My name is Carlos Valle-- business development
manager-- based in San Francisco Bay area.
So what we are looking for-- as a company
who's trying to innovate with
our customer base, and that's industrial.
So that's-- a challenge now where, in the
IT space- finding people that want to innovate
or companies that want to- innovate, soon to
be a a lot easier.
And the OT space where we live on the industrial
floor where machines are moving-- conveyer
belts are humming-- that's a bit more difficult.
And that's mostly because our customer base
wants to segregate the data. They want to contain
the data and not let it out because of security
breaches or, you know, other fears. But we
know that we can help them by taking that
data from those machines and pushing it out
to an analytics platform.
So that's really what we're looking--
looking for. Someone-- on the industrial floor,
manufacturing floor, OT space, that wants
to innovate, and sees the value in the data
and pushing the data out. So that's kind of
my focus. We know that there's, you know,
IBM Watson-- other platforms that create a
lot of value. And if we can enable--
the programmable logic controllers, the PLCs,
the robot arms, and we can push that data
and contextualize it, most importantly create
a context behind that data, we can
show them-- equipment efficiencies, deficiencies.
And be able to predict failures before they
happen.
And that's just a small part set. So imagine--
an assembly line. We're building a car. That
assembly line as a whole is a system
that runs and it can you know,
fail. And if we can predict that failure--
we can schedule outage. We can-- create a
work order for a maintenance person. We can
order the part. If that all happens in the
Cloud and we can enable that, that's the future
that we're looking for. I mean, that's what
we want to innovate towards.
The speed at which technology
is changing now and where-- IBM and other
companies are really pushing their platform
is challenging for us because we need to catch
up-- make sure that we have the personnel
that can talk to the plant floor,
and then-- and, you know, the-- the data that's
down there. But also take that data and push
it on up.
And that's really-- the buzzword that everyone's
using as IT/OT convergence. And that's what
we're seeing. So for us, as a company, and
companies like ours, we have to-- push and
innovate and build a team that
can take that data from the OT space and push
it up and converge it with the IT space. So
that's a challenge-- that
we're-- facing and that I think other companies
are facing.
So, yeah, that's the biggest push, to be ready
for this change, because
it's going to happen. And it's not gonna happen
tomorrow; maybe not within the next year.
But in the next five years, you will see a
lot more-- plant floor data up in a Cloud
platform-- and analytics being performed and
getting pushed back as a closed-loop system
onto the plant floor.
The focus has changed
from trying to help companies-- make a product,
right, to-- to design the line, design the
system. So, "Let's make that more efficient."
That's really changed to, "Let's get data
out and then analyze that data and those
data sets." And what use-- the focus is,
from before to, "What use is that data? What
can we do with that data?" But first, we need
to collect the data, bring it up. And the
focus has changed from physical to more of
this-- big data sets-- virtual, digital, I
guess, if you will, the digital transformation,
which is the whole industry 4.0. we've gone
from-- a physical world to a digital world.
The future's going to a digital environment,
big data sets. And where we see opportunity
is no one now on that I know of is taking
those-- all the planned-for assets in that
data and actually taking it out to analyze
it and to bring it back for repurposing
it.
And what I mean by that is-- not just your
typical, "Let's make this line more efficient,"
but really what other business opportunities
could that end user have with those data sets?
Is there a customer relationship-- opportunity
there for them? Is there---- a new business
model that enables them to sell consumables?
Like if you have-- a car and you know that
the air filter's going bad, then go
ahead and ship them a new air filter, or schedule--
them-- maintenance on their-- in
the end user-- or the company, sorry, is--
repair-- you know, repair facility. So those
kind of things are where we're trying to find,
"Let's reinvent the customers
business so they have new business models
and new revenue streams."
I think one thing that we haven't really addressed,
we get the concepts, right, right now. Here,
everyone's really kind of-- not drinking the
Kool-Aid, but really, "Yeah, this is gonna
be a great solution. This is the future."
It is the future. But what's gonna happen
on the ground floor? We haven't really talk
about the connectivity in that edge gateway,
which we've heard, "Okay, well, there's a
lot of components to the edge," right?
There's-- you know, on-premise computing--
data acquisition, big data sets. They're on
the edge. And buffering of data, and
also the security piece. So we know it
needs to exist. And there are some
solutions. But from what I've seen, it--
they've been kind of clunky. So I think one
thing we have to address, in order for us
to enable-- this-- at least, in my point of
view, the industrial, the manufacturing side
of IoT, it-- there needs to be a better discussion
on how we protect that data, how we aggregate
it. And then how we securely send it out.
