Open Source in Industrial Applications with Alexander Krüger

Willem (00:00)
welcome to the ITOT insider David. Who did you bring this time?

David (00:05)
Well, I wanted to do something totally different here. So we’re going to discuss a super interesting topic. ⁓ It’s a topic which we have been discussing for quite a while. We’ve been touching it and it’s the thing called open source, open source in the industry. ⁓ And I’m ⁓ very happy to have Alexander Kruger here with us. He’s the CEO and co-founder of United Manufacturing Hub.

He knows everything there is to know about open source. The good, the bad and the ugly, assume, Alexander. Hopefully the good. Let’s start with that. good. Hey, ⁓ welcome to the podcast. Can you just introduce yourself to our audience?

Alexander Krüger (00:41)
Yeah, hopefully they’re good, yeah.

Sure. Thanks for having me. So I’m actually mechanical engineer by background. So if you think about asking somebody about open source, I might be from the surface the wrong person to do that, but then quite fast actually transition into system integration. So studying mechanical engineering, then move to system integration. So shipping applications for two and a half years, ⁓ creating business value, if you would ask consultants. then we understood that there’s a missing software building piece or something in between application and the data sources, which…

There’s a lot of noise currently about it and we chose like the path of being open source to, to crack that nut and yeah, happy to, and yeah, I’m co-founder and CEO. So happy, happy to share some, my, my two cents on the topic.

David (01:36)
It might be the start of a joke, so you have a mechanical engineer, a mathematical engineer, and a chemical engineer entering a bar. Yeah, okay.

Willem (01:42)
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, David. It like a boring joke,

too nerdy. So, Alexander, I think what sets you apart from many others is especially like this open source part. can you go a bit deeper? mean, usually our audience is… Well, let’s say our audience is technical enough, so I would like to know what’s behind it and why did you choose open source compared to writing something out using libraries?

Alexander Krüger (01:57)
Why?

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah. So like when back then we are like system integrator, we always been technical people. Therefore we like been, okay. We are now in a factory. have this nice dashboard and we need something to pump it into and like data into. And then the obvious choice was first you thought about, okay, let’s get to traditional vendors. Let’s get a quote. Let’s have a trial license and use three weeks down the road. And it was so frustrating how the software is distributed and trialed and manufacturing. So.

It was quite obvious for us to do it the way that we like to explore software. So trying it, getting it on the hands and proving the value firsthand. So, and this is also, if you think infrastructure, actually the normal thing to do, if you think operating systems, you can think database, if you think streaming platforms, deleting ones are open source. So we thought, okay, open source or like a data handling and manufacturing will be a core infrastructure.

Therefore, open source is just logical. And ⁓ over the time, ⁓ we already thought it was something, but also building a better product is also a function of users and usage and getting feedback. And specifically, if you’re in a dusted thing like industrial software, ⁓ it’s hard to get the first customer. So it’s obviously easier to get somebody on the internet, trial your software, and give you unstructured feedback. And this is…

David (03:27)
Yeah.

Alexander Krüger (03:29)
Actually

also flywheel for us, this problem is not solved, I would say. It’s like just getting data from A to B in manufacturing is everybody’s pitching you an essence. It’s there, it’s done, but it’s not solved in our opinion yet. And therefore exposing us to people makes it good. Therefore open source is a way to do that.

Willem (03:49)
It’s like your whole platform and open source project. that the way I need to imagine it? Or are you like using open source components?

Alexander Krüger (03:56)
Yeah.

So no, no, we are also our platform. There are two pieces to it. So it’s the data infrastructure, which runs in the sites of our customers, 100 % open source, Apache 2.0 license. So we can do anything about them. So if you use them, it shovels data from A to B. We can have a pull the rug if you want it like that. And there’s an additional component or management console, which makes it easier to work with it. And this is proprietary, so like a SAS application, also harder to do.

open source, it’s more distributed application. And this is also a monetization model. It’s called OpenCore. So giving the core of the platform for free and then have certain features for enterprises, multi-users, role-based access behind the paywall. And this is then a good approach to monetize also open source.

