This is Part 3 of our “25 Things to Consider when Choosing an OPC Tunnel” series. What is the customer experience when contacting the supplier’s technical support?
Technical support is an area where users shouldn’t underestimate the importance. This blog will cover some important aspects of technical support to consider when evaluating different tunneling suppliers.
In today’s industrial operations environments, OPC is the standard of choice for interoperability between software and hardware in the multi-vendor real world. Major software applications that need data from other systems have implemented OPC client interfaces. Those same applications if they need to share data with others, have also implemented OPC server interfaces. Similarly, the OPC standard has allowed software vendors to write applications, called OPC Servers, which make it easy to access real-time data from any piece of equipment offered by any vendor.
Since 1995, the OPC Foundation estimates that over 30 million OPC server and client software applications have been deployed in operations management from the shop floor up through production and operations management layers. The result is that data from the factory floor is more available now than ever before.
The greater availability of data has generated greater demand for access to the data across a wider number of locations and users. However, getting that data from the factory floor to your systems and staff to monitor and act upon it has challenges.
You may have heard the terms OPC tunnel or tunneling of OPC data before and not have known exactly what the terms meant. In this blog post, we will explain what people mean when they talk about an OPC tunnel or tunneling of OPC data. In order to explain what the terms mean, we need to first understand how OPC data is exchanged between an OPC server and an OPC client.
Trends are moving towards making smarter operating decisions based on actionable information, whether you're in the manufacturing space, oil/gas, power/utilities or other industries where outside variables can substantially impact the bottomline.
Having access to current and historical information on all of those outside variables is key to having "smart" operations that maximize profits in the most efficient manner possible.
We're going to discuss several sources of such important outside variables that, in the past, may have been difficult to integrate into a control system such as an HMI, SCADA or MES and how they are now available in an easy-to-consume, JSON RESTful web services format.
