- Okay, what is open architecture?
All right, so, this question just popped up,
we didn't plan on doin' it this month
so I'm literally gonna wing this, we didn't think about it
at all but the answer is what is open architecture
and really what is open architecture for industry?
What does that actually mean, okay?
So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna illustrate two different types of architectures,
right, because so many people are confused
as to what IIOT is, for example, you can have a platform,
you can have a solution, a series of, a piece of hardware
and two pieces of software that all support IIOT protocols
but are not open, okay, I can use the underlying protocol,
could be an IIOT protocol like (muffled)
but I could just by virtue of the way
that I'm publishing the payload, I could make it
so that it only plays nice with the software I want it
to play nice with, that is not open, that's closed, okay?
- [Cameraman] Why would anyone wanna do that?
- Well, there's a couple reasons, number one,
they may wanna sell turnkey solutions,
completely unified turnkey solutions, number one,
number two, they may wanna own the entire stack, okay,
they may wanna monetize the entire stack, right,
and number three, it boils down to reliability, right,
if I have the same engineering group
developing the communications protocol
at the hardware layer, the communications client
at the HMI layer and the communications client
at the (muffled) layer, well then I have complete control
over how that communications performs but what I'm doing
by virtue of developing all three closed is
I am essentially locking out a whole bunch
of off the shelf solutions that could benefit
from being able to consume from that data,
provide value to the end user.
One of the things that we do when we go into a,
when we are architecting solutions for customers,
doing IIOT solutions, whether it's intellic integration
or whether it's 4.0 solutions, one of the first questions
that we ask them, one of the very first questions
that we ask them is, we actually say this,
show me all your excel reports
and they look at us kinda blank on the face.
What do you mean?
And what we say is I want you to go
to all the decision makers in your organization
and all of their assistants and I want you
to give me every spreadsheet that they've got
in their personal files and what's the reason
that we care about looking at those things?
Because industrial consumers, they use excel
to fill the gaps for data collection and data analytics.
When they wanna present the data in a certain way
and none of the solutions that they have
in their plant can produce their report in the format
that they wanna produce it, they will create that report
in excel, they'll take all the data collected together,
normalize it and then on a separate tab, build a report
that they're gonna use in their daily production meeting
so we ask for these reports because these reports tell us
what they want, this is showing us the gaps,
this the gaps in their data, we take data, we turn it
into information so we ask that question,
show me all of your excel reports and this tells us
what's missing, what's missing is a pain point
and when you're trying to sell to end users,
when you're trying to solve their problems,
you wanna know what their pain points are
so we start by asking give me an example,
show me all the spreadsheets you guys use to make decisions,
okay, because we can use the IIOT to automate the building
of those information dashboards and so you don't have
to use Excel anymore, okay, all right,
back to what I was saying, what is open architecture
so you probably have to, yeah, do that
as just one little, yeah, all right,
so what is open architecture?
Open architecture is the concept that everything plays nice.
That is my data can be shared with any platform,
any consumer can access that data, decipher that data,
turn it into information so everything plays nice, okay,
we use open protocols, that means not proprietary,
that is an organization
or a business doesn't own the protocol, okay,
we use open protocols, okay,
what open architecture is the idea that we don't know all
of the consumers and what that means is there may be nodes
in our ecosystem, there may be applications built later
that will wanna consume our data
and so we architect an open solution
so that other nodes can consume that data without needing--
- [Cameraman] Blockchain.
- Blockchains are really extreme example
of open architecture, right, a really extreme example,
what is a closed architecture, okay, specific software
and hardware play nice, we select the nodes
that we are gonna go ahead and share information with, okay,
we use closed protocols, what is a closed protocol?
Proprietary, right, so this would be the way that,
the way the payload is constructed in profibus for example
when you're using
a siemens process control profibus connection.
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- Right or data highway plus for the (muffled)
between Rockwell solutions, okay, there're advantages
to using those protocols but the downsides
of being closed like
that outweigh the benefits drastically now
in the industry 4.0 space, closed protocols,
we use proprietary protocols in a,
now we could also be using an open protocol
but using it in a proprietary way
so I could be using the underlying protocol could be open
but I'm using it in a proprietary way
and then number three, these are explicit consumers,
that is we know all the consumers of our data
from the very beginning, okay, so when we build it closed,
we're building a closed loop system,
think about a closed loop PID, we explicitly say
where the data's going and who's consuming it.
The downside to that is that later on
when another consumer needs that information,
we either have to create another explicit connection
or we have to say no, all right, so examples of open
and closed, all right, let's try to illustrate here,
the difference between an open solution
and a closed solution, all right, so I'm gonna go back
to factory talk analytics for machines, okay,
or actually a better example here would be plant PAX,
let's use plant PAX, right, what is the advantage
of plant PAX for Rockwell automation and again,
this is a great solution, I love plant PAX,
I'm not picking on Rockwell here,
I'm not even completely totally opposed
to closed architectures in certain applications, okay,
there are applications where it's appropriate.