The FDT Group and the OPC Foundation announce a joint project to provide off-the-shelf interoperability between the FDT 2.0 standard and the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. The project envisions a standard plug-in for the new FDT 2.0 standard that will provide the necessary connectivity to enable data to be communicated throughout the enterprise using the OPC UA standard. Work is underway to make this capability available by the end of this year when the new FDT 2.0 standard is fully available.

“This collaboration is all about the end user,” states Glenn Schulz, Managing Director of the FDT Group. ”When the two dominant industry standards get together to collaborate on off-the-shelf interoperability, the end users get a much higher return on their use of open standards. The technical achievements in the new FDT 2.0 standard make it a natural fit for the highly regarded OPC UA standard. We believe the end user community will quickly embrace this new capability.”

“This is a unique opportunity to take the best-of-breed data and information models for the applications and devices supported by the FDT architecture and leverage the OPC UA information modeling and corresponding services for complete application-to-device integration,” says Thomas J. Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. “This exemplifies the device-to-cloud computing strategy that supports configuration, communication, run-time and historical data access, and alarming and event services for existing and upcoming devices supported through FDT Group technology.”