Jarie Bolander: Hey everyone and welcome to the O T crowd. My name is Jarie. This is David. That's Andrew. We're actually in the same room. This is like the first time it is in a long time. I think I don't think we've all been in the same room, but I'm clearly not doing the podcast, which Just started the podcast. So we figured we would do an impromptu episode and chat about state of the industry or how is the automation industry going. A couple of things. This week, David had a talk at CODIS's Tech Talk, which was really cool. A lot of fun. About the ExxonMobil ACT project and about how CPlane, the company we all work for, and COPA, pulled together and did that. There's been a bunch of announcements. Yokogawa did their high availability announcements. Announcement this week, I think it was a day ago. Good. When this drops, it'll probably be next week, but we'll talk a little bit about that. And then Andrew had a great topic called Inchidification. Inchidification. I don't think that'll be the title of the episode, but shittification, that's a pretty good one. So why don't you start off with that? Like what does that mean? Yeah, so it's not my term. it's a term that's been, I can't remember who coined it. But it's basically about how it seems like all of any product or service that you get eventually gets worse. it's really been a big problem with internet services. But it it can also be applied to, I think the reason I was originally learning about it was in dependencies of countries together. So the whole geopolitical situation we have going on right now, where alliances are changing and there were dependencies that are now being reconfigured. Right. And I think it applies to the software that we use in OT as well. so basically is there's the the thing that cycles and causes this inchidification is a four-part. So the first part is called efficiency. That's when you're trying to do something, you look for the cheapest, most efficient way to do it to optimize your processes. once you've Or the most features or whatever is the best. The latest and greatest, and that's okay. Yep. So now you're in. But then what happens is because that is the best way, you end up becoming dependent on it. You restructure all of your processes. Standard. Yeah. We need to do this. This is what our standard is. Okay. Okay. So then the step after the efficiency is you become dependent. And then once you're dependent, is where bad things start to happen. You're hostage. Because you get held hostage. And when your vendors realize that you are a hostage, they weaponize it. So they raise prices, they reduce fees. You can't change to them. They're incompatible or they don't do this the way we do it. Yeah. Not that they don't do it better, they don't do it way we Way we do it. Yeah. And you love doing it this way because that's your standard. Yep. So they try this your vendor starts trying to eke out their profit margins as high as they can because they can. So then finally, your pain becomes high enough that you're willing to break away from that weaponized vendor to go do something else. So you've if you look at your subscription services that keep getting crappier and more expensive and more. Eventually, like the And it's they do both. They get crappier and they get more expensive. Right. So eventually you're under so much pain that you're like, you know what, I'm gonna go find a different way, even if that other way is not as efficient, I'm done. Right. And I think that in the OT world, we now have that situation occurring. That's what OPAS is trying to do. Yeah. Is given out for end users to escape the weaponization, the thumb they're being held under. And switch to something. Yeah. Proprietary lock in as they say. Change the model so it maybe it's harder to become Get weaponized as well as that dependency, you know. I'd say OPA, the big thing is dependency is not a criteria. Yep. dependency on architecture and standards might be, but an actual vendor and a specific set of products. Yeah. Yeah, to be able to escape the weaponization stage, you gotta avoid the dependency stage. So you wanna stay in the efficiency stage all the time. So you need to be able to easily switch at the efficiency stage to the next most efficient. thing without having pain and education. So let's w in the OPA world you change the dependency into a mother a beneficial relationship and as long as it meets the needs and fits the the criteria, you're not dependent but you have a preference and that's okay. That's the way businesses do work, but the dependency part is now you're no longer in control of your own future. Yeah. I mean that's growth. This is happened over this past six months with SaaS. The SaaS apocalypse, I'm sure people have heard about that. A lot of companies, because of AI, I'm gonna build my own tool, right? Like, okay, how's that gonna work? So six to my nine months ago, they were always starting to do that. And then what was happening was all of the pricing people would just cancel. Yeah, yeah. And then, hey, we still need to make revenue. They would jack up the price on companies that built their workflow around the tool. And then people got pissed off and started to go even more. Now it's starting to come back sass because it was a lot harder to make you roll your own roll your own. trying to be everything and do everything is really hard. Yeah. And that's quite honestly, that's the automation conundrum. Yeah. We need the vendors, we need capability, we need the efficiency, we do not need dependency, we do not need weaponization. Or we will take that last step. Yeah we'll move on. Exit. Well, I mean that's part of the reason what fourteen years ago, fifteen years ago, ExxonMobil decided to launch our own OPA. This is very true. The open process automation started from an obsolescence issue that was Really