 So we're here at B plus B smart works. So who are you? So I'm Tim Tabner I'm the global product manager for our advanced IoT gateways and also look after our wizard wireless sensor network products in EMEA So WSN right? That's gonna be a big part of IoT Yeah, it's it's growing. There's already a lot of wireless sensor networks out there The problem historically in industrial applications is that they've got a bad reputation for not being too reliable And that's because of the way that current systems work where essentially you have to select a channel. They're going to run on and That's the channel. They're set to RF conditions change because trucks drive by or a new piece of equipment to install and The comms become unreliable. So what we're doing with wizard is basically adding a set a level of time synchronization Above the basic wireless meshing that means that actually the network comes up with a point in time And it can select the best available channel at that point in time That gives us a lot better availability of signal across the across the network In fact, we're getting 99.999 percent availability of signal which is as good as a piece of wire But obviously then with the benefit of dramatically reduced installation costs compared to what's an encabled systems So it's quite important for the IOT that everything should just be a Flip the switch on Provisioning or what it is that makes Wi-Fi very popular or something They would you were doing a keynote, right? Yeah speech. What are we talking about? So so so you're right about the provisioning You know, one of the things we're working on very very hard is something we're calling zero touch provisioning That's the notion that actually a user can take an unconfigured box and have an electrician wire it in on site And when it switched on it calls into a central server and basically picks up the user account It's going to be installed in picks up all of its configuration and all of its firmware and everything. So it's a key element What I was actually talking about in a lot of the keynotes is it's both the wireless sensor networks But also an emerging paradigm we have for edge nodes Which again overcomes one of the limitations that's existed for a long time And that's namely that historically there's been a direct correlation between an edge node and a physical device Problem with that is that means day one of a project you've got to decide What interface is what level of processing power you need on the device? And of course what that leads to over a period of time that assistance deployed is a continuous cycle of Deploying a box waiting for its capacity to be exceeded for whatever reason Taking that box out and replacing it with another one. So kind of a deploy destroy deploy cycle that carries on forever We're bringing to market something based on a concept called swarm intelligence Where a physical edge device isn't any longer a single physical box? But in fact is a combination of devices that cooperate and share their resources collaboratively That means that the edge now can adapt and evolve as system requirements involved So it actually protects the investment much better than has been the case in the past and also gives you a complete degree of food to prove against the emerging technologies. So when we look at all these This hardware what's inside is there a non-processor? So there's basically a wireless Wireless radio that conforms to IEEE 15.4e Yeah, there's some process intelligence that then takes the sensor data Converts it into a format that crucially for the internet of things is already Enriched and what I mean by that, you know historically with sensor data It's kind of coming through things like PLC's and that's giving you a Something that says PLC 31 register 40,000 and 3 has a value of 20,000 Well, you know, it's meaningless unless you understand precisely what that that is So with wizard actually the wizard devices are pre-configured or configured by users to actually transmit the temperature at a location is Sorry, okay, temperature at a location is 23.5 degrees C. So actually now users can semantically search for that without having to understand any of the complexities Of what the wizard sensor is and how that information is getting into the cloud so What I've been doing with IoT in the past Well, I've been involved with IOT since before it was called IOT actually the first System that I remember installing that had all the characteristics of what we now call IOT so Enriched semantically searchable data Data going from sensors and H devices to multiple systems in a flexible way I was involved in that 15 16 years ago with Phillips pipeline and Chevron pipeline right at the birth of a protocol called MQTT which is now one of the Main protocols that's used and standardized for IOT applications. So that was pipeline monitor it because pipeline is pretty long Yeah, and you want to monitor the whole thing and from one control station somewhere? Yeah, it's it's not so much that because those sorts of systems already existed You know the pipeline control system would be there to control the pipeline But happening in parallel with that you'd find there was another system that was taking the flow meter data And exporting that into the ERP system in fact We got involved with it because that wasn't happening the way actually that bills used to get Sent out by the pipeline company was once a month a load of guys would get into four by four trucks Would drive down their port part of the pipeline would go to all the flow meters print out the tickets of all the Transactions put them into a packs machine to a data center where they'd get entered into the system You know and three months later a bill comes out and the user says this is wrong So what we were able to do by essentially inventing IOT technology Would say well, okay, we're already getting that information into our pipeline control system We can make that available directly to the ERP system. So as a transaction happens Electronically that transaction goes straight through to ERT ERP and it automatically creates the invoice That then got expanded once we've got that in place to say well Actually, there's also usable data from the pipeline control system that can go into our maintenance operations to help optimize those That's kind of how we got involved and what it was all about It wasn't so much about monitoring geographically diverse stuff because people have been doing that for many years. It's been called skater The difference was doing it in a way that meant we could share the data amongst different enterprise systems flexibly so Do you have the patents on IOT and Are you a big company making a lot of IOT already? I wish we had the patents on it In fact MQTT was a protocol that was invented by the company I worked for at the time Which wasn't B&B smartworks and IBM that's now been made open source and has been standardized across the community So no, we don't have any patterns for B&B. It's an area that we're moving into very rapidly B&B's background is actually in connectivity. So in Media converters for fiber to ethernet on infrastructure for cellular routers for serial to ethernet conversion And especially as part of its cellular router product range gradually They've been adding intelligence and adding intelligence. So now the cellular router A is very functional But also is user program also user can put their own applications into to provide some local control or some local filtration What we're doing is building on that and adding more intelligence adding more user Flexibility for how they program in and adding this swarm intelligence piece, which again as I say Completely protects the investment that you make when you deploy a device and so what we're here We're looking at what's coming out in and out of here. And so how about the power energy harvesting? Batteries are you considering all these things when you deploy? Okay So so the idea with the wizard node is that it can be externally powered or it can power from internal batteries So the internal batteries on it the lifetime depends on how rapidly you're sampling But if you were sampling measurements once every 10 minutes then on the internal batteries in here This thing will run for something like two and a half years currently people. We have to worry about changing Getting the signals in from the transducers. These aren't sensor systems. It's a it's a wireless system for carrying sensor data So we take completely standard Sensors that have been used in the industry for 20 30 40 years, you know 4 to 20 milliamp signals thermocouples Close contact digital's they wire into the wizard systems locally to wherever they wherever they're located And then we take away the cost of wiring that back to some infrastructure points some instrumentation cabinet or whatever So what do you think about IOT and this conference and what do you think? I think IOT is really interesting. There's a massive amount of hype around IOT and To an extent a self-fulfilling thing that IOT is almost an end that people talk about in their own rights And I think as an industry we've got to start getting a bit more real about it You know there isn't a CEO or a CFO that wakes up at 3 o'clock in the morning thinking my goodness What my company needs is is a load of IOT? You know they have business problems and need to solve those with a return on investment IOT and the technology behind it give us a really good way of doing that That also brings along a whole load of added benefits But we've got to start getting back to talking about the business basics of the return on investment on a problem before People start investing in IOT to any great scale. So what do you think about the engineer of things applications Europe this conference? Yeah, it's been it's been very good for us We it's been interesting with the mix that where it's co-existed with Conferences for for other technologies When we came we were a bit worried that that wasn't going to be right. We were worried that we were going to get You know little or no interest from the other conference delegates But actually there's been some reasonable crossover. So it has been better than we expected and yeah been quite good