Stefan Hoppe is the OPC Foundation President and Executive Director since Nov 2018. Since begin 2015 he coordinated as Vice President the worldwide OPC expansion into the Internet of Things & Industrie4.0.
Stefan has been the President of the OPC Europe organization since 2010 being the catalyst for initiating liaisons with other industrial consortiums that has resulted in OPC working groups developing companion specifications for the organizations respective information models – e.g. in 2008 he initiated and chaired the PLCopen OPC UA Companion working group which results are adopted in process industries and discrete manufacturing by multiple international well-known vendors.

Stefan Hoppe studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. In parallel, he worked on automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) at Fraunhofer Institut IML, Dortmund.

Since 1995 he has worked for BECKHOFF Automation, starting as a software developer later as a lead Product Manager with focus on PC based Automation, connectivity and embedded software products.

The OPC Foundation is 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, & minerals.