OPC Foundation announces new president
January 2019
News
The OPC Foundation has welcomed Stefan Hoppe as its next president and executive director. Hoppe is a long-standing member of the control automation industry and the OPC Foundation. As an electrical engineer, he joined Beckhoff in 1995 where he developed OPC classic server and in 2006 the world first OPC UA server integrated into an embedded controller.
Stefan Hoppe.
In 2008 he initiated and chaired the PLCopen OPC UA Companion working group, whose results are adopted in process industries and discrete manufacturing by multiple international well-known vendors. During the following years he became increasingly committed to adopting OPC technologies, seen as a core standard in the emerging Industry 4.0 environment.
After over 12 years of working with and promoting OPC UA, and over eight years of active OPC Foundation leadership, Hoppe was a natural fit for the position. “While the OPC Foundation’s roots come from industrial automation and will always be grounded there, I believe it is time to widen our horizons in multiple directions – inside industrial automation but also into other new markets,” he concluded.
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