The OPC Foundation defines itself as being "dedicated to ensuring interoperability in automation by creating and maintaining open specifications that standardize the communication of acquired process data, alarm and event records, historical data, and batch data to multi-vendor enterprise systems and between production devices. Production devices include sensors, instruments, PLCs, RTUs, DCSs, HMIs, historians, trending subsystems, alarm subsystems, and more as used in the process industry, manufacturing, and in acquiring and transporting oil, gas, and minerals (OPC Foundation; “What is the OPC Foundation?”; www.opcfoundation.org)”.
The OPC Foundation is a cooperation of automation control product vendors and Microsoft. As of 2006, the foundation had about 300 members worldwide. The main standard, with which it all began, is the OPC DA (Data Access) specification.
Compliance tests are provided to the members to test OPC conformity.