5 Barriers to System Interoperability

The objective of any key is to unlock the barriers between you and what you need to achieve. The most important keys that any systems integrator wants to get their hands on are the ones that deal with the five most common barriers to successful system interoperability.

1. Multi-vendor Interconnectivity
   The nature of system integration tends to produce generalists who have some knowledge of a large number of products from multiple vendors. This also means systems integration includes a substantial amount of diagnostic and troubleshooting work since most vendors have not validated their systems interconnectivity with rival products.
2. Proprietary Protocols
   Even in the current age of OPC and other open standards, many vendors still rely on proprietary protocols within their systems. New protocols continue to appear and evolve from those claiming to have a superior solution to accepted open standards. System integrators need to handle the problems of the past and the future to come.
3. Non-compliant OPC Software
   Although the OPC Foundation provides much in the way of compliance and interoperability test tools, there are still vendors who put less than perfect products on the market. Unreliable, non-compliant or custom OPC products are a real part of life for many system implementations.
4. Architecture Design
   There is more to reliably moving data through out the enterprise than just choosing the right products. Any OPC system architecture needs to consider aspects such as reliability, guaranteed data delivery, redundancy and recovery and what that means in terms of OPC implementation.
5. Firewalls, Domains and Windows Security Settings
   Like it or not, Microsoft technology is a dominate feature in many industrial automation settings. Typical IT imposed security features such as firewalls, multiple isolated domains, DCOM and other Windows Security settings are the bane of many interconnected systems.

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