Anyone following the usual Industrial Automation blogs and news will have heard about the cybersecurity threats against Siemens WinCC and PCS7 platform. Among others, Control Global has an article, and Gary Mintchell has been following it closely on his blog. While this doesn’t specifically apply to OPC, it definitely affects the overall industrial automation space. From the reports coming in, it appears to be an ‘industrial espionage’ attack targeting Siemens, but makes use of a Windows vulnerability that is present on systems from XP to Windows 7. This particular variation uses a default password to access the WinCC database. Since all major control system vendors have systems that run on Microsoft platforms, it would not be surprising to see different variations of this crop up. The good news is that work arounds are available and patches will be forthcoming.

This should serve as a warning and reminder that users MUST consider security as an essential part of their control system planning. This includes OPC data communications. There are many options available to ensure your OPC products work well within your overall security architecture: OPC Security 1.0 Specification aware products, OPC Security Gateways, OPC Tunneller, etc.

Check out the OPC Security information section or read a whitepaper for more details on creating secure OPC architectures.

Today Honeywell has completed the acquisition of Matrikon.  Matrikon will be integrated with the Advanced Solutions business of Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS). It has also been announced that MatrikonOPC will operate as a separate business entity within HPS.

The VP of OPC Products, Sean Leonard, gives more details in the most recent MatrikonOPC e-newsletter.  The main point is what will remain the same:  The MatrikonOPC business will run as an independent business unit under Honeywell, just as when it was owned by Matrikon; the MatrikonOPC brand will remain the same, and will continue:

• Its commitment to vendor neutral OPC
• Leading new technology development
• Helping people adopt open standards based solutions

This is echoed in the statement by Norm Gilsdorf, President of Honeywell Process Solutions. “Following our acquisition of Matrikon, Honeywell intends for the MatrikonOPC business to continue delivering on this promise and to preserve the vendor neutrality that has made MatrikonOPC successful. MatrikonOPC will operate as a separate business entity within Honeywell Process Solutions. Honeywell is committed to ensuring the continued success and growth of MatrikonOPC.”

You can read the full press release for more details on the acquisition.

Guess that means, I get to keep on blogging about OPC J

The OPC Foundation’s next roadshow seminar for End-Users and System Integrators, on June 23rd in Minneapolis, the City of Lakes. The event will be held at the Minneapolis Marriott Southwest, 5801 Opus Parkway, Minnetonka, MN 55343; ph. 952-935-5500. The program will begin with a continental breakfast and registration at 8:00 a.m. followed by program start at 8:30 a.m. To register for this event, please click here. Hotel information and directions can be found here.

Some fine folks from MatrikonOPC will there to help you learn more about OPC technology, including OPC Classic, OPC Xi and OPC UA. OPC is the automation industry plug and play standard. Drop by our booth, have a conversation and learn how OPC provides efficient data exchange and moves information from the plant floor to the enterprise.

If you are in the area, come on down and have a look.  If you are unable to attend but still want to learn more about OPC, there are many great, free OPC webinars available.  Here is the most current list of free OPC webinar topics.

Boy, has it really been that long since I put up a post?  You get busy with the day to day grind, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll get one up by Tuesday, and realize it is Thursday already’.  I’m sure we all have something we know we should be making more time for during our work week; filing those overdue reports, re-certifying those work safety requirements, taking that on-line OPC training course you’ve been meaning to do.  If it is important than it’s important to find the time to get it done.

I took some time to catch up on some marketing reading, including this posting on ‘What’s working in marketing’.  It’s a great podcast featuring Gary Mintchell and Walt Boyes. If you listen to the section on blogging, you’ll of course hear Gary’s admonishment at my recent remiss in blogging.  He quoted me quite correctly as saying ‘There’s blogging and there’s business’, but it’s high time I get back to the ‘business of blogging’.

Walt and Gary talk about the power of blogs to get breaking news and information out.  There has been a lot of things happening in OPC these days, that is blog worthy including the next upcoming OPC Foundation Roadshow.

MatrikonOPC will be at the next OPC Technical Seminar , on April 29, 2010 at the Fremont Marriott Silicon Valley, in Fremont, CA .  There is still time to register, if you haven’t already, and you’re going to be in the area.  Feel free to drop by the MatrikonOPC booth, and learn more about OPC and how it can help your business.  For those on the other side of the globe, you can check out the Matrikon User Conference in Koln, Germany.  The OPC track includes talks on OPC UA StreamInsight, secure data architectures and much more.

