The MTConnect Institute is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit standards development organization for the MTConnect standard. Its membership is made up of over 400 companies and research organizations in discrete manufacturing including automotive, aerospace, medical, and other industries as well as software developers supporting those industries. Membership is free and open to anyone with a stake in MTConnect. The MTConnect standard offers a semantic vocabulary for manufacturing equipment to provide structured, contextualized data with no proprietary format. With uniform data, developers and integrators can focus on useful, productive manufacturing applications rather than translation. MTConnect data sources include things like production equipment, sensor packages, and other hardware. Applications using MTConnect data provide more efficient operations, improved production optimization, and increased productivity. Scalable system architectures depend on standards. MTConnect provides domain-specific vocabulary and data models, is extensible, and integrates with other standards by design.