untenable for the business. it was say stated, and you know, I don't work for Exxon anymore, but that's okay. I lived those during those years and I and I heard the stories. in several conferences, our chief engineer at the time, he went and said, Listen, the vendor tells you you got five, six years and it's over. The product can't it's not gonna be available, you're gonna be you're stuck. Yeah. not good. Well the company, they're so big, you know. You start looking at these projects that it's going to take 17 years to fix, but I've only got six. It's going to cost billions of dollars to fix, which is also a huge drag. Because most automation projects, migrations especially, they don't add a lot of value. They're not earnings projects, they are infrastructure projects. That's the new, the new water line, the new air conditioner, the new refrigerator. It is this is a problem because you know, you can't g s go spend billions of dollars and not get something back for it. You can spend you can spend ten thousand dollars and not get anything back for it, but at somewhere in those numbers you start talk you have to approach the board, the management committee of the corporation and say, gee, we want to spend a whole lot of money, you know, a significant portion of annual profit. Yeah, it's true. And this I mean, seriously, this is you know, in those days this was Tanamount is making somebody promise fifty percent of their annual profit to go fix a problem because you're you need a new fridge, a new air conditioner. You need a lot of new air conditioners. but yeah, that's This is this is the where we got to a state and just said, this isn't gonna work. What's great is we're starting to see this already in our industry with some of the vendors. So they're making their tools so they can be installed on Windows and Linux, importantly and Linux. People are tired of Microsoft. So they're learning to do containers for their Linux software. Yeah, containers containers. my gosh. Okay. Now that's a fairly New technology compared to virtual well, yeah, ten years now. But the but virtualization's been around for over 20. Yeah. Yeah. And there are still vendors occasionally will talk, the salesperson will talk like Vin you know, virtualization is new. What world have you been living in? In automation, it might be it might be new, but it is not new. It's well done, it's well understood. Yeah. Yeah, and it's good to see the vendors come stepping up, implementing the cybersecurity capabilities, implementing things like OPC UA and other I'll call not vendor supported, specific vendor supported protocols. Yeah, we're vendor specific. I joke, you know, they made open 'cause they fa they made a foundation. Yeah. But you gotta buy a membership card and you have to kinda Sometimes you kinda have to swear an oath to to use and you think, well But they were built in y in time periods where cybersecurity's not strong. Yeah. Well that's a problem today. and they don't always share the information models. or some of them use special chips on the Right. Right. Built on the bo it's not just an Ethernet chip, it's some special stack. Yeah, in our proof of concept work, we actually ran into a vendor who did not do unsigned sixteen-bit integer as a data type. Okay. It seems pretty What world is that not one of the sets of data types, especially in a tr strongly typed, the standard models you ha you have boundaries about you are gonna type your data, you are gonna do these things. And for someone to say, and then and their answer was, Well, we don't use that data type in our software. No. And I was like, But you're you need to be interoperable, which means somebody else will, is how we found it. and you think would you do this to yourself? Well in the world before standards and interoperability and interchangeability, you got to do what you wanted. Yeah. Because as a as a vendor, you bought their product, they kind of owned you now. Yep. That's true. The dependency started and the weaponization showed up every year with the support contract. Yeah. Just keep paying the bill, we'll be your friend. Yeah. Well I know like this the week we're recording this, we're at the end of it. It's Friday. Yeah. And Code Assist had their tech week this week and one of the things that they announced Codasys four huge great thing it runs in Linux finally and some other other and some other cool things. I think they also did they do they didn't do like a web they have a website. They have a web version now. We can ru can you run the tool SAS now? Or is there some you can run it you probably can be but it it's meant to be able to be run on prem from a central circuit so that anybody can log in with their thin client browser and edit libraries. It's pretty limited right now in terms of functionality. But they've been very vocal with that. Yeah. That's a very huge step. Step towards multi user. Just a huge step, yeah, multi tenant or whatever. That's huge. Having having one person work on a program at a time is kinda inefficient. Yeah. That's good. There that's that. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Because I mean the reason why I bring it up is like tech week, you got to present it tech week. Right. R solution for the Anchorage Chemical Terminal for Exxon Mobil down in Mount Rouge. Full kermo full commercial installation. Right, running. Full bid with other major vendors in the in the loop there. that was really cool. And the in the winter was little OLS. Yeah. C Plane and Copa and a bunch of CSI, a bunch of our partner notes. We've adopted the OPA standards and and lived by it and the and other vendors could do part of it because they hadn't they hadn't embraced all of it yet. Now they're all working on it, but that's good for the marketplace. But I think it's very a positive step that we've got a system that is not a a lab system. It's not made up of glue ware. It's it's a full tilt commercial capability. Yeah. And it's making money for a company. Yeah, well I think this is what it's foring the business case for why this is important. Not only total cost of ownership, as we always talk about, total installed cost and all that, but also being more efficient, being able to optimize things when you normally couldn't have done that. So yeah, that was really cool. That was really a really a great thing. And I I just can't wait to see more folks, you know, trying to embrace that having been part of OPA since the very idea. stage of this through the the the starting of the standards organization with the forum and and building standards which is hard work and now having built some projects I think one of the things I really love is not only is it available, but the end user and the system integrator who put it in basically went on stage in earlier this year and said told the world there's no difference between a proprietary and OPA system project in terms of how it works, what happens. You have some of the same issues. you know, gee that sensor's not working, why you know, yeah, it hasn't been working for six months. you have these, you know Other kind of project timeline issues that happen, somebody's not available, whatever, manpower kind of l electricians. But the actual automation project was the same boring migration. It's the same kind of system. And it does the same kinds of things that a system did. Although with the open standards basis, you're not stuck. You're not stuck. You can do other things that in other systems, well, yeah, you can put that on another server outside the automation system. Right. And and I love that it's boring. It's just another boring automation project. Beautiful. Yeah, well would would Would did a great job on that. So we're really happy that they're our partner. They're a good data. They're a good group. They've been yeah. They've they actually were along with us in some of the steps within the Exxon Mobil R D program. Yeah. and it was very good. They actually volunteered first and they were like, hey, we're interested. we need somebody to try this out, see if you like doing this. And they and they loved it. That's right. Well they were the they were the integration, the EPC system integrator. and then they helped us take it to the to a a a pilot a a plant that did R and D processes and and we got to test it with operators. Yeah. And Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, as we all know. If you wanna know how good an engineer you are, give your product to an operator for ten well during the FAT it took the operators seventeen minutes to find something that they did that we had to fix. They break they look break. That's not what I wanted. That's not what we meant. okay. Which everybody's lived through that. That's why there's But they are the toughest customer. and yeah, so so the the ACT project is excellent because it's a full commercial. This is not somebody's lab testbed prototype. It's real. It's just like if you had gone to another brand of vendor and done a project. so it's a it's a very good sign that this is the way to go and everybody sees the The advantages of the OPA part. The freedoms you get, as I say, once you learn it, you can't go back. You can't unknow it and you're not gonna want to go back. Yeah. This is how it should be for the future. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, and I think something else happened this week. I think it was yesterday, Yokogawa announced that they're a high availability product. I think they're gonna show it at open group in a couple weeks. Yeah. what's cool about that is that we also have the same kind of thing built on OPA. One of the things that OPA was really really harped on was right being able to have a high availability system as part of the standard. Right. And that's really cool. So now we have two vendors that can do it. And so this yeah. And high availability is that if you take redundancy and you add software capabilities to it, you end up with what's really high high availability. It's not simple redundancy. It's much, much better. Right. and this is a very a very good day. Yeah. We've got this. And And to have multiple people doing it, it's it sets a trend. An expectation can be met. Yeah. it's a demand in the automation world to have some redundancy capability. And the high availability is what you really want, anyways. the simple redundancy was great, you know, in the eighties and it served us well, but it it as the world's gotten more complex and systems get more complex, it needs to be better. Yeah. And this high availability starts to prove it. Yeah. And the standard spaces is Yeah, well I think that's the exciting part. It's like as this ecosystem builds out. Yeah. Part of the challenge with anything is like, okay, do I rely on a vendor or do I rely on an architecture and an ecosystem for support? Right. And in every other technology company, every other technology sector, IT, you know, et cetera, it's it you rely on the architecture. So your Wi-Fi, your Ethernet, your Linux or a CERT, like you can buy that stuff from everything, and so it just gets better and better innovation. happens more and more and as a as an end user you're just way more comfortable that you have options. Like choice is always a good thing because without choice that's just you are locked into the inchidification. Yeah. So yeah we're really excited. We're excited to see the opening. I find it interesting that Andrew came from a world that they adopted optionality, choice in their systems. earlier than a lot of vendors. And and when you hear that story you just go, This is the way it oughta be. Now there is a criteria and a requirement everybody shows up with, but why does it have