The OPC Foundation has announced that Stefan Hoppe will become its next president and executive director. Former president and executive director Thomas Burke nominated Hoppe as his successor before resigning during the last board of directors meeting. Hoppe was elected by the board in the same meeting. Burke will remain as an officer on the board of directors. Hoppe has taken over the operational activities and responsibility for worldwide adaption of the OPC standards and the further development of the organization.
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. In 2008, he initiated and chaired the PLCopen OPC UA Companion working group which results are adopted in process industries and discrete manufacturing by multiple international vendors. In 2010, Hoppe was elected president of OPC Foundation Europe. Since 2014, Hoppe has been the vice president of the OPC Foundation and a member of the OPC Board.
"It is truly an honor to be entrusted with the responsibility and exciting opportunity to lead this incredible global organization towards its full potential," said Hoppe. "While the OPC Foundation roots come from industrial automation and will always be grounded there, I believe it is our duty to greatly widen our horizons in multiple directions – inside industrial automation but also into other new markets.“ On the future adoption of the OPC technology Mr. Hoppe continued, “the value of the open, secure, vendor independent data interoperability the OPC UA standard introduces is universal and is as important to IoT applications across all markets as Ethernet was to connect computers and is to the Internet. My mission is to position and grow the OPC Foundation to work on this scale."
