OPC Foundation announces new president

The OPC Foundation has announced Stefan Hoppe as its next President and Executive Director. Thomas Burke, the former president and executive director, 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 and will continue his widespread evangelism for OPC UA adoption across various domains. Stefan Hoppe took over the operational activities and responsibility for worldwide adaption of the OPC standards and the further development of the organisation.

Stefan Hoppe is a longstanding member of the control 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-first OPC UA server integrated into an embedded controller. In 2008 he initiated and chaired the PLCopen OPC UA Companion working group, the results of which have been adopted in process industries and discrete manufacturing by multiple international vendors. In 2010, Hoppe was elected for President of OPC Foundation Europe. Since 2014, he has been Vice President of the OPC Foundation and member of the OPC board. During the following years, Hoppe became an OPC UA evangelist increasingly committed to adopting OPC technologies. Experts see OPC UA as a core standard in the emerging Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 movements.

The key qualifications the OPC Foundation looked for in Burke’s successor were deep working knowledge of the existing organisation, a well-formed long-term vision for the OPC Foundation, and a strategic and collaborative mindset. With 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 role.

“It is truly an honour to be entrusted with the responsibility and exciting opportunity to lead this incredible global organisation 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.”