Stefan Hoppe becomes President of OPC Europe
On 8 February 2010 the OPC Foundation announced the launch of its official European subsidiary, OPC Europe. OPC Europe will initially consist of a core group of member companies including ascolab, Beckhoff, Matrikon, Siemens and Softing. The group will be headed by Stefan Hoppe from Beckhoff who will be President. Tino Hildebrand from Siemens will be the Vice President. “Half of the OPC members are based in Europe. I am very pleased to have been selected to lead such a prestigious group of companies in the marketing effort for OPC UA technology throughout Europe”, said Stefan Hoppe. “We have already established several subsidiary organisations: in Austria led by Michael Haas of Certec, in France led by Michel Condemine of 4CE Industry and in Poland led by Dr. Marius Postal of CAS.” The OPC initiative was originally set up with the objective of standardising the data exchange between PLC controllers and visualisation applications. The new generation of OPC-UA provides a high-performance, platform-independent communication platform covering small Embedded controllers, the HMI level and the MES/ERP world. “In view of the continuously increasing demand for information exchange, the core theme of the OPC Foundation - interoperability - will become increasingly important”, said Stefan Hoppe. “I truly believe that the creation of OPC Europe is only the first step down a path to new levels of industrial communications not only in conventional data streams but also in the embedded market.”
