Haar, May 9, 2017 – Softing Industrial announces a commercial license for the OPC UA .NET Standard Stack. The OPC UA .NET Standard Stack has been developed by Microsoft, and was contributed as open source project to the OPC Foundation GitHub in June 2016. This announcement follows the OPC Foundation’s recent statement about Microsoft’s contribution of the stack.

The OPC UA .NET Standard Stack is targeting the .NET Standard Library. .Net Standard allows developing apps that run on all common platforms available today, without requiring platform-specific modifications. Furthermore, the .Net Standard stack adds security features and supports cloud applications and services.

Softing Industrial plans to offer a commercial license for the OPC UA .NET Standard Stack in the fourth quarter of 2017, making it available for full commercial use to everyone. Preparatory work and technical coordination with the OPC Foundation as well as Microsoft have already begun. Softing’s support for the currently available Softing OPC UA .NET Toolkits will not be affected and continue to be available.

OPC UA is an interoperability standard for industrial communication developed by the OPC Foundation. It has developed into the global de-facto interoperability standard for the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0.

“OPC UA has truly established itself as the interoperability standard for Industrial IoT. We are honoured to work with the OPC Foundation on the continued evolution of the standard. The response from the Industrial IoT community to our .Net Standard reference stack contribution has been very positive.” says Sam George, Director Azure IoT, Microsoft Corporation.

“I’m very excited about the work that Softing is doing with respect to providing the complete development cycle for OPC UA product deployment. Softing is and has been doing the development and maintenance of the OPC Foundation OPC UA reference implementation deliverables providing a solid foundation for the OPC community, and Softing provides leading edge commercial certified OPC UA development products that enable the OPC community to quickly bring quality OPC UA products to market“, adds Thomas J. Burke, President & Executive Director, OPC Foundation.

“We have more than 20 years of experience with OPC technology, and we are excited about this new offer which will simplify the implementation of OPC UA products for secure and innovative IoT solutions significantly”, concludes Hans-Werner Auberg, Managing Director Softing Industrial.