Let’s Go Italia! Open Industry Alliance Intro­duces Itself for First Time at the Sps in Parma

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is intro­ducing itself for the first time at this year’s SPS Italia, in Parma. From May 23 to 25, 2023, the Alliance will inform compa­nies and asso­ci­a­tions about the coop­er­a­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties within the Alliance in the exhi­bi­tion area District 4.0 in Padiglione (Hall) 7 at booth A038. In addi­tion, 14 members of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance will be repre­sented at Italy’s leading trade fair for digital and soft­ware-based automa­tion — including Beck­hoff, Bürkert, Dunker­mo­toren, Endress+Hauser, Festo, Hilscher, IFM, Kübler, Murr Elek­tronik, Pepperl & Fuchs, SICK, Siemens, WAGO and Weid­müller. 

Since its founding in April 2019, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance has grown to more than 100 member compa­nies and is increas­ingly estab­lishing itself in Euro­pean industry as a ‘prac­ti­tioner and imple­men­ta­tion alliance’. With its first trade fair appear­ance at SPS Italia, the alliance is under­lining its inter­na­tional expan­sion program. After its successful launch in the Nether­lands last year, the alliance is now strength­ening its Euro­pean commit­ment in Denmark, Belgium and Italy. 

“As part of our inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion initia­tive, Italy is now on the agenda. We are very excited to be present at one of the top indus­trial loca­tions in the world,” says Dr. Thomas May, Member of the Board of OI4 and of the ifm foun­da­tion. “Many of our members are connected to Italian compa­nies or see great poten­tial in the Italian market. There­fore, we are happy to comply with our members’ request to estab­lish the OI4 commu­nity in Italy.” 

The Alliance will be supported by its members at its first appear­ance in Italy, for example at the booth of ifm (Hall 5 Booth M014), where visi­tors can see a repre­sen­ta­tion of the cleaning process of the food industry (cleaning in place). In this case, the status and docu­men­ta­tion of the asso­ci­ated cali­bra­tion certifi­cates of the sensors are displayed in the OI4 Asset Admin­is­tra­tion Shell. “We are very pleased to be able to support the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance on-site at the SPS Italy. As a founding member, we are happy to be avail­able to asso­ci­a­tions, industry orga­ni­za­tions and espe­cially compa­nies at the show to discuss and show­case bene­fits and customer value. Our network has already grown to more than 100 member compa­nies. The focus of our activ­i­ties is the prac­tical imple­men­ta­tion of cross-company inter­op­er­ability of systems in the Industry 4.0 envi­ron­ment,” says Dr. Thomas May. 

Encrypted and licensed 

The apps sold through the Hilscher Flag­ship Store for OI4 Commu­nity or, more specif­i­cally, the intel­lec­tual assets invested in them have to be protected from theft and illicit use. For that purpose, Hilscher turned to Wibu-Systems for their CodeMeter soft­ware protec­tion tech­nology. CodeMeter has been built right into the app store and lets app publishers protect their work, if they so choose, before uploading it to the App Store . CodeMeter Protec­tion Suite can auto­mat­i­cally encrypt and add license checks to apps in just a few minutes. It is avail­able in a large variety of program­ming languages and plat­forms, supporting all envi­ron­ments that work with tradi­tional machine code, like C/C++, Rust, and Go, but also languages that operate with inter­me­diate code like Java and .NET or script languages where the source code is deliv­ered, such as Python and JavaScript. There is also a licensing API that can even license indi­vidual features sepa­rately or create freemium options. 

Auto­matic encryp­tion means that the IP in the app is safe from product piracy and reverse engi­neering. The right soft­ware key (ticket) to acti­vate the app after down­load from the Hilscher Commu­nity Store  is made avail­able as part of the trans­ac­tion. When the license is acti­vated, it is bound to the device it is acti­vated on, which stops the soft­ware from being dupli­cated, e.g., by cloning the Docker container. 

To keep rights manage­ment as straight­for­ward as possible for the app users, Hilscher has worked with Wibu-Systems to create a dedi­cated license server app, the netFIELD App License Server, that can run on the same edge device as the actual appli­ca­tion. The license server app stays in the back­ground to commu­ni­cate with CodeMeter License Central, where licenses are created, rolled out, and managed auto­mat­i­cally. The end users simply select the avail­able licenses for the app they want and acti­vate them with a single click. 

About the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance: 

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance acts as a part­ner­ship asso­ci­a­tion of leading indus­trial compa­nies that prag­mat­i­cally partic­i­pate in the imple­men­ta­tion of cross-vendor industry 4.0 solu­tions and services for manu­fac­turing plants and auto­mated ware­houses. In industry and tech­nology working groups, industry experts develop, use cases, and imple­ment them tech­ni­cally based on the OI4 refer­ence archi­tec­ture. These solu­tions, along with imple­men­ta­tion guides, are shared within the commu­nity and made avail­able outside the Alliance. The Alliance was launched in April 2019. The seat of the asso­ci­a­tion is Reinach, Switzer­land.