‍

4IR Solutions CEO James Burnand and CTO Joseph Dolivo talk about unique Industry 4.0 products and services that they are thankful for.

‍

‍

James:

Hey Joe, good to see you. Happy Friday.

Joseph:

Good to see you too, James. It's been a pretty crazy week, crazy few weeks. I can't believe we're halfway through December already. The new year is almost upon us and we've both accomplished so much, and also I feel like there's always so much left to do, but that's how it goes these days.

James:

Yeah. And if our viewers can't quite tell, both of us have managed to simultaneously come down with illnesses even though we're several thousand miles apart, and are struggling to make it through this particular podcast. So we will do our very best. Please bear with us if you can.

Joseph:

I'm not convinced that you didn't somehow find a way to spread it electronically, so I'm blaming you for this one.

James:

I'm blaming the general state of viruses flowing through society right now. It seems as though it's taken down lots of different folks all at the same time. So hopefully all that gets cleaned up in the next week or two and everybody's good for the Christmas and New Year's celebration.

Joseph:

Totally. Well, Geralt's here and he's ready and he's healthy enough. He's at least upright. So, let's get rolling.

James:

All right.

Joseph:

What are we talking about today?

James:

I believe our topic today is, what are we thankful for? And specifically with Industry 4.0, what are we thankful for? And there's a lot of different ways to look at that, but I think from a topic perspective, our goal was to talk about some of the things that we've seen in the last year, some of the positive advancements, some of the vendors and the things that they brought into the marketplace. And, just in general, what are we thankful for as we've moved forward as an organization?

Joseph:

Awesome. Sounds great. I mean, we can start in a lot of places. I think the company that we have tended to work the closest with for a long time now, that is near and dear to our hearts, of course, is Inductive Automation with the Ignition platform. I could spend a whole podcast or two talking about that.

In particular, I'm really excited to see a lot of the improvements they've made to both better support the life sciences industry. Those are things like the electronic signature stuff that we've talked about in the past, as well as the whole move towards cloud.

We've talked about this a little bit in the past about how we've been sort of pushing it, and now we're really seeing a pull from both customers, and from partners like Inductive, that are going to be putting out a lot more messaging around that and are also helping us putting out a product that really, really aligns well with this space. And that's super exciting for a whole bunch of reasons. That's the first one on my list.

James:

That's a great place to start, certainly, the engagement and the growth that Inductive has seen and the innovation that they brought to the industry. There's no one else that's really distanced themselves quite as far as that.

My first choice, or second choice, really, behind Inductive, would actually be MQTT. I would highlight some of the vendors who are strong in this space, folks like Sirius Link, with Arlen, co-inventor of MQTT, but also folks like HiveMQ, and there's a variety of other organizations that have adopted this as standards and included it in their products, as well as folks that have built new and better broker technologies, companies that are now embracing SparkPlug on top of MQTT.

I think it is as enabling technology really is a game changer in a lot of different ways, and I'm kind of waiting for the rest of the automation world to figure out what the big deal is, and when they do, I suspect it's going to explode even more than it already is.

Joseph:

I think that plays nicely into this theme of openness and open architecture as well. That's something that MQTT has done a great job of, is becoming this open standard that can connect products and software and hardware from a whole bunch of different vendors, as opposed to some of the things we've seen from other vendors where they're trying to close off those ecosystems, is, I think, how you've described it. MQTT is a great enabler of this open connectivity. And again, Ignition embraces it, a lot of the partners in the ecosystem, and certainly Hive and Sirius link as well.

James:

Yeah, for sure. Who's your third choice, Joe?

Joseph:

I'm going to have to go with our friends at Opto 22, because they just make a really nice, rock solid set of devices, which we've talked about, again, in the past, but really nice out of the box way to do collection of data at the edge and also do things like local control without you having to start from scratch with an industrial PC. That's been a really enabling technology for us. That's exciting that is built into some of our managed services. But also just a great group of folks to work for, really, really collaborative, really, really strong messaging. Like us, they put a very technical focus on a lot of their messaging, so it's easy to talk to their technical staff, their engineering staff. Everything's built locally here, so have really, really good experience working with them and looking forward to continuing to do that. They're next on my list.

What about you, James? How many you got? How long is your list?

