Following up on the 27th annual ARC Industry Forum, 4IR Solutions CTO Joseph Dolivo and Derrick Chambers of Flexware sit down to talk about the Industry Forum, what it was like, and what technologies caught their eye.

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Joseph Dolivo:

All right. Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Heads in the Cloud Podcast with James and Joe. I am Joe. James is not here. He's off swinging a hockey stick, I believe. So, in lieu of James, we have a special guest, Derrick Chambers from Flexware Innovation. Derrick, how you doing?

Derrick Chambers:

Pretty good. It's been a long week, you?

Joseph Dolivo:

Yep. Also, it's been a long week and also doing very well. So, I thought for our audience members who may not know you, I wanted to give you just a couple minutes to introduce yourself and then we'll dive into a quick topic.

Derrick Chambers:

Sure. Derrick Chambers, I'm a senior systems engineer at Flexware Innovation. If you don't know who Flexware is, how do you not know who Flexware is? But we're Shop Florida Top four integrator. We work out of Indianapolis. And yeah, been there two and a half years and working mostly in Ignition. Actually, I've touched a couple other software, but I mean 99.9% in Ignition. Yep.

Joseph Dolivo:

Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show. I certainly know of you and you guys and the work that you've done with Ignition. Also, the last few years we focused heavily on Ignition, and I also came from a background working with other vendor software, which gave me a big appreciation for Ignition. I'll say it was a breath of fresh air, so-

Derrick Chambers:

Absolutely.

Joseph Dolivo:

So hey, you and I actually met together for the first time in person at the ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida, here in the States. So, that's really what the topic is for us today. And I just wanted to get kind of your raw sense. You're probably still a little tired coming off the week, but what were your first impressions of the industry forum? What did you think?

Derrick Chambers:

Oh, I mean, it was an amazing week. I keep describing it as hanging with giants. Just one minute you're talking with a CTO or CEO of a major corporation and the next, you're talking to a startup and other integrators. Just so much insight this week. I think it truly had an impression. I mean, over the next couple years I can see some of these insights playing into even my career. So yeah, it was awesome. The first day was kind of cybersecurity related. I'm not a cybersecurity guy, although working with products like Ignition, it obviously has some kind of play in there. So, it was good to see what we're doing with our projects and things we're doing right and where we can do things better for sure.

Joseph Dolivo:

Awesome.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

I think there's a point where all of us are going to have to become somewhat well versed in cybersecurity, given that manufacturing is now the biggest target of cybersecurity attacks and all-

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

... this critical infrastructure needs to be protected. So, I think that's why we probably saw a pretty heavy focus on that from the industry forum and probably continue to keep doing that in the future. So, outside of cybersecurity, were there any particular sessions that you attended or discussions that you had that were of particular interest to you?

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah. There were a couple. One that stood out was Digital twin in manufacturing. Of course, it's hot topic, but I didn't realize that Orlando was like, they're trying to be this Mecca, Silicon Valley of Digital twin. And yeah, it was really interesting that they're trying to draw that kind of technology to Orlando, especially in Unity. Unity was there, they talked a lot about what they're doing. So, I think a lot of the questions were around, how do you get people to know that Unity is a platform that you can use for manufacturing? Because traditionally it's a gaming platform. So, I know-

Joseph Dolivo:

Yeah.

Derrick Chambers:

... we've done things at Flexware, we modeled our office in Unity, we've put data up, so there's 23 Ignition members, all over the building. We've made this much money last year. We know you can do that kind of stuff. But I think it's really cool that they're trying to get the word out that, "Hey, this is possible."

Joseph Dolivo:

That's awesome. It's nice when you have hands-on experience with a technology like that. And like you said, "I think they're trying to figure out how they can branch out beyond gaming." Unreal is done something similar where you've got a... Let's say a graphics engine and a whole engine that can do other things like simulations and tie in with other technologies and manufacturing is certainly a good space for it. Oh, that's really cool.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

I'll say for me, I attended the session on industrial open-source, which I thought was particularly interesting. Were you in that one as well?

Derrick Chambers:

No, I ended up going to another one. So, Flexware was purchased last year by Hitachi and I was hanging out with them and we decided to go see one that we were all interested in. So yeah, I missed that one. Anything good.

Joseph Dolivo:

It was interesting for me because I've kind of followed the open-source community for a long time, but not as much in manufacturing. Certainly, with our products and what we're doing, we're bringing open-source into that a little bit, but it was just interesting to hear from the Eclipse Foundation for example. So, somebody I've known for a long time with the Eclipse IDE that folks have used for a while, but some of these IOT specific projects that they're kind of introducing and even basically a runtime that will run on a bunch of industrial PCs called 4diac with the number four and then D-I-A-C. So, they talked about that and then there was talk about the importance of different elements of a good open-source project such as governance, for example.

So, not just the technology like, "Hey, I'm going to write some code and I'm going to put it up there on the internet for others to share or to take and do things with," but how do I put in governance? How do I build a community around it? How do I have guidance around, if I want to collaborate, do I have submission criteria? Do I have a code of conduct? All those kind of things that you may not think about, but that's a part of what makes some of these more mature, open-source based organizations work and work effectively. So, I thought that was quite interesting.

Derrick Chambers:

Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Joseph Dolivo:

And then of course, favorite session would be the panel discussion that you and I were on, that we're on together for sure, which I thought was interesting. Do you have any thoughts on this? You and I were both on the panel, so for folks who weren't, there were one of the ARC industry advisors, did kind of a quick presentation at the beginning, went through a few slides to set the stage around a topic, and then there were four or 15 minutes slots where some speakers gave some presentations in that vein. And then, after that there were four additional panelists, including Derek and myself, who basically sat down at a table with some microphones with the speakers and took some questions from the audience. So, were there any sessions that really stood out to you from that one, which was by the way, on operational resilience?