David (04:44)
And I’m gonna play a bit of a good cop, bad cop here if you don’t mind. If I take my, let’s say my typical OT hats on, I put it on and where open source components are something which we all know from hobby projects or the IT world or…

Alexander Krüger (04:49)
Hmm.

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Willem (05:10)
I’m pretty

sure most of IT is running on open source, not just hobby, everything basically.

Alexander Krüger (05:14)
It is fun.

But with the people still singing like that, so fair point.

David (05:18)
Yeah

But I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, don’t know. I’m, I’m John, your OT manager. And I go like, yeah, but I’m, feel more comfortable paying. ⁓ I don’t know, whatever amount of money for the solution offered by, by this vendor, because then I’m, then I’m sure. I don’t know. I’m sure that ⁓ this thing is going to run in my factory for 20 years, for example. Is that, but you say that’s the old way of thinking.

Alexander Krüger (05:25)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Mm.

Mm.

Yeah. So this is the redhead, the way of monetizing open source. if you take a, trying to be not a history teacher, don’t know if correct me if I’m like, yeah, okay. Okay. Let me try my best and don’t look stupid in the meantime, but so like there was this wave of first generation open source, which was mostly focused around operating systems. So you had like, you know, store files, obviously making a huge, huge leaps with, with Linux.

David (05:57)
No, no, but you teach us history. That’s very interesting.

Alexander Krüger (06:14)
And then you need to install like a lot of stuff on top of that. So it was not something like plug and play, like it would be now. And then enterprises like struggle to run that commercially. like, with certain availability guarantees, et cetera. So then was a smart company, redhead, like combining Linux with a lot of those, application, nitty gritty pieces on top and bundling with a CD. So here you go. You have a product, so it’s open source, but we sell it to you. It was quite, quite an interesting value proposition because now.

I have somebody to call if something goes wrong. This was the first way of getting software. But then you are in a conflict of making software as good as possible. But at some point people then think, okay, do I really need to support because it runs now for five to 10 years and I’ve never had any issue. And then you’re like in a complete conflict. Then this second wave of open source was this paying for compute or storage way of thinking. Like you had databases, you have streaming platforms. So MongoDB.

David (07:00)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Alexander Krüger (07:11)
For

example, pure Elasticsearch would be a good example. So it’s hard enough in application, it’s hard to scale, therefore they take the burden off of you and just pay per gigabyte or whatever. But then those hyper scalers came into play, AWS and Azure, and pulled the rug and said, you can also just host the open source project on our platform and make it way cheaper. And then this open source vendor said, something goes wrong here with our monetization model. then they…

David (07:34)
you

Alexander Krüger (07:37)
brought into place so-called like AGPL licenses. So licenses, they just forbid those hyperscalers to host open source as a service. So a little bit technical, but this was also like a little bit destined to fail in my opinion, because you now have like this conflict already in the making. And so now it’s a time for this open core part of doing that. like currently now there’s still like a lot of projects pulling the rug or to a clawback.

So for example, a good reason example is Nuts. So everybody’s like the discussion of, I use MQTT? Do I use Kafka? Do I use Nuts as the broker? And then they took the, ⁓ they, it’s an open source project. You can give your product to a foundation. So they take care of maintaining and the brand, et cetera. And they had obviously some monetization issues, I guess. And therefore they did a clawback and said, this is now again, all brand and all source code.

like in a huge public battle now with CNCF, which is just ugly. And therefore you, yeah, they can, or they trying to do that. I’m not into the trenches on the details where they’re currently standing, but I think this is now an ongoing legal battle, which is in the making. Because there you need to have like, before you, old way of open source is technically person doing something great and then be not on accident, but be successful with it. then like Docker and then.

Willem (08:31)
out.

Could they do that?

