 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey, welcome back to the FIRA in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. Dave IV of MWC23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles. We're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries, it's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge product gateway product technologists at Dell Technologies and Scott Wallers, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you. What is the Open Innovation Lab? So it was a hatched three years ago. I'd get about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran Startup Ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if those are familiar with MSDN, and they came three years ago and said, how do CSPs, working with some of my team mobiles in our backyard, I'm from Seattle, how do they monetize the Edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing, right? The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners. Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Spirant, you name it, The Enterprise. Folks who are also in the connectivity business, and with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstar, is where it's investment first, and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR, AR type of application, or an observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsofts of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world, that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've got 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars, and it's really valuable to our partners like Team Oval and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing folks like Expedo and Gen Xcom and FireCell startup private companies that are around here. They were cohorts from our program in the past. That's awesome, because I've seen Dell get into this business, and they're like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is, and you've been part of the pipeline. We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers, laptops, et cetera, but what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments, and it allows customers to do analytics data collection at the edge, and what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range, there's no fan in this, and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box, Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery, and then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it is you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. Tell us about the brewery story. I mean, you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery that taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, we can help you with this problem. Explain the story. Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. Is it framing in mass? Framing in mass, correct. And basically, we talked to the mister, we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot of money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges, and what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them, rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late, the batch is scrapped, this allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. Okay, amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? Yeah, actually, this is the final product. So as Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network. So we wanted to keep the ITOT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using IntelliT device-wise, their dashboarding application that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spilled beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones because they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook, this is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory, they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle, this one's in the crashing cycle, they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. And they're doing all that from this dashboard. They're doing all that from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor, instead of walking 100 yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, oh, that's red, that's out of range. They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now too. So this is real time from Boston. Oh, okay. This is actually real time from Boston. I'm no hot master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. We literally just lit this up last week, so we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around, this is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. And now they're also training and learning and we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries may be able to use. So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system, the device that you have here has essentially Wi-Fi antennas on the back. Hold that up a bit if you would. Yeah, now I've seen this just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. Correct. And so that's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into Wi-Fi. So the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. Fermentation tanks. Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are Wi-Fi, that's a Wi-Fi signal that's going into this, is that correct? No. No, it's not. It's a hard wire. Okay, okay, okay. But you're right, this particular gateway. It could be Wi-Fi if it's hard wire. It could be any technology. This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on Wi-Fi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were IFM, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway. And then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner, Tellit, that has device-wise software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant, and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. We're talking about a small business here. I mean, I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network, right? And so they wanted, and it's very common in when we talk about industrial Internet of Things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, you know, their payroll, all of the kind of, the way they run their business on their IT network. And you don't want to have the same kind of traffic out on the factory floor on that network, right? So it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. We installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down. They didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. We, it was kind of like we were invisible there. And we spun the thing up within two days. Very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. I mean, it's like 99% of the company's on the planet. I mean, what are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? Yeah, I can talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple of years running my own little IOT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. That's my hometown. But in the ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deployment. But in those, because we have the vast amount of hops, there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and Inbev and Heineken, they've got great IOT platforms. They've done, I mean, if they're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't. And when we talk about IOT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just I get local broadband and I get Wi-Fi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit, it was the education. I have got years in IOT security in my background. So that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them and now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they are inherently aware of what should be done. So they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue model. But we came in, we came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too, we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use because I've toured dozens of brewers in Washington. They're the exact same scenario. Analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? You know, it keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range because the chiller fails, that's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also, once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read only. We're not changing any of the process. We augment it on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process, but now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best. It means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. It's like St. Louis Buds when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds because they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made it all the same. There you go. Must be an East Coast thing. I've got to think about it. It's an old guy thing. Big and lucky longer. I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. We like the hops. We were 21, so do me a favor. Clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone is familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. It's really the factory floor, right? You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your email, stuff like that, right? We're the ransomware usually gets affected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. What's the O stand for? Operational. Operation? Yeah, the operation side. But some people will think objects because we think internet of things. The industrial operations. Think of it that way. But in a sense, those are things that are connected. So they're sort of... And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well, right? So a machine that, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you think if there's a lot of traffic on that network it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted a design that it never touches the internet inherently, without having to go through a security gateway, which is what we did. You mentioned the large companies, INBEV, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-sized company? For this particular solution, I think so. Yeah, because the cost to entry is, whoa. I mean, you talk about INBEV, they have millions of dollars of budgets spent on OT, right? So they're completely automated from top to bottom, but these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US, right? Vermont, Washington state, they're completely... A lot of these guys just started in their garage. They just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around Edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. And our both were serving beer and it's all these kind of topics. It brings people together. Unless the little guy compete, you know, more effectively with the big giants. And how do you do more with less is the little guy. It's kind of the big thing. And it's, you know, to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine? Same materials in the end, right? A vessel of some sort. Maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same. The scents are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talk about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and we integrated them in and used a set of platforms that we could, how do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf? And it's four different companies in the solution. Yeah, we were having conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So it's a, you know, from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. Correct. And it's, you know, one of the things with the gateway and having a flexibility, the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it and have a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, you got a larger facility. I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh heck yeah, they probably could do it, right? And they might have a private 5G network. But let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. Is that how the CSBs fit here? How are they monetizing them? Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile. And so, you know, we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. So small manufacturing, agriculture, you mentioned. Any other sort of use cases we should tune into? It's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, right? I see it in IoT deployments all over the world that just the simple starter kits because a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform where he's got a higher bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that. It's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year because I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story is about, just giving visibility into the process. It's very cool. And as you say, it gets me real excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big tam? Yeah, so one thing that Dell kind of brings to the table in this space is, people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell. Companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. So we're talking to billions, tens of billions? I mean, do we know how big this market is? What's the tam? I mean, come on, you worked for Dell, you had to do a tam analysis. No, yeah, I mean, it really is an abilience. Yeah, the market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. I mean, we're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but yeah, the possibilities are endless. Yeah, that's tip of the spear, right? Yeah, yeah. Guys, great story. Scalable, I think the biggest thing just, my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we've got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a packet core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there and I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor and now he can do something that we're providing connectivity he never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we've got the telco size units that we can purchase. So it's very scalable. It's just great, great suite of offerings. Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great, great to have you on theCUBE. Good to be with you. Stop by for beer later. You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team. We're here live at the FEDA in Barcelona, MWC 23 day four. Keep it right there.