 connection left Denver.

Decending into San Jose, an announcement was made that they were sorry for the delay and said that we could go on line to www.united.com/appreciation and choose a gift to best suit our needs.  As I watched people fumbling for pens or looking thoughtfully to the ceiling trying to memorize the URL, all I could think to myself was… Broken.  Could you not have a flyer, business card… a sticky note with that generic info on it?

When I finally got the time to go on-line, use Google to find the UA site (it’s united.com not unitedair.com), misspell ‘appriecation’ and be told the website has been reorganized and the page does not exist I finally found the entry site.  After the page froze up and crashed on me three times.   I got to experience one more time how Broken service can be.

</rant>

If you’re still with me after that tirade.  Let me share some thoughts on how vitally important good customer service is for any business, particularly in today’s environment.  Here are a couple of e-mails that have crossed my desk about our MatrikonOPC support staff in the last couple of weeks.

“<Customer Name> and the Project team are very grateful for the amazing support you and everyone at Matrikon have provided us.  We couldn’t of been happier with the quality of support that both Chris and Jeff provided us.  For a multitude of reasons we were in a very difficult position with the state of the OPC architecture between our Servers, both Chris and Jeff did an excellent job of using their expertise with the Matrikon products and with OPC in general to come up with a solution to fix the architecture , implement that solution, and then to convince the customer that we were implementing the correct solution. “

“Working on the first activities of our program implementation, we have had issues connecting our <operations> platform to the Historian and therefore have contacted your support in Europe.

It is unusual to send this but I wanted to inform you that we were impressed by the quality of support and high professional expertise we received from your colleague, Heiko.

The quality of his intervention has not only helped us resolve our current connection problem quickly, but has also comforted us in the choice we made to purchase Historian components for our <project> exclusively from Matrikon.”

A far cry from the “God, I hate this airline” , “I swear I am NEVER flying this airline again” and “<Dripping Sarcasm> Imagine that… A United Air flight that’s delayed”  I overhead during my extended layover in Denver.

Choosing a product or service is a whole lot more than product features or price.  Knowing that you will taken care of before, during and after your decision to buy is extremely important to all of us.  I’m glad I work for an OPC vendor that knows and embraces that.  

Got an OPC question?  Or even a question on connectivity or another vendors product?  You can probably find the answer at our MatrikonOPC Support portal, and if not someone can find out for you.

Just got back from the OPC Expo at Connectivity Week in Santa Clara.  It was a good opportunity to have some good conversations on a wide range of topics.  Some great presentations on how OPC, in particular OPC UA, fits into the SmartGrid story and plays in the building automation space.  One of the hot topics around connecting the grid is of course security, and the presentation by Tyler Williams of Wurldtech on their Achilles Industrial Cyber Security Certification Program generated some good discussions.  This is the Achilles certification program that our MatrikonOPC products are following.  As SmartGrid rolls out, the focus on communications security will become increasingly important.

I spent a lot of time talking with folks on the exhibit floor.  MatrikonOPC shared a booth with Cimetrics, whom we partnered with for the development of our OPC Server for BACnet.  What I did find surprising at the conference, is how many folks in the building automation space are still unaware of OPC and all that it offers.  Many of the larger vendors certainly know of OPC, and anyone who’s business models span across industry verticals are on board, but the message needs better penetration at the ‘grass roots’ level.  I suspect this lack is mainly due to the image of OPC as a ‘Microsoft’ technology. As OPC UA continues to gain adoption, the cross-platform and web service aspects of the architecture will begin to resound more in this area.

In the meantime, those in the building automation space that ARE aware of OPC have a leg up in connecting their applications to the enterprise, using solutions like those outlined in Extending Building Automation Data Visibility Using OPC.  OPC awareness in this space is growing rapidly, and with more OPC UA products coming out every day, and increased focus on energy optimization expect the pace to get even quicker. 

If you are one of those folks standing still, you might want to think about getting a move on to OPC J

I hope to see many of you at the OPC Expo at Connectivity Week, Santa Clara, California: June 8-11, 2009.