Alexander Krüger (08:56)
trying to or be never successful at monetizing it. And now you need to make sure that already when you start, already had in mind, how do I monetize that? And this is open core, like having some enterprise features, like with the UMAGE, you as a technical user, forever free to use, like in this one man army in a company use it. But as soon as you need enterprise features, David wants to invite Willem to the UMAGE, then it’s an enterprise feature. And this is the third way I would say.

David (09:26)
So that actually means that not all open source software is created equally. There are big differences in what to, and what would be from an enterprise perspective, what would be the, well, basically the green or the red flags. What are the things to look out for when you’re using open source components?

Alexander Krüger (09:32)
in.

Mm.

So like the lawyer answers always check on the licensing because open source is also stacked. So you have like open source companies building on top of other open source product and then it goes like it’s that can be a card box. So if you buy open source, make sure that you like comply with the licenses, Apache or MIT are the super permissive ones where you can just do what you want. But sure that you don’t get into any BSL, perhaps too deep for the technical piece, but sure to check on the licenses. And secondly,

This is also still true, this tinkering situation. So you have this open source projects, which are not in any way commercially maintained. there’s just, it’s, parked somewhere pepped on the, into, into CNCF or somebody else, but nobody has actually interest or commercial interest to evolve that platform. So it’s like a slow death. And you don’t want to be part of any of those products who are not on a track actually of commercialization because it can also just die slowly, but steadily.

David (10:44)
Yeah, yeah, that’s, I’ve seen it myself as well. Now I’m putting my IT hat on. You’re developing a piece of software and you’re selecting a couple of libraries. And then after a couple of years, you want to upgrade and you come to the conclusion that, there is no support anymore for this library.

Alexander Krüger (11:01)
Yeah.

And it’s still, yeah, this is also described by the bus factor, how many buses needs to kill the whole development team of the platform. It’s only one person doing it as a side hustle. So a good example is Bentos. We’re also using that. It’s like a topic component from who’s data from A to B. It was just maintained by one person at a core. So quite risky to set up on top of that. Now they’re bought by Red Panda. But this is also something, are you sure that enough people are interested and

Willem (11:02)
Or nobody’s working with it.

David (11:10)
You

Alexander Krüger (11:30)
pushing it forward so that not one person getting uninterested or something really bad happens can kill the whole project.

David (11:40)
I want to make the bridge a bit from the pure open source discussion to more the data discussion. ⁓ Let’s hold back on UNS for a while, maybe for a while. Maybe as a cliffhanger or so. ⁓ one of the things I’m seeing ⁓ in general, and we’ve been discussing that in previous podcasts as well, is if you talk about ⁓ building a modern data stack today,

Alexander Krüger (11:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David (12:10)
It’s not so easy. There are no, at least from my perspective, not really complete solutions. If you really take the OT functionality and the IT functionality together, what you typically end up with is either you still stay a bit more on the OT side, so you’re selecting vendors which come more from an OT background. In some cases, for example, if your project is more IoT heavy or something like that, you typically lean towards the…

Alexander Krüger (12:23)
Yep.

David (12:40)
IT side, you’re more into the IT solutions tech. I ⁓ want to talk a bit more on what you see happening in the world from your perspective on how IT and OT are from a technological point of view, maybe converting or not.

Alexander Krüger (12:55)
Yeah,

we would like to build a bridge also about convergence. Like it’s always like this, this, this, this, thing that you now see at trade fairs, IT, OT converges, but it’s still true. you have, like I said, I would say hardware centric way of building software or from the hardware vendors at least. the Siemens, the Rockwells or the historians, the Scala attached software players were still on this gray software. If you want that gray rectangular boxes way of thinking. And then you have the IT way, which is then snowflake, Databricks.

Azure, but not OT persons can use IT and rather the OT burst software has failed to scale like in the classic IT sense. I think this is quite important to strike a balanced approach here. This is also why we open source. You need to know your users. They know ⁓ ignition, for example. They know all this of Pi. They know how TIA portal works.