I encourage everyone to take the opportunity to attend these events.  If you can’t find the time to make the trip, you might still want to read more on how OPC can be configured to limit access so that users can only see the tags they really need to: ‘OPC Access on a Need to Know Basis’

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently issued an initial list of standards and other elements needed to support an interoperable smart grid. The NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 1.0, concentrates on standards that will help achieve interoperability among devices and systems. OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is one of the few non-industry specific standards to make the list.

The whole process of choosing which standard makes the cut requires a lot of effort to ensure that those chosen meet the industry specific needs and have sufficient vendor support to encourage a market of compatible products. In order to coordinate work within the SmartGrid community to work towards the achieving interoperability, NIST has coordinated the formation of Domain Expert Working Groups (DEWGs). The DEWG members are subject matter experts representing from utilities, vendors, academia, industry, standards groups, and federal agencies. The working group most relevant to OPC UA is the Industry-to-Grid (I2G) collaboration. As on OPC UA vendor, MatrikonOPC is an active part of the I2G Working group.

I’ll be attending the upcoming ARC forum in Orlando, where Keith Stouffer, the co-chair of the I2G Working group will be presenting on topics related to SmartGrid initiatives. If you’re going to be at the conference and looking to learn more on OPC applications to the SmartGrid or on the I2G working group, let me know. Hope to see you there.

If not you can always read more on it on our OPC and the SmartGrid page.

The results are in for the 2010 Control Readers’ Choice Awards. This annual survey of brand preference among suppliers of process automation technologies, represent the collective opinion of more than 1,000 process automation professionals. Those surveyed include the print magazine’s U.S.-centric readership as well as subscribers to their increasingly international digital media outlets anchored at their website ControlGlobal.com.  Here’s the most interesting section of the article. IMHO.

“Closely complementing our Readers Choice Awards across the range of essential process automation disciplines are the Readers Choice Awards for specific software competencies.”

”New to the Readers Choice Awards this year is the category of OPC Connectivity Software. Matrikon took top honors in the category”

This is a double pleasure in that, OPC was recognized as an essential process automation discipline, and the validation of MatrikonOPC’s commitment to reliable, secure OPC connectivity. Thanks to all those that voted to show their support.

If you want to try out any of those ‘top choice’ OPC products, you can find them here.

I’ve been very remiss of late on getting blog posts up.  That will be my number one resolution for the coming year.  To make up for the lack of posts recently, I thought I’d do a recap of some of the noteworthy OPC happenings of 2009. This year saw a lot of activity from the OPC Foundation, particularly in regards to OPC adoption.

Early in the year saw OPC UA meet a major international standardization milestone when the Committee Drafts of Parts 1-6 & 8 of IEC 62541 (the international version of the OPC Unified Architecture specifications) were approved.  Shortly afterwards was the Final Release of Unified Architecture Phase I Deliverables.  New released versions of Parts 1-8 of the OPC UA specifications, along with matching UA SDK and sample code was made available for members to download.  This, along with additional SDK updates through the year and the launch of the OPC Foundation Blog for Developers and creation of the Accelerated Adoption Working group helped paved the way for many new OPC UA products. 

Autumn 2009 saw several other OPC UA initiatives such as the release of the OPC UA For Devices Companion and Analyser Devices Companion Releases, as well as the OPC UA For IEC 61131-3 Companion Specification  release candidate from the PLCopen/OPC Foundation Joint Working Group (PLC). Several OPC vendors now offer OPC UA support, either as an OPC UA wrapper or native OPC UA support like the MatrikonOPC Universal Connectivity Server (UCS).

OPC adoption also got a boost from the announcement that the OPC Express Interface (Xi) was added to the OPC Foundation technology portfolio, complementing OPC UA and COM-based OPC Classic. OPC Xi’s primary objective is to provide a .NET-based migration path from OPC Classic. Additionally, OPC Xi may be used as a standard .NET WCF interface for newly developed OPC servers.  Expect to see more products supporting OPC Xi in the coming year. 

