This month, Opto 22 announced it had joined the Eclipse Foundation as a participating member in the Sparkplug Working Group. The Eclipse Foundation, which has been the home for open-source implementations of the MQTT IoT protocol since 2011, introduced the working group in 2020 to broaden adoption of the Sparkplug topic and payload specification for MQTT.
Opto 22 notes its history of supporting the MQTT standard, starting in 2013 with the introduction of its groov product family. It added Sparkplug support in 2017 shortly after the specification was released. Since then, Opto 22 has worked closely with other proponents of MQTT like Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link, the original developers of Sparkplug, to establish MQTT as the dominant protocol for IIoT.
VP of product strategy at Opto 22, Benson Hougland, commented that “Opto 22’s participation in the Sparkplug Working Group gives us the opportunity to contribute directly to the development of Sparkplug and to work closely with other vendors that are committed to its success. Given our strong belief in the use of open-source software for industrial applications, we are also thrilled to be working with an organization like the Eclipse Foundation on such an important project.”
