IO-Link grows and grows and grows - both the number of members and the number of installed nodes. Thus, Reinhard Schlagenhaufer, Speaker of the Steering Committee of IO-Link, was delighted to be able to present the latest positive growth figures at the IO-Link Members Assembly on June 22, 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany to nearly 50 participants.

As the data from factories scales exponentially, the ability to access that data transparently becomes critical. If we want the Industrial Internet of Things to truly be a game changer for the manufacturing industry, open standards will be a major enabler of that transformation.

A recent magazine article outlined six steps to take to implement the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). It was mostly political – form a team, get buy-in from a C-level executive, etc. The political approach may be valuable, but for engineers the steps are different. So here are the six technical steps to the IIoT.

OPC UA wherever you look. This was my first impression at Hannover Fair, which just closed its doors for 2017. With the rise of Industrie 4.0 and the IIoT, OPC UA came into focus for all industries and so came the products which support it. This is well-deserved of course. And then there is TSN – another attention-grabber for the fair visitors. But, not to be missed, was important news from PI...

"More attendees, more solutions, more international!" was the short-form report on Hannover Fair. See the numbers and have a visit to the PI Booth.

TSN (Time-sensitive Networking) is a promising new IEEE technology for Ethernet that combines the bandwidth of IT (information technology) networks with the latency of OT (operational technology) networks.