ConnectivityWeek 2009 is the only event focused on the intersection of energy and information technology.  IndConn the Industrial Automation is part of ConnectivityWeek a focus on the application of information technology for solving critical energy issues across all segments of industries. The OPC Expo is an opportunity for end-users and vendors explore the interoperability possibilities between industrial automation and other domains , including building automation, security and the smart grid initiative. 

I’ll be doing presentations on OPC UA, the role of OPC in Wireless applications as well as Enterprise integration.  See you then!

Ever get the feeling the world is slowly breaking down around you? I was travelling last week and got to spend an extra four hours at the airport because the landing gear on my intended flight ‘wasn’t behaving as it should’.  Last night I sat down to watch the CBC News and Peter Mansbridge said they had “a massive computer breakdown at the CBC, right across the system right across the country”.  Not to mention exploding mining operations.  Is it because the economy is bad and no one is paying to fix anything or is it that companies just don’t know when things are going to break?

Why isn’t everyone using OPC to monitor their assets?  Would the CBC computers have gone down if they had read “Maintaining Healthy IT Assets”?  Or at least they could have considered redundancy solutions like those outlined in “The Power of Prevention”.

Here is the next installment of ‘Coffee Break OPC’.  OPC is used for system connectivity in many aspects of the Oil and Gas Industry.  Let’s take a look at how OPC can help in the downstream oil business.

GoAnimate.com: 02. Coffee Break OPC - Downstream Oil and Gas by MatrikonOPC

Hope you learned something new with your brew. Anyone who wants to follow up on the topics presented in a bit more detail might be interested in:

Look before You Leap: Implementing Successful OPC Projects

Creating Secure OPC Architectures

Get Closer To History With OPC: OPC Technology Helps Maximize Return on Process Historian Assets

Just saw this announcement on the Register, Iron-pumping Microsoft SQL Server due this summer regarding the new SQL server, code-named Kilimanjaro.  One of the most popular topics on the blog is OPC vs SQL.  A common argument in the whole ‘historian or relational database’ discussion is the speed of SQL databases.  Seems like these new puppies have lots of power. The technical gap between historian and relation databases gets smaller every day. Also, there are many folk who end up using both.  When relational databases and plant data historians are deployed together, companies have access to all the data they need to improve performance, integrate the plant floor with business systems, and reduce the cost of meeting industry regulations. If you’re using OPC HDA to pull data out of your system, it doesn’t really matter what’s under the hood.  Anyone pumping up their relational databases this summer might want to look at how OPC fits into their plans.  Just because the new database is codenamed after a mountain, doesn’t mean implementing OPC connections should be like climbing one!

OPC Gets Relational with Databases: Accessing SQL Server, Oracle and other Relational Databases Using OPC

Will you be attending Connectivity Week, Santa Clara, California: June 8-11, 2009?  If so, make sure to attend the OPC Expo.  (I’ll be speaking and am looking to pack the room with an attentive OPC audience J  )

ConnectivityWeek 2009 is the only event focused on the intersection of energy and information technology.  IndConn the Industrial Automation is part of ConnectivityWeek a focus on the application of information technology for solving critical energy issues across all segments of industries. The OPC Expo is an opportunity for end-users and vendors explore the interoperability possibilities between industrial automation and other domains , including building automation, security and the smart grid initiative.  Read more on the OPC Expo here

If you’re looking for a primer on using OPC with Building Automation, give “If These Walls Could Talk” a try.

Speaking of expos, save the date Aug 21^st, for the MatrikonOPC Expo in Singapore.

Hope to meet up with lots of OPC readers in sunny California!

Reports like this “GM burns $10 billion in 1st quarter as deadline looms” really highlight the crunch manufacturers are facing these days.  The more cuts and layoffs that hit means the more people left behind to do more with less with an increased focus on the bottom line. Productivity, energy usage, project implementation, process execution, etc. all must be made more effective. These pressures often mean that automation picks up pace faster than during periods of economic growth. With increased automation means increased need for system connectivity, and OPC.

There are a lot of automation folks out there trying to figure out the best, fastest and smartest way to do their job. Is OPC part of that thinking?

Lack of Access to Data Hinders Competitiveness for Pulp & Paper Company  (Sound familiar?)

Look before You Leap: Implementing Successful OPC Projects  (Need any OPC implementation advice?)

5 OPC Questions Integrators Need To Ask  (Never hurts to ask questions)