On the heels of an immensely successful 2020, the IO-Link Community is building on the growth rate over the last years with an eye towards future developments. These developments stand to push IO-Link even further as an enabler for Industry 4.0 and IoT network architectures.

Location tracking systems until now have been characterized by propriety solutions with complete vendor lock-in. That all changes with omlox. As an open standard under PI, omlox is poised to revolutionize the automation industry like PROFIBUS, PROFINET, and IO-Link before it.

It is my great pleasure and honor to be presenting the Welcome Article for this edition of PROFINEWS. What do 200 issues of PROFINEWS mean for our community? For some, it's just a number. But for the rest of us, it represents the achievements and growth of this market that's been created.

Even during a year faced with coronavirus-related challenges, the 2020 node count for PROFINET, PROFIBUS, IO-Link, and PROFIsafe show promising results. Read this article to get the exact node count numbers.

The essential and successful IODDfinder has been enhanced with a new feature: IODDviewer. The IODDviewer enables easy, centralized access to documentation and information on IO-Link devices. In other words, IODDs now no longer need to be downloaded and possibly installed to just view a device function.

PI Germany has just wrapped up its first virtual PI Konferenz. The four-day conference included 80 experts, 70 lectures, 8 workshops, and a podium discussion. Nearly 1200 people registered, and registration is ongoing, with all lectures recorded and made available to the public. Learn about the topics covered.

As evermore amounts of manufacturing data are being used at enterprise IT levels, the challenge of easily accessing, collecting, and processing that data is growing. To tackle this challenge, the power of information models has become clear.