James:

Well, I don't know when we're going to run out of time, Joe, but I would say my next one, I'm not going to put these in order, so I will say, in no significant order, both Azure and AWS. Both of these cloud platform vendors have been tremendous in terms of the offerings they have, the breadth of capabilities that are brought to the table, and specifically now working with both AWS and Microsoft Azure, see how I switched them back there? They've got some really compelling hybrid offerings in both cases that I think are really going to help customers bridge the gap.

You know what, I know I want cloud, I know cloud is the future, but I'm not ready to have this out of my building yet. I still need my systems inside of our four walls. The solutions that we're able to now leverage from those vendors and be able to bring into play lets us still deploy a factory stack or a pharma stack instance, but it's on-prem, and there's parts of it that live in the cloud, things like backup and authentication, where it makes sense, and the functional parts of it, the Ignition application, the database, the back or the Git systems, they're all on-prem, they're all as fast as they would be as if they were installed on bare metal.

I think that, coupled with the support and the growth that we've seen with both of those ecosystems, I think is something I'm certainly thankful for.

Joseph:

For sure. I'll add Google Cloud in there as well. I think especially recently we've seen a lot of the technologies that they've been using to somewhat differentiate themselves, things like Anthos. Also, they have a more managed version of their Kubernetes orchestration engine that is a little bit more hands off and reduces some of the maintenance that's required from vendors like ourselves. So they're also a player in that space. Not as big, of course, in manufacturing these days, but certainly that could change.

The other new one that I'll throw out there is Copia, really, because they are really sharing our vision of bringing some of these cloud native and cloud adjacent technologies to the manufacturing and industrial automation space, namely version control. Doing version control of PLCs and building it on open source technologies like Git is super exciting to me too.

James:

Awesome. I guess my next one is going to be HighByte. I see specifically once we started looking at offering the ability to do on-premise, hybrid, cloud-based instances of our systems, the ability to have a data ops tool like HighByte be a part of that architecture and to provide that contextualization and in-flight management of data really does create a whole lot of value in the modeling and transportation and transformation of information as it flows from system to system. Pardon me. Sorry. Possibly loud. But yeah, I would put them on the list as well. Joe?

Joseph:

Totally. I could probably do this all day. There's other companies in this space, which, whether they're part of our product ecosystem right now or things that could be there in the future, but companies like Canary that I think are doing pretty interesting things. There's a lot of technologies, things like PostgreS, which I've been posting a lot about online, and it's really enabled a lot of these managed services to produce some pretty cool things. I could go on all day. I'll say-

James:

It's probably not necessary for us to go on all day, but I mean, just to be thankful for the fact that innovation appears to be as embraced as it is today, that there's so many folks out there that are really pushing to try to find the best ways to solve these problems, the maturity of the unified namespace concept, and really the collection of tools that all go around that to help our customers and help to create a more consistent and easier way to deploy these kind of systems. I think that's such a cool thing to see and a cool thing to be a part of. And obviously as we move forward, I expect to see it become more and more the norm as opposed to the edge case.

Joseph:

I was definitely hoping to go all day, so that's a little disappointing to me. But if we're going to close it up a little bit, I'll make it a little bit more personal and just echo that I think we've had some great conversations with a lot of companies, a lot of partners, and those companies are made up by people. And so we've had some great interactions with folks, and so I wanted to extend a heartfelt thanks to the people that have put in the time, both people in our team, people we partner with, other people in the ecosystem, that are putting knowledge out there, sharing knowledge online, that are trying to bring some of these exciting technologies to this space. Very thankful for all of that and all the buzz and excitement, which is helping to make these things a reality. And of course, our families and friends and everybody else who's supporting us as we do some fun, innovative things like this here at 4IR.

James:

Very well said, Joe. And I echo your comments. I definitely would not be as articulate in saying them all, so all of that same stuff from me as well. And certainly we wish everyone has a great holiday season. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Happy Hanukkah. Whatever it is that you're celebrating, we hope that you enjoy it and that you get some time with your friends and your family during the holiday season. Thanks everybody.

Joseph:

Awesome. Thanks everybody.

James:

Cheers.

‍

‍

Subscribe

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gyENbvvFfc&t=12s

Audio Podcast: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/gzLK3xcPMsb

Blog: https://www.4ir.cloud/blog

‍