Discovering OPC

No other industrial communications standard has achieved such widespread acceptance across so many different verticals, industries, and equipment manufacturers as OPC Classic. It is used to interconnect a large variety of industrial and business systems. SCADA, Safety Instrumented Systems (SISs), Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), and Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) use OPC to exchange data with each other and with Historian databases, MES, and ERP systems in the corporate world. The reason for the success of OPC Classic is very simple—it is the only truly universal interface that can be used to communicate with different industrial devices and applications, regardless of the manufacturer, software, or protocols used in the control system. This ability has become increasingly important, as the need to exchange information between the different devices...