I was on a family trip to the Phoenix area and caught up with old friend Tom Burke. We’ve known each other since my early editor days through his leadership of OPC Foundation. He left OPC Foundation some time ago and spent time with Mitsubishi and the CC Link Partners Association. Inductive Automation just introduced him as a Technology Evangelist. A good move for both.
Inductive Automation (who is a long time sponsor of The Manufacturing Connection and has no part in my writing this story) has impressed me ever since my first meeting with founder Steve Hechtman. The current leadership team is taking the company in a stronger direction with even more IT integration. As I mentioned in my latest podcast, I never thought I’d use words like Git and containers and dataops and MCP describing manufacturing software.
Given Tom’s history with OPC and the technology in that space, I’d expect him to be promoting the Inductive Automation ecosystem including the light weight messaging of MQTT and Sparkplug. Years ago, I wrote to him about how users were coming to prefer the simpler, lighter weight messaging to OPC UA, which was becoming ever more complex and cumbersome. This could get interesting.
