May 5, 2022 – Beeond, Inc., a company focused on providing OPC Unified Architecture (UA) technology and services to help automation vendors and end users transition their products and systems to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), today announced the release of EdgeXConnect (EdgeX), a COTS OPC UA Server.
EdgeXConnect is an off-the-shelf, 100% configurable No-Code OPC UA Server, for Linux and Windows platforms, that is designed for technology and OEM equipment vendors, system integrators and end users to quickly expose edge device data to other systems. EdgeXConnect supports all OPC UA Companion Specifications providing users a totally configurable, flexible, and easily maintained solution that control engineers can quickly deploy, lowering cost and ongoing maintenance for users.
“Our objective with EdgeX is to make it easy and affordable to add OPC UA to any edge device. The traditional approach was to buy an SDK and spend months of software development to typically build a limited functionality OPC UA Server; and it was not uncommon, for these UA Servers to have hard-coded links to the edge device I/O and be difficult to change and maintain. EdgeX changes that paradigm, because it can be installed, configured and used in minutes,” notes Stan Brubaker, President, of Beeond.
“There are 2 key features that make EdgeX really unique. The first is that any of the existing OPC UA Companion Specifications can be imported into EdgeXStudio and modified or used as is. The second is that the information model can be linked to the edge device I/O through configuration, then deployed to the EdgeXServer with one click. No SDK and no software development is needed.,” notes Costantino Pipero, Founder and CTO of Beeond.
“The OPC UA standard for interoperability between systems, from sensors to the cloud, is being adopted worldwide by industrial automation vendors and the user community. But is a high hurdle for many companies because of the cost and skill set previously needed to develop an OPC UA Server. With EdgeX, that changes because it is now a BUY rather than a BUILD decision. Our mission is to help companies adopt OPC UA so they realize the business benefits of lower system integration cost and improved information sharing throughout their enterprises,” comments Brubaker.