David (13:33)
Yeah. ⁓

Alexander Krüger (13:47)
This is what they work, but they need under the hood something scalable like a Kafka and a Kubernetes cluster to load balance and have a high availability set up. But the skillset is different. So we need to have it be visually targeted in order from the functional perspective for OT. But under the hood, needs to be the next generation or the cloud native way of building software. yeah, so this is also some insights we hopefully got from the open source community because we are exposed to the people that are the users.

Willem (14:18)
You’re putting the core, let’s say, ⁓ out there as an open source code base. Do you expect others also to continue developing that or to help in the development? And who would those others be? Because let’s say I don’t expect that people in the plans are going to say, I’m going to go into code base and fix a bug, for example.

Alexander Krüger (14:24)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No,

but it’s in any case, also a little bit of a misconception about open source that you put software out there and then the community will maintain it. even if like in mature projects, for example, like Grafana, 80 % to 90 % of the code or the pull requests, the code is built by the company. And then you have like also in all case,

Willem (14:56)
done.

David (14:59)
Yeah.

Alexander Krüger (15:02)
People have functional problems, see features that are not there or something that we don’t see and they provide that as templates in OpenCourse. So for example, now we have back off as a new protocol that needs to be in there. Somebody has a problem and he forks that in. So something that we didn’t see, but this is like smaller than 10 % of the code that’s coming in, but still quite, quite useful. And we need to tune it in any way, but this is what we see.

David (15:29)
It’s interesting anyways because… Would that then be those contributors? Those are people who really need to have a very deep idea understanding, assume. Because you can’t just contribute to a platform like this.

Alexander Krüger (15:38)
Mm.

Mm.

Willem (15:46)
Or just raise

an issue and say, I have a question.

Alexander Krüger (15:48)
Yeah.

Yeah. So therefore we also provide the GitHub, the Discord. So it’s not only GitHub where people, so in the IT world you just live on GitHub and different pull requests and issues, but this is also not the known forum for automation engineers. So we have also Discord.

David (15:54)
⁓

Alexander Krüger (16:06)
which is an everybody can join community. Currently 1000 people are in there roughly. And then they have also a more unstructured approach to talk about what doesn’t work with UMAGE and where they see limitations. And then we can also derive the right measures from that. And I think this is also something which open source has a huge edge over to create a caring community. So normally you would have perhaps a vendor community. And if you’re super large, you can then start having your vendor specific meetups, et cetera, PP. But this is then

quite late, super late in the stage of a company, talking now ⁓ IPO scale companies, which then can do that. But with open source, you from day one have a huge focus of connecting people and problems via forums like Discord. And then they can talk with like-minded people about the limitations and the use cases and what problems they solve. And this is also super, super strong and important for us.

David (16:40)
Mm-hmm.

So ⁓ I’m an OT manager or I’m an IT OT integration person or something like that. ⁓ How should I organize myself to make, I would say, ⁓ the use of open source components sustainable?

Alexander Krüger (17:15)
Mm.

David (17:21)
in my company? ⁓ Would you ⁓ go for an SLA? ⁓ How do you need to make sure that ⁓ it’s not just my one colleague who is a bit more IT savvy but leaves the company or gets sick or whatever? How do I organize myself? Or is it maybe exactly the same as with any other software component?

Alexander Krüger (17:29)
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah. So what is normally failing in your company if you buy software? Is it really the software or is it the knits and pieces in between certain software components that are actually failing? Who, Jordan, who left the company three months ago, stitched together in an all nighter. In my opinion, this are the, or like in all experiences, this are the stuff that’s actually failing. And this is then the same as if you now build in proprietary stack with a system integrator that left the company.

as vulnerable with proprietary software as you are with open source software. So perhaps there are bugs to open source software, which you then don’t have any legal construct to force the vendor to solve them. But in my opinion, as long as it’s an active and large project, you’re

as in a good position as you are with proprietary software, if not in a better one, because in my opinion, open source software is well better tested as long as they’re distributed well than any proprietary software could be. So as you see, MQTT brokers are open source and a post-grace database, which is open source, it’s way more better tested than any historian or OPC UA servers that you get from a proprietary vendor.