to be a specific brand or specific style? it it's it's it's the rest of our world is like this. What kind of PC do you have? Right. Do you even use a PC? Do you use a tablet? Or do you use Mac. Right, but the but the idea that gee somehow a particular brand is the one to have this is the Ford versus Chevy truck argument. Or even cloud, like which cloud vendor? There's so many that go you can get whatever you get. I need the functionality of cloud. And yeah, I'm gonna look for economics and relationship and and feature service in my world and specialization and my kind of problem. You know, but it's that I I l my one of my more recent analogies has been I need a half inch wrench. You know. Or twelve millimeter wrench, whatever. And everybody's like, go go buy, go to the the Harbor Freight Northern Tool place and get you know, they got for two bucks. You know, no, no, no. Go to the big box store and get the ten, twelve dollar one in this lifetime warranty. or better, go to the guys who show up in the truck and it's a seventy dollar wrench and it's a lifetime warranty. And it's like, Well Everybody gets to choose. Do I have one task and if it breaks three years from now or I use it again in three years, no one cares? Do I use it every day? Do I use it hard every day? Well that's why you pick what you pick. But in the end, you needed the half inch wrench or twelve millimeter inch or whatever. It's that idea about everybody gets to choose what is their desired function, their their best in class, which is a subjective term. optionality is a phrase that's been used. I like that. This is where the world needs to go. Yeah. Absolutely now. it's just gonna make everyone better. yes, you know, Yokogawa, good on them. Of course, you know, no, no, it's it's it's impressive to see that people are stepping forward and are implementing technology and and using the OPA standard as a guide for doing it. Yeah. showing that it doesn't have to be proprietary. It can be based on standards. They get to offer it, that's their IP, and they're gonna have their customers who love it. Yeah. but other people go, Well, I want something from somebody else. So they can't Yeah. Right. So other vendors can supply different features, better features, but you're still not locked in because you're still using OPAS. Right. It's easy to switch between just competition in general is just gonna be better. makes everyone better when you have choices and that we're competing in the open market. It's like, all right, you did your thing, now okay, good on you. Now we have to show you our stuff and we have to kind of fight it out in the marketplace. among gentlemen of course. Yeah. We we all love each other. So so you got to go to Ignition's conference. Yeah, that was a couple of weeks ago, yeah. Yeah. I C which is another place that Yeah I think you were saying how, you know That's where you run into a whole group, a whole tribe of people who think about open and standards. my gosh, yeah. Yeah, Ignition. And to them it's not a they don't believe there's a proprietary world that should get should exist. and that's it had to be enlightening. it was. it was like my first show. it was really cool to like look at all this stuff, you know, and and also like, you know, I I mentioned like so there it's starting to go to yearly releases releases. So the next one, ignition twenty twenty. 27's coming out. Okay. One of the cool things they did on stage, and we wrote it, they wrote about it on over at Copa, was that they put COPA up as for the high availability, we needed to work with ignition and code and everything needed to work. And so they they gave us some recognition, which is really cool. And Bob, our mutual boss, the boss boss, got on stage and talked about it too. So yeah, I mean they see the vision too. I think it's for them, and they were talking about open, open architecture, open, open, open, open, even CODIC. Was like they wanted an open world because they know that that's gonna make everyone better, including them. But yeah, I think the momentum's there. I mean, as I always say, we gotta make the we want software that doesn't care about the brand of the hardware, right? We want harder brands that don't care about the software, and they are functionally equivalent in the standards area. Obviously, there is IP and differentiation, everybody needs that. Yeah, that's the reason you bought the product, right? But in the end It has to achieve some similar goals no matter which product you bought. And that that's an important piece. You know, in the automation world, we talk about this idea. Nobody wants to lose control. Yeah. Everybody really hates losing visibility. So the HMI functionality is is also very important. But I believe, you know, now that we're in the 2020s and it's 2026, you know, loss of data should go away. We have the technology capability. Capability, why are we losing data? Because a a network is d a connection is down or a piece of software is being updated or servers being upgraded or changed or modified and you don't have your historian or you don't have your whatever. And so I think these you know, no loss of control, no loss of view, and no loss of data is really the the rule we should live by moving forward. Yeah, I think that's the standard that's gonna start to happen. You know, I mean the momentum the momentum, sorry, is there. I mean, I do think 2027 is going to be the inflection point. that's all everything we see right here, and and what we're planning for. The reason we're all together is to plan for 2027. So all right. Well, thanks so much for for watching the show. This is the OT crowd of Jarie, David, and Andrew. All together. All together in one room. If you like the show, please give us a rating and review. Tell your buddies and friends and all that. And we will see you next time. Bye.