Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Talk to me. Information, news and entertainment on demand. WUS radio.com. 0:11 [on-hold music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world, with your host, Peggy Smedley. [on-hold music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:26 My last guest today is spreading the word of innovation. He has been involved in the adoption of solutions related to machine condition monitoring, smart grids, and the industrial IoT. 0:38 His extensive knowledge of the oil and gas, power generation, heavy equipment, and transmission industries are enabling organizations to take their own energy and utilities to the next level. 0:50 Please join me in welcoming Brett Berger, principal marketing manager at National Instruments. Brett, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Well, we're delighted to have you. 1:03 So let's talk about, uh, National Instruments. You know, how you guys have been involved. You've been doing a lot of things on the industrial side, oil and gas, as I mentioned, power gen, heavy equipment. 1:14 Now you guys have really been doing a lot in industrial IoT. Let's talk about your-- how your customers are actually trying to leverage all of this, 'cause it's a changing time. 1:24 You have to get those manufacturers involved in understanding how they really need to get those devices involved, what they need to do. Uh, you've done a lot in measurement and control over the years. 1:34 What's your thought on how you leverage all of this technology in the Internet of Things space? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a, there's a big push right now to connect the unconnected. 1:46 And what businesses are seeing is that once they are able to both, uh, communicate to and receive data from heavy equipment like trains or automated, uh, farming equipment, uh, off-highway equipment mining, and then in the big heavy industries like power generation and, uh, downstream oil and gas refining. 2:05 Once you're able to really pull information from all these assets, you just really open up the world of the, the IoT ecosystem where you've got software trends like machine learning and, uh, deep compute algorithms that are gonna go through, unlock the insights that let these businesses make better decisions and ultimately make money. 2:24 And, and looking at that, you know, companies right now are trying to really gather all the information when we talk about the data analytics. And talk about how companies are really benefiting. 2:34 Are they doing it through customizable software? Are they doing it from platforms that are off the shelf? What are you seeing with your customers? What are the, a, a combination of things? 2:44 What are they really looking for to get accurate information from the things that they have in their operations right now? 2:52 What we're seeing a lot in multiple industries, especially with our customers, is the need to use a platform-based approach that lets them kind of harness the, the technology on the shelf today, but then combine it with some customization so it, it, it fits their special needs. 3:08 Um, a good example of that is, you know, we worked with London Underground, uh, the basically the subway operators in the UK, and they had these safety circuits that if they failed, all the trains would stop. 3:19 And so what they did was they put in a part off-the-shelf, um, hardware monitoring system with some customized software on top, and now their maintenance professionals can go in, they can swap out these safety circuits before they fail, uh, so they don't have to do that in the middle of rush hour. 3:34 They can do it overnight when the, when the tubes are operating at very low capacity. So things like that, where you have, you know, a customer requirement. 3:41 There aren't too many businesses in the world that have those kind of specific problems or those kind of specific systems. 3:47 So when it comes to the, the industrial IoT, there's a lot of that kind of customization layer that needs to come in and, and really take shape. 3:56 When we talk about that, and you looked at the industrial side, even like on the energy and the utility side, we're seeing a lot of them trying to figure out because like, for example, you guys recently partnered with Invary, um, on the energy platform that they have for big data and for the utility side. 4:12 Talk about that, because I think that's an interesting partnership for what they have to do with grid operators to improve their utilization. 4:19 I think that's important because we're seeing a lot of partnerships trying to be successful in how they provide information and a surety in the marketplace. 4:31 I think the Invary solution is a fantastic example of industrial IoT applications. 4:37 And, and you mentioned, you know, you hit the nail on the head when you talk about partnership, because a lot of what they do is they go in and they take the utility industry, which is in charge of putting power on the grid as, as us customers plug in and consume power. 4:52 But historically, there's not been a, a way to, to kind of cross that, that meter gap. The utility company can't control when I turn on and off my air conditioner or plug in my hair dryer. Um, and vice versa. 