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah, I mean firstly that was my first time on stage, a little nerve wracking, but I mean it was awesome. After that first question, I was calm, I was ready for the next one. Unfortunately, I didn't get another one, but I did meet some people after, which led to more conversation. But-

Joseph Dolivo:

Awesome.

Derrick Chambers:

Did I answer your question?

Joseph Dolivo:

You did.

Derrick Chambers:

Maybe.

Joseph Dolivo:

No.

Derrick Chambers:

Okay. All right.

Joseph Dolivo:

You definitely did. Yeah. I-

Derrick Chambers:

Started going off on a tangent. Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

I was going to say the one, I know Yan was talking about some of the stuff that Lockheed has been doing, which I found to be pretty particularly engaging. And then certainly, John Paul from Kamiko that we've been working with for a long time was talking about that hybrid cloud architecture, which is really obviously key to us and that's building in our technologies. But yeah, I thought those were really interesting. And I'll say outside of that, I don't know if you sat on any of the other sessions, I felt like for some of them I wasn't necessarily the target audience from them. And what I actually enjoyed quite a bit was the networking that happened outside of those sessions. So, to your point earlier, they're bringing in a lot of C-level folks from big companies, some small companies as well, vendors, integrators, and the community that creates and the opportunities for discussion that creates both with potential end customers as well as potential partners, I thought was really cool.

Derrick Chambers:

Absolutely, the presentations were... A lot about solutions, but the conversations in the hall were all about problems and it was really neat to see how open everyone was about, like, "Hey, I have this problem," and then you'd see somebody else chime in like, "This is what we do." But I guess in the end, everybody has problems. Everybody's looking for a solution, so-

Joseph Dolivo:

For sure.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

Were there any booths that you saw in the exhibition hall that drew your eye? You kind of mentioned Unity for sure.

Derrick Chambers:

I only got into the exhibition hall a couple times. I was mostly out in the hall talking to people. So-

Joseph Dolivo:

Yeah.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah. Obviously, I stopped by inductive, but I've talked to a couple people inside of the exhibition hall, but really no, I didn't get in there much.

Joseph Dolivo:

I ended up being parked basically at the inductive booth for a long time.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

It was interesting because I heard from folks, this is my first ARC industry forum and I know it was yours as well, I guess between the pandemic and everything else. The last year they ended up delaying it a few months I think, because one of the other variants was out. And so, but even then, so I guess the foot traffic wasn't quite as big this year. So, if you're a vendor, that's probably a bad thing. But for me being in there, that was actually a great opportunity to get a lot of one-on-one time with folks who I maybe otherwise wouldn't have been able to.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

So, that was kind of made the best out of that and had some great conversations. And the one other thing I was going to ask about too, so given that you're in Flexware in addition are both very familiar with Ignition, they did do some announcements at the breakfast the first morning where they talked about Cloud Edition. So, I was curious-

Derrick Chambers:

Yes.

Joseph Dolivo:

... what your thoughts on Cloud Edition where now that it's got a date of April tentatively for the AWS release with the address shortly after that, but what are your thoughts on that?

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah. Absolutely. Obviously, we're really excited. We want to be on the forefront of that technology and pushing that out to our customers, but I really thought the Pay As You Go model was interesting. I think that's probably going to open some doors that'll last. They were talking about elasticity of usage, so you know, don't have to pay for a big giant system if you're not using it, one day if you're using three users, you're going to pay for three users and in a 100 days, if you're 150 users, it's going to be for everybody. So yeah, it's really interesting.

Joseph Dolivo:

Yeah. We were excited to finally see a dates because I know it was kind of announced at ICC, I'm sure you were there for the announcements and now it's becoming more real. Now, it's that much closer to release. And we've certainly had conversations with the inductive folks about, what that's going to look like and what it's going to include and yeah, it's super, super exciting.

Derrick Chambers:

Yeah.

Joseph Dolivo:

So, awesome. Well, I'm glad you had a good time. Glad you got back safe and now it's back to the real world with work, right. So, yeah, exciting stuff. But hey, I appreciate you joining me. I did want to say for folks, where can we find you and where can we find Flexware and follow what you guys are doing?

Derrick Chambers:

You can find us on pretty much all major social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, I think we have an Instagram, YouTube. So, we do a show at the end of every month, the last Thursday of every month, 3:30 to 4:30. And so, far it's just been bringing on guests to develop cool NextGen features and Ignition. And we put those things on the exchange, obviously for the community. And then, those go on YouTube. So, if you want to check out the episodes or check out our next live stream, which will be this... Actually, it's going to be Tuesday this month because somebody's going to be out. My co-host is going to be out and that's going to be... We're going to have the Women of Flexware on, it's engineers' week. We're going to be be celebrating our lady engineers at Flexware.

Joseph Dolivo:

Awesome. I will definitely be checking it out and sign me up on the list for future potential guests. So, I'd love to chat with you guys and build something cool and distribute it for the community. I think that's a great initiative. So...

Derrick Chambers:

Absolutely. We're trying to get more engaged. I think we were going to have some good collabs coming up this year, so.

Joseph Dolivo:

Awesome. Sounds great. Well, Derrick, thanks again for standing in. I'd rather talk to you than James anyways, so appreciate the time and glad you had a great week. So, thanks again for joining us.

Derrick Chambers:

Yep. Thank you.

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