The 2026 State of the Union for Sparkplug B brings the community together to review where the specification stands today and where it is headed next.

Hosted by the Sparkplug Working Group, this session will walk through upcoming and proposed changes to the Sparkplug B specification, including ideas currently under discussion within the working group. The goal is clarity. What is changing, why it matters, and how these decisions impact real-world implementations.

The session will also share key learnings from the 2026 ProveIt! Conference, highlighting what is working well in production environments and where implementers continue to struggle when deploying Sparkplug at scale. These insights are grounded in live demonstrations, vendor interoperability, and practitioner feedback from the field.   Beyond the specification itself, the discussion will cover broader Sparkplug-related topics relevant to anyone designing or operating a Unified Namespace.

This includes adoption patterns across industries, common architectural pitfalls, and where Sparkplug fits within modern OT and IT data strategies. If you are building, maintaining, or relying on a Unified Namespace in manufacturing, utilities, energy, or any industrial vertical, this is a must-attend checkpoint for 2026.

Arlen Nipper is the President and Co-Founder of Cirrus Link Solutions. Arlen has 48 years of experience in Industrial Automation including embedded computer design, industrial sensors like HART and LoRaWAN, and 35 years with legacy Poll/Response device protocols. Arlen started his career with Koch Oil working as a SCADA engineer in the Oil/Gas sector. That experience with “how things work” led to the rest of his career in industrial communications. Arlen was able to apply his SCADA knowledge in 1999 working with Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark when they co-invented the MQTT protocol specification. The topic namespace/payload flexibility and security model of MQTT has led to its dominance in the IoT and IIoT solution space world-wide, but the lack of an industrial standard for MQTT led to Arlen working with Wes and the development team at Cirrus Link to create the Sparkplug Specification.

Wes Johnson specializes in embedded device software, cloud computing, and the communication technologies that connect them together (IIot, IoT, M2M, SCADA). He has over 20 years experience specializing in the industry. After graduating from Portland State University with a B.S. in computer engineering and physics, he began working at Arcom Controls Systems where he was the primary creator of what is now the Eclipse Kura OSGi device framework. At Eurotech, he was Director of Software Engineering and a key contributor to what is now Eclipse Kapua.  He is now VP of Software for Cirrus Link Solutions where he co-created the Sparkplug specification and is also project lead for the Sparkplug Specification project and Eclipse Tahu.

Thomas J. Burke specializes in global standards development, scalable data models, and digital transformation for industrial automation. He has over 30 years of experience driving secure and interoperable solutions worldwide. After graduating from John Carroll University with a B.S. in Theoretical Mathematics and the University of Dayton with an M.S. in Computer Engineering, he began working at Rockwell Automation as a Senior Software Architect where he co-founded the OPC Foundation and led the development of the first OPC Data Access standard. As President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, he transformed OPC technology into a global IEC standard and built a vendor-neutral ecosystem of over 1,000 organizations. He is now Technology Evangelist for Inductive Automation, where he drives the adoption of open standards like Sparkplug and OPC UA to enable digital transformation across the Ignition community and beyond.

Sparkplug B State of the Union 2026: Specification Updates, Field Learnings, and What Comes Next for UNS Builders