5:03 If I'm the consumer, I can't really-- I don't have a path to tell the utility what I'm gonna do. Uh, so what Invary has done is they've come in and with 5:12 IoT technologies like distributed, intelligent edge nodes, cloud compute, um, analytics, they've been able to bridge that gap. 5:20 So what their system does, the, uh, and they call it the intelligent energy platform, is it distributes these hardware nodes that would connect to large commercial buildings. 5:31 Think of a big box retailer, large office space or a, a university campus. And the edge nodes, these grid edge devices, give the utility company a way to automatically control some of the loads of these large customers. 5:47 So in the middle of the day, when it's really hot and everyone's trying to run their air conditioner and their TVs and everything's on because people are at home and at work, the utility com-company can now say, "Well, instead of having to buy really expensive energy on the market-"I can instead turn to my, my Innovari system, this IEP platform, and intelligently turn off loads with as much predictability as turning on a power plant. 6:14 So it, it gives me that ability to, to shed loads, uh, optimize my, my grid utilization, and save money for all people in the process. 6:22 And it's a really just absolutely incredible example of taking some-- finding some inefficiencies and using IoT technology to eliminate the efficiencies and save everybody money. 6:33 Are these good examples of, you know, utilities companies, one, saving that money, saving the loads that you just described? 6:41 You know, actually are they able repeatable cases, companies can be able to-- utilities can be able to say, "Look, these are cases learned that we can actually leverage and improve upon and, and continue," and others can say, "We can do that," you know? 6:55 This is the way that the Internet of things is really take us... and it's a secure environment as we do it as well. Yeah. Ab-absolutely. 7:05 And that's, that's kind of what Innovari is seeing as they work with a variety of utility companies around the world is, you know, the, the utility companies are able to avoid capital expenditure. 7:17 They're able to better utilize some of their power generation capability. 7:21 Um, and then energy customers on the other side, the ones getting these intelligent boxes installed, are saving, you know, five to seven percent of energy savings. 7:29 And, you know, kind of bridging back to your last comment where you were talking about platforms and, you know, I mentioned how there's that customization software layer on top, um, Innovari has said that when they walk into one of these, the energy customers, these big box retailers or shopping malls or what have you, um, they, they never really know what to expect. 7:47 So it's another really good example of how in the industrial side of the world, uh, not everything is, is, is cookie cutter and not everything is the same, which really kind of enforces that need for platform and some configuration on top. 7:59 And, um, it's, it's, it's modifications like that, uh, that, you know, when National Instruments comes to the table, those are things that we focus on. 8:08 Um, and, and certainly we, we have our industrial IoT lab that we just opened up this year that invites all of these different technology vendors to the table to help work these things out before they go out to market. 8:19 And so we know that, Brett, that the evolution of the industrial IoT is gonna continue. So what's next for these companies and your partners that you see that you're gonna have to help them understand? 8:31 Well, a few of the, the big trends that, that we see both, uh, just from being in the marketplace, but also with working with customers like I've, like I've mentioned, 8:41 um, the number of systems that our customers are deploying and that vendors serving the industrial IoT space are deploying is growing dramatically, which creates a few challenges that right now engineers are kind of tackling on their own, but a lot of technology companies are putting some investment in, and that's systems management. 9:01 So how do I reach out to these hundreds or thousands of devices, make sure they're all running the same firmware, uh, make sure that they are all in a good operating state? 9:10 So if one of them may be running over on CPU cycles or filling up a disk or something like that, some kind of systems management. Um, and then the other side is data management. 9:20 So how much of this data do I need to save, store, or process at the edge versus push back to the cloud? Um, and then when I do get it all back to the cloud, 9:31 um, or along the way, uh, I have so much data that I may want to look for automated ways to- Hey, Brett? -process it into information. Oh, yeah, Peggy. Brett, we're out of time, but thank you so much. 9:40 I hope you'll come back. Hey, listeners, remember- Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. We're broadcast every Tuesday live twelve PM Central. Join us. If you wanna s- tweet at us, tweet us peggy_smedley. 9:52 Remember, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT. Have a great week. 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