OPC Foundation appoints Stefan Hoppe as its new president and executive director

Former President and Executive Director Thomas J. Burke nominated Stefan Hoppe as his successor

Stefan Hoppe was named president and executive director of the OPC Foundation after being nominated by its former director, Thomas J. Burke, who resigned 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 OPC Foundation Board of Directors, and will continue his widespread evangelism for OPC UA adoption across various industry domains.

Stefan Hoppe is a long-standing member of the controls and automation industry and the OPC Foundation. As an electrical engineer, he joined Beckhoff in 1995 where he developed the OPC classic server and in 2006, the world’s first OPC UA server integrated into an embedded controller.

In 2008, Hoppe initiated and chaired the PLCopen OPC UA Companion Working Group, which has provided communication standards that have been adopted in the process industries and discrete manufacturing by multiple international vendors. In 2010, Hoppe was elected as president of OPC Foundation Europe. Since 2014, he has been vice president of the OPC Foundation and member of the OPC Board. Since, Hoppe has become an OPC UA evangelist increasingly committed to adopting OPC technologies. Experts see OPC UA as a core standard in the emerging Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 movements.

Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.