Willem (19:03)
I think you see, again, you’re seeing much more open source core components being rolled out. ⁓ It’s usually not mentioned as a feature, let’s say. It’s like, okay, it just happens to run in containers. So yeah, you’re going to use Docker. I don’t think you need Kubernetes in the plant. Why are you putting this open source ⁓ part to the front even?

Alexander Krüger (19:14)
So, that’s all I

Hmm.

Hmm. Because it’s honest, would say. Because if you go to a proprietary render, I don’t want to point any competitor like from us, but they’re also using open source software. Then perhaps erase the open source label above something like Node-RED, example, and call it, for example, Siemens, those that you used to call it Siemens Flow Creator. And it was pure Node-RED in the outdated version. And it’s running on that.

Willem (19:42)
Mm-hmm.

David (19:51)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Krüger (19:57)
I think it’s just, if you bundle open source, be transparent about what’s in your software, which is already a benefit. And then if you put something on top of it, also putting an open source, with a good commercialization model on top, it’s also super attractive. if, so like, hopefully, and I’m quite confident on that, this piece will be super important in any factory in the future. So it will be as, if not more important than an MES. So it will be the bridge between anything on the, on the shop floor and in the application way.

And owning the data is super important. step one, the data is not with any vendor in any cloud so that you can control it. But beyond that, I’m also quite confident it’s important to govern the software. So who owns the software? the prices are increased, if the service levels change, if the software, like certain features are discontinued, how do I do that? And open source is a super attractive answer to the governance problem on this crucial component in your factory.

Willem (20:56)
I think definitely there’s a couple of recent examples where ⁓ I’m just thinking about VMware, for example, where they just massively increased prices, kicked customers almost out. mean, what was it, times four five more. ⁓ And you have no way out except migrating.

David (21:06)
Mm.

Alexander Krüger (21:16)
Yeah,

and it’s a nuclear option that you now have. So like it is migrating out of it or you can also just fork the open source part. Yeah, still there’s a toll to that attached. So you need to maintain it on your own, but you always have this as an option. So I think it’s nice to have that.

Willem (21:33)
Well.

But picking up on the question that David said before, I’m seeing that you would probably benefit from having more IT savvy people in your OT organization to be able to really have the most benefit from those kinds of environments because it needs a different way of thinking maybe that we’re not so used to see in OT environments.

Alexander Krüger (21:51)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Willem (22:06)
On the other hand, I also get it like if at midnight something happens ⁓ and production is going to shut down, mean, who am I going to call to help me out? You need help at some time. So how would you see the OT organization of the future evolve, let’s say, to make most use of open source?

Alexander Krüger (22:18)
Yeah.

Okay.

⁓ I think there is this, so if we just look at our customers, I think this is always a good example. There’s this, would say traditional OT organization who still lives in the TIA portal, software stack way of thinking. These are the people that you definitely need to get data out there to contextualize and get the machines up and running. But there’s, would say this.

this hybrid form of a human being now evolving as somebody who is actually, I think he needs to have an engineering background point. It’s way easier to have somebody from OT teach IT versus the other way around. For IT people, OT is just stupid what they’re doing there. This is just stupid, just point and they don’t want to learn. We just did the experience, no finger pointing, but OT people who are in their free time, for example, are super into home automation, having their Docker containers spin up.

Willem (22:59)
Yeah.

David (23:01)
Yeah.

Yep.

Alexander Krüger (23:20)
And I think this is the hybrid that we are seeking. So people coming from a traditional educational OT way, but are still open and also interested in IT best practices. So they don’t need to be ⁓ engineering DevOps experts, but they need to be able to get the fundamentals right. And I think this is essential for building a successful organization.

