OPC Unified Architecture goes beyond the limitations of existing OPC interfaces and provides solutions for numerous new use cases. The functionality and enhancements of OPC UA offer various possibilities for implementing and using solutions on different platforms.

For standard use cases Unified Automation developed standard products using the advantages of OPC UA. These products can be used out of the box and can be combined with other systems supporting OPC UA or legacy OPC standards.

To cover special use cases, Unified Automation provides platform independent Software Development Kits based on the portable OPC UA ANSI C communication stack. All SDKs can be ordered with platform layers for Windows, Windows CE or Linux. Additional platform layers are available on request. The .NET SDK is only available for Windows.

To avoid confusion on deliverables, toolkits, SDKs and examples the following table gives an overview on deliverables. The OPC Foundation provides OPC UA Stack implementation on GIT in a dual license model (RCL for members, and GPLv2 for non-members). However, Unified Automation's commercial SDKs (for everybody) adding convenience, general functionality and support to the pure OPC Stack. For rapid development and professional support you will need a commercial SDK/Toolkit.

* all platforms that (at least) support C++ compiler (multi-tasking/multi-threading)
•/o available/planned at Unified Automation GmbH (commercial license)
• available at the OPC Foundation (RCL for members, GPLv2 for non-members)

The OPC Foundation provides deliverables for its member companies. These include three OPC UA Stacks (.NET, ANSI C and Java). The OPC Foundation was the official manager of the code base for all the three UA Stacks. The .NET UA Stack was developed by the OPC Foundation, the Java UA Stack was developed by Prosys, and today’s mostly used ANSI C UA Stack was developed by ascolab. In addition the OPC Foundation provides a sample implementation of an UA Server and Client in .NET (C#). This code is called .NET SDK and was taken as the base for many other .NET SDKs. But unfortunately this package requires the latest .NET Core and can only be used within Microsoft environment.

NOTE: A misleading wording gives the impression that the OPC Foundation provides a Java SDK, but in fact this is just the “pure” Java UA Stack and it’s far away from being a Software Development Kit. A real Java SDK is available from Prosys and Unified Automation GmbH.

Unified Automation offers complete OPC UA SDK/Toolkits (not only "pure" UA Stacks) to members and non-members under commercial license model. We fully concentrate on platform independent development and in addition to (a forked an fully maintained version of) the OPC UA Stack our commercial SDKs come with additional features and functionality, examples and professional support to simplify professional development of OPC UA enabled applications. Besides running on literally all platforms we provide different platform adoption layers for x86, ARM, PPC, Atom, etc. and we support several operating systems like Linux, Windows CE, Solaris, QNX, Euros, vxWorks, etc.

• Cross Platform Development—base framework
• Embedded Device Development—small footprint
• Enterprise Application—rich information model
• Legacy Support—upgrade to state of the art technology
• Demonstration and Education—evaluation usage