The Industrial Internet Consortium and the OPC Foundation Announce Liaison

Organizations to continue working closely to help further IIoT market adoption

The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™), now incorporating OpenFog®, and the OPC Foundation®, announced they have agreed to a liaison to work together to advance their shared interests. The two organizations held a signing ceremony on February 13 at the IIC quarterly member meeting in Raleigh, NC. Under the agreement, the IIC and the OPC Foundation will work together to promote the digital economy by preventing fragmentation and harmonizing various aspects in the field of the industrial internet.


The IIC will supply IIoT requirements to the OPC Foundation, such as problem statements or use cases related to IoT and adjacent industry markets. The OPC Foundation will adopt these requirements in their specification development process and share use cases with IIC for consideration in IIC work.

The two organizations hosted a joint workshop on Thursday, February 14, 2019, in Raleigh, NC. This workshop: Building Industrial Internet Solutions with the OPC Foundation workshop featured speakers from both IIC and OPC Foundation and supported the joint work to gather requirements for tailoring and extending specifications to address specific IIoT scenarios.

"A formal relationship with the OPC Foundation is a natural fit for the IIC. The OPC Foundation OPC Unified Architecture standard is widely used in several of our IIC testbeds, which are generating feedback for standards organizations. We're happy to formalize this relationship with the OPC Foundation," said Dr. Richard Soley, Executive Director, IIC.

"There are a lot of opportunities between IIC and Industrie 4.0. Consequently, a formal liaison between the OPC Foundation and the IIC is strategic for the OPC Foundation membership," said Stefan Hoppe, President, OPC Foundation.

"OPC Foundation is an important part of the Industrial IoT Ecosystem," said Wael William Diab, Liaison Working Group Chair and Secretary of the IIC Steering Committee. "Its addition to our comprehensive portfolio of liaison partnerships with other SDOs, government initiatives, regional organizations and industry consortia will help accelerate market adoption of IIoT."

"The OPC Foundation recognizes the important value of the IIC and of a close cooperation between our organizations. The OPC Foundation members are actively engaged in a multitude of initiatives and testbeds at IIC, and this liaison between our organizations formalizes our relationship," said Thomas Burke, Strategic Marketing Officer, OPC Foundation.

The IIC Liaison Working Group is the gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities/agencies. For more information about the IIC Liaison Working Group, visit https://www.iiconsortium.org/liaisons.htm.

About the Industrial Internet Consortium
The Industrial Internet Consortium is the world's leading membership program transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIC delivers a trustworthy IIoT in which the world's systems and devices are securely connected and controlled to deliver transformational outcomes. The Industrial Internet Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG). For more information, visit https://www.iiconsortium.org/.

About the OPC Foundation
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation's mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, process and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 600 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and Smart Energy sectors. For more information, visit https://opcfoundation.org/.

Note to editors: Industrial Internet Consortium is a registered trademark of OMG. For a listing of all OMG trademarks, visit http://www.omg.org/legal/tm_list. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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