The annual OPC Day Finland was held for the 8th time last week on Tuesday. For the first time in its history it was organized with MES people, combining both OPC and MES tracks.

Speakers gathered up for Q&A after the presentations

We were honoured to have Thomas Burke, the president of OPC Foundation, giving an inspiring speech about OPC UA’s future insights and success cases. Even though classic OPC still has a strong position on plant floor, the future belongs to OPC UA with its versatile possibilities on different levels of automation pyramid.

Stefan Hoppe, the president of OPC Europe, introduced a wide range of OPC UA success stories and proved that the adoption of OPC UA indeed is progressing well. Nevertheless, it seems that we OPC UA marketers and enthusiasts have a lot of work to do to make people see all the benefits of OPC UA. From that point of view it was an excellent opportunity to have MES people around during the day. Uwe Steinkrauss from Unified Automation and Paul Hunkar from DS Interoperability LLC covered MES point of view in their presentation about integrating OPC to MES and OPC UA for ISA95.

My colleague from ProsysOPC, Otso Palonen, had a presentation about OPC UA development for Android, which has also been introduced here in this blog. Otso brought up the true platform independence of OPC UA by introducing an OPC UA client running on Android, which is capable of controlling a PLC running on an Beckhoff ARM device – without any PCs between them. Otso’s presentation slides are available here.

Other speakers in the event were Kari Koskinen from OPC Committee in Finland, John Harrington from Kepware, Tuomas Miettinen from VTT, Andreas Frejborg from Neste Jacobs, Sean Herring from Matrikon OPC and Andre Bastos from Indusoft.

We had time to have a Helsinki tour with our guests – Thomas Burke, Stefan Hoppe, Uwe Steinkrauss and Paul Hunkar (behind the camera)

As we have done several years in the past, we had an OPC UA Workshop also this year on the following two days of the OPC and MES Day. Once again the Workshop was a great success: the participants got a kick start for developing their own applications using C++ and Java SDKs. We will for sure continue having these workshops in the future to increase the knowledge of OPC UA – if you are interested, feel free to contact me anytime.

As the year is approaching the end, it is now a good time to start planning the year 2013. The next big OPC event is OPC Day Europe in May. This time it will be hosted by Yokogawa in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. See you there! You can also meet us during the end of this year at IAS 2012 in Shanghai (OPC China department) on November 6th – 10th or SPS/IPC/Drives 2012 in Nuremberg (OPC Foundation department) on November 27th – 29th.