While the cloud, big-data, fast-data, machine-learning has been a huge thing in the IT industry for the last years, the production industry was stuck in a proprietary world, dominated by some of the big players. The new incubating Apache PLC4X project aims to closing this gap by providing a unified API for communicating with industrial controllers via a wide variety of protocols. Besides providing the APIs and driver implementations, PLC4X also provides integration modules to other Apache frameworks such as Apache Edgent or Apache Camel. This makes it really easy to integrate industrial controllers into our Open-Source world. Self-optimizing production processes, predictive maintenance, industrial control systems running in the companies cloud. This was all almost impossible until now. With Apache PLC4X it will be easy.