Willem (23:42)
I think it goes even a bit further than that because I think David, you had an interview once with Davey who is trying to bring in those devopraxes, but also like all the benefits that come with it into the world of programming a PLC. Why shouldn’t you use support of an LLM like all the other developers do when you’re working on your PLC, for example, and you will need people in your organization who are open to…

Alexander Krüger (24:03)
Yeah.

Willem (24:11)
experiment with that and want to put the time into learn those things to really before you start to get the benefits of it

David (24:16)
Yeah.

Davey called it and I think it was a very nice way of putting it. Automate the automation engineer. I still use that saying quite a lot because he really nails it. Like we have this…

I would say job thing or job title we call an automation engineer, but the automation engineer starts with Word documents and Excel sheets and ⁓ copy pasting and yeah.

Alexander Krüger (24:39)
Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

I really think this is, need to synchronize the underlying technologies. So in the seventies automation, IT split up, like everybody knows, somebody took the left turn to letter logic. Somebody took the right time to object oriented programming more. then it now that we’re like, like really, really far apart. this now led to, ⁓ IT things, software gets deployed via container applications and OT is still using PDF, to then go step by step to install something on windows. And I think.

and still lives in Excel. And what I would love to see and where the future is also heading is to have under the hood, IT best practices. So use, for example, Postgres for data storage, not something proprietary. Use something like MQTT or Kafka ⁓ for data transmission and distribution, not something proprietary. You’re also not the hugest fans of OPC UA, know, but go to the IT way, but now make it applicable. So make it usable for the people who have not extensive experience to then…

use LLMs for programming, ⁓ use Git for ⁓ versioning so that you get for free the commodities of IT now.

Willem (25:54)
Yeah, absolutely.

David (25:59)
I’ve seen a couple of your posts on the well or at least the company’s posts on on OPC. ⁓ But let’s not go into the OPC versus MQTT discussion in this one. Yeah. Open standards, open standards, lightweights where possible, I would say. ⁓ So ⁓ will ask you for, I’d say the future OT organization or that type of thing.

Alexander Krüger (26:02)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Open standards, open standards and open source.

Mm.

David (26:29)
You already stated a couple of words I would like to ⁓ turn the question around, the future OT data stack. you already mentioned MQTT, you mentioned the way to stack it. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on that? what would be the future, in your opinion, OT stack? Maybe also linking that to the unified namespace discussion?

Alexander Krüger (26:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

So, so something that you touched based already quite a lot on. So, so let me try to give my two cents or something to connect. So don’t be any vendor, but something that’s still because old protocols are still here for 10 to 15 years to come. So we’re not standardized yet. So there needs to be something to convert protocols. There needs to be something for the data ops part. So like, or like data, industrial data management, how you want to call it to create data models from.

those data that’s coming in, then they need to read data, a message broker. And there I think, ⁓ or we have a little bit of a different, it’s not in our opinion, not only MQTT, because in manufacturing, it’s all about a lot of transactions. So getting work orders, setting something up, therefore something like Kafka, actually is quite, quite, quite powerful. So perhaps a combination of MQTT for

all the WiFi devices, all the AGVs who are disconnected where MTGTMAX are lost hands. And for all the transactions and data cannot be lost situations, Kafka, ⁓ a time series database, not a historian anymore, could be, in our opinion, time scale is really good. ⁓ There are other options like QuestDB or Influx. ⁓ And then perhaps some people call it an IoT platform. ⁓

At the end, think Grafana is actually the most used tool out there to actually visualize data. So something around those rooms, I think, will be in the factory, in every factory in the next 10 years.

David (28:21)
Mm-hmm.

Willem (28:30)
⁓ You touched the topics of standards there. Now we have a couple of standards but if you could have one thing that would be standardized what would it be in that stack?

Alexander Krüger (28:34)
Hmm?

David (28:44)
What are we missing?

Alexander Krüger (28:47)
Standardizing. So the foundation answer to to standardize the assets. So standardize a frying pan, for example, to its course reattributes would be the answer of associations.

