OPC: Connecting industry through open, secure interoperability

The world’s leading community for industrial interoperability and universal connectivity

The OPC Foundation is a global community that advances industrial interoperability through the OPC communication specifications. Its ecosystem brings together vendors, end users, integrators, and educators with a shared goal: enabling secure, reliable, and platform-independent information exchange across machines, plants, and enterprise systems.

At the core is OPC UA (IEC 62541), designed to provide consistent semantics and secure communication while scaling from embedded devices to IT systems and cloud platforms.

The OPC Foundation supports the market through education, collaboration programs, and the official OPC Certification Program, helping ensure products interoperate in real-world deployments and reducing integration effort in multi-vendor environments.

Key strengths

• International standardization: OPC UA is standardized as IEC 62541, supporting global acceptance and long-term stability.

• Security by design: built-in mechanisms for authentication, authorization, encryption, and auditing to support secure-by-default architectures.

• Scalability: a single approach that can span sensor-to-cloud use cases, from small embedded devices to enterprise applications.

• Vendor and platform independence: designed to be independent of vendor, operating system, industry, and programming language.

• Transport flexibility: supports multiple mappings (e.g., TCP, HTTPS, UDP, AMQP, MQTT) to fit different network and IT/OT architectures.

• Interoperability focus: a strong emphasis on consistent information modeling and certified compliance to enable predictable plug-and-play behavior.