All in all, an very good year for OPC.

Although 2009 was a tough year for many companies MatrikonOPC had its share of good OPC news.   Major advancements on the core OPC Framework technology lead to had several product milestone achievements including reaching OPC Foundation Gold Level Independent Certification, achieving Wurldtech Achilles Certification and most recently enrollment in the Honeywell PKS Advantage program.  These framework advancements along with the OPC UA implementations culminate in our newest product offering the MatrikonOPC Universal Connectivity Server (UCS).   There will be much more to talk about on UCS as 2010 unfolds.

Technology investments were not the only growth this year.  MatrikonOPC expanded its reach opening regional offices in Brisbane and the United Kingdom.  This global presence allows MatrikonOPC to offer ‘round the clock’ OPC support, which plays a major role in the offerings provided by the Partnership programs such as the MatrikonOPC Integrator Program (MIP) and the MatrikonOPC Vendor Partner program.  Clearly customers recognize the value in our commitment to OPC, since the year also as had exciting business news.  These included the Shell’s global standardization on MatrikonOPC connectivity and the collaborative agreement with Siemens Industry, plus many others joining the Partner programs.

With the horizon looking brighter from an economic point of view, it bodes well for an even more exciting 2010 for OPC. 

P.S.  Don’t forget to check out the newly updated OPC Tutorial video.

Happy Halloween to all the ghouls and goblins out there.  Halloween is really a time of excitement, expectations and a little uncertainty.  What’s in the treat bag? Candy or Apples?  Who’s that behind the mask?  It’s that combined factor of anticipation and unknown that makes Halloween fun.  The same can be said for new interfaces. The recent news about the .NET based Express Interface (Xi) and the inclusion of Xi as part of the OPC Foundation portfolio is bound to raise feelings of hopeful anticipation about new connectivity options and probably some questions as to how everything will fit together.

P.S.  As a Halloween treat there are a few more questions added to the Ask The Experts pages. 

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What is an Engineer’s favorite software tool? It has got to be Excel.  When I worked as a Project Engineer I had spreadsheets for everything!  Reports, graphs, data manipulation, text parsing. I’ve even had a flight simulator.  Excel is a great tool for analyzing and manipulating data, so it’s no surprise that there are OPC based products that help get data into Excel.

What I learned the hard way, is what Excel is not great at… storing data.  It was manageable when I was only producing information for myself. I had a set naming format for the filenames, sheets and columns, so I could keep track of what data was coming from where, and from what time frame.  But once I had to start sharing the data out to other members of the project team, managers or end client reports things went down hill fast. Data getting changed in one version but not the other, ‘multiple versions of the truth’, missing or renamed files, and other fun problems.  

Of course the right answer is to separate the data from the information.  Use Excel as the reporting and analysis tool, and store the data in a correct repository, like a historian.  Which is why the release of the MatrikonOPC Micro Historian is such great news.  Light-weight, simple to use and cheap. No wonder it’s called ‘a historian for the rest of us’ J.  Of course you get data in and out of it using OPC, with full support for both OPC DA and HDA, otherwise I won’t be talking about it.

So for all those engineer’s out there with their data files in an ‘Excel of a Mess’, give the datasheet a look.

And before anyone comments, of course the answer to what is an Engineer’s favorite tool would be duct tape.

As Gary said in a recent post on tradeshow tips, this the event and conference season.  That means I’ll be on the road again spreading the OPC message.  This year I’ll be attending Emerson Exchange, ISA Expo and Rockwell’s Automation Fair.  Other MatrikonOPC folks will be showing up at Invensys OpsManage as well as globe trotting to tradeshow events in China, Indonesia and the Honeywell HUG in Portugal.  OPC’s reach is global!

At Emerson Exchange I will be presenting on managing risk when implementing OPC projects.  I have speaking slots Wednesday at 9:00 and Thursday at 10:00.  If you’re at the event, I’d encourage you to drop by, and if you can’t you can read all about it in the whitepaper Look before You Leap: Implementing Successful OPC Projects.

ISA Expo has always been a popular event for the OPC Foundation and its members, and this year is no different. I will be parked in Booth# 1335 with a few of the other MatrikonOPC folks.  Drop on by for a conversation or three on OPC.

Hope to see you all there.