David (29:00)
I’ve

actually, and this is not a joke, I’ve also seen, I’ve seen the standard of a frying pan. Yes, it actually exists, Willem.

Willem (29:10)
I’m

pretty sure there’s somewhere in Germany a guy.

Alexander Krüger (29:13)
In Germany, we actually have huge government money spent on that. But another topic. if I would love to have something standardized, in my opinion, it should be actually the API to do something like that. So how do you access data? I’m not sure. People are now ⁓ prepping for LLMs with MCP.

David (29:13)
You

Willem (29:19)
Yep.

David (29:19)
Hahaha

Alexander Krüger (29:38)
I don’t know, it’s just a JSON interface. What’s so special about it in my IT way of thinking. Yeah. ⁓ But I think this is something that we should agree on. How do you now connect to applications, machines, and sensors on an interface level? And this is not OPC UA in our opinion. It’s not MQTT. In a nice way of thinking, it would be a good structured and documented REST interface. But yeah, this is something that we should, in my opinion, agree on for.

Willem (29:43)
Yeah, exactly.

David (29:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alexander Krüger (30:06)
events and transactions.

Willem (30:08)
Yeah, I think in the past it was often seen as a way to monetize the data of your device where you would say, you need, I mean, we’ve seen things, David, like serial ports where they switched pins and you had to buy their special cable where they’re like twisted the pair. But that cable of course costs 500 euros because it’s very special. ⁓

Alexander Krüger (30:12)
Hmm. Yeah.

David (30:24)
Yes.

Alexander Krüger (30:30)
Yeah, is

a fun fact. We’ve been with like large management consulting before we’ve started UMAGE. And then there was this wave of we are now machine builders, machines, get like huge pressure out of Asia now. How do we set ourselves apart? Digital operating models, software, et cetera, PP. And the answer to a lot of vendors was, let’s just monetize the access to our data. And this was like, oh no. And it’s still like that. enough of our community members, the best trick is if you’re a CNC machine user.

David (30:51)
Jesus.

Alexander Krüger (30:59)
You activate the key logger, call a service mechanic, then you get a logger password to the OBS UA server and you have no free access.

Willem (31:09)
Yeah, but I think they’re missing the boat there in trying to ⁓ pay well the access to the data. ⁓

David (31:15)
Yeah.

Alexander Krüger (31:15)
Yeah, there’s there’s

regulation now should remove that the EU data act. ⁓ Let’s see.

David (31:23)
But still, I would say there are still lots of steps to take. Again, it’s about organization. You touched, I would say, the knowledge we also have to have on the OT side. ⁓ We touched ⁓ the future OT IT data stack. And then, the way we’ll be accessing data, ⁓ the way we get… ⁓

Alexander Krüger (31:36)
Mm.

David (31:49)
to those machines. ⁓ That’s definitely the next step. ⁓ I would say that’s been a very, very interesting conversation. ⁓ Alexander, think if we would do this again in a year or so, maybe even not that long, but I think many things will probably have changed because they are changing ⁓ quite rapidly. ⁓ So yeah, thank you for joining us. To our audience. ⁓

Alexander Krüger (32:09)
Yeah, it’s good, finally. ⁓

Willem (32:09)
very fast.

David (32:17)
Thank you for tuning in. ⁓ If you want to know more about our work, obviously there is our website, itotinsider.com, but now also our newly launched ITOT Academy, which you can find on itot.academy. The thing actually, the domain actually exists, so why not itot.academy? Alexander, thank you very much. ⁓ Good luck with promoting, ⁓ well, open standards ⁓ of open systems and United Manufacturing. ⁓

Alexander Krüger (32:34)
Nice.

David (32:46)
until we meet again.

Alexander Krüger (32:47)
Thank you, it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure talking to you both. Thanks.

David (32:50)
Thank you. Bye bye.

Willem (32:50)
Bye.