 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering OSISoft, Pi World 2018. Brought to you by OSISoft. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at OSISoft conference called Pi World. They've been doing it for at least 15 years. I see the pins walking around the hallways our first time here and it's pretty interesting because we talk about the marriage of IT and OT all the time and kind of the industrial internet of things. These guys have been coming at it from the OT space for over 15 years, almost 20 years or no. 40 years, 1980, right? About 40 years, yeah. For a long time, so they've been at it for a long time. We're excited to be here, 3,000 people, and we're joined in our next segment by Chris Nelson. He's a VP of software development for OSISoft and Penny Gunterman, Group Lead of Product Marketing. So welcome. Welcome, glad to be here. So how many of these shows have you guys been to? I've been to everyone since 1996, except for two when my two daughters were born. They're pretty good. I've only been to fewer than 10, so that makes me a young button here. Boy, you're just a rookie in this crowd. That's why I still wet behind the ears. Yeah, so for the folks that aren't familiar, give us a little bit more detail because you're in a really interesting space. You're pulling all this data off sensors. We talk about this all the time as if it's kind of a new and interesting and evolving thing, but you guys have been at it for decades and decades. Yeah, it's really just been kind of the press and some new players have grabbed onto it, but we've been doing this for 30 years and our goal is to collect operational data wherever it exists, reliably and securely, persist that and deliver it to whoever or whatever needs it. We don't pretend to know how our customers and users are going to use the data. We just take care of that data flow and we really light them up. By giving them their data, they can use it to drive outcomes for their companies and they are our data heroes. What's interesting too is a lot of times the sensor data it gets tied back to big data, right in fast data and Hadoop and kind of all these technologies that are evolving around that type of data. But you guys have been doing it long before there was Hadoop out in the public sector or Flink or Spark or kind of all these new technologies and I think it's interesting because you're showing that you don't have to have big data for regular people to see trends and get value and get some real business benefit. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean really when you think about it it's like driving your car. In order to operate that car you want to be able to get that information in, you need to make sense of it and then you move forward with it, right? Now after the fact you're going to do some analysis maybe you want some other things but in your day-to-day operations when you're making sure that things are running you want that dashboard, you want that real-time visibility and we've got folks out there if they see a trend they could tell you what exactly what's wrong they can tell you exactly where to pinpoint those issues. So what's interesting is seeing finally this emphasis on data and people kind of catching up seeing what they could do but now you take that natural intelligence that people have always had pushing that into some of those advanced tools doing what they couldn't do before and that's what's really exciting. So are you integrating now more with some of the newer tools that are hitting the marketplace as opposed to just kind of the I assume you're way tight into ERP and some of those types of systems? It's absolutely, it's really cool because we're in this technology and market change around digital transformation is the buzzword but we can take everything that we've done in the past and then overlay some of these new technologies that are coming from the giants of Google and Amazon is these we could take advantage of a lot of those tools with the data we've collected for 30 years that really drive outcomes and I think the important part of the outcomes is we're really reducing a lot of the resources that are scarce in the world. You know, water, power, carbon footprint that are the outcomes that people are trying to reduce with the data and it's really impactful in the world today. When it's funny too, startups often begin because somebody sees inefficiency whether it's car ownership and you have Uber or it's empty rooms in the city like San Francisco and you have Airbnb but your guys and your customers specifically there's all types of inefficiencies still in old line industries, old line systems, old line infrastructure that you're helping ring out all kinds of efficiency out of things that some people who aren't paying attention probably thought was already done but there's still a lot of opportunity. Oh, absolutely, you see it all the time especially with the older industries they've been operating for 100 some of them even older and so when you think about normalizing failure a lot of them have just kind of well assumed that well, we're always going to have 30% loss or well, we're always going to have a 10% inefficiency but I think we're really challenging some of that paradigm by being able to look at the information and saying well, wait a minute no, we don't have to have that 30% leak wait, no, we could improve our gold extraction efficiency just with this simple tweak in the process so I think what's exciting with conferences like these is you realize that you can challenge what used to be possible with these new tools using that tribal knowledge that people have always had And I think one of the again hitting on what Penny said the power of this conference is especially today we have industry tracks so all colleagues across an industry will get together, share their success stories and that will help those success stories get out to other customers really helping the overall industry so today is critical as that industry day where they all get together, share their expertise and the other one is I've always found it interesting I grew up in life sciences, you know, pharmaceuticals going to other industries and seeing what they're focused on you can learn from them and bring it back to your industry so the idea doesn't have to generate in your industry, it could generate somewhere else and you can bring it back and that's what this conference really helps our customers do is share those success stories Right, I can't help the thing I think it's a Bourbon or a Scotch commercial where they talk about, you know, the angel's share right, when they take it out of the barrel after so many years or some percentage which is kind of cute and quaint for a commercial not necessarily if it's a big municipal water district and somebody said in the hall some of these big ones are losing as much as 50% of the water leaks out of the system that's crazy so this is the type of tool so how do they use it? So they're just you're looking for inconsistencies of the data they're looking to just kind of classic pattern recognition how are you helping the people find these inefficiencies so they can bring new solutions? Yeah, it's a little bit of both some of it is just surfacing that data it's almost like I said if you never even knew on your car dashboard that your oil, that your oil was looking low you wouldn't even know to go in and services so level one is just surfacing it that information I would say that's going from zero to 50 but if you go from 50 to 100 you talked about whiskey I'm a beer fan so we've got customers like to shoot who we're going through and they were trying to figure out when the fermentation was done they used to have to go around and pipette when it was completed the problem was you get your rounds maybe once an hour maybe fewer less than that and by the time you get it back around to that batch you could have long passed that fermentation point where that beer needed moved on to the next process it could mean either bad beer or it could mean that you reduce the amount of throughput that you could have so they've used the data that they were collecting from the pie system trained their models to be able to predict when that fermentation was going to be complete and know exactly when they should be moving over to their next batch right and I'll share one from my knowledge that I worked on from pharmaceuticals where just creating a new drug there's lots of iterative process that goes through that we monitor that manufacturing process to give that data to the process engineers so as that iterative process they know exactly what they're building is accordance to how they filed to the regulatory companies so that's all great and they use the pie system to do that and they've been doing that for 20 years this one particular drug that this manufacturing was making they wanted to go into a new market and that new market was they had to provide enough yield product to the whole population and they couldn't make enough so then they took and applied big data analytics and they found a process problem that they could optimize which allowed them to get enough product to go into this new population so it's really like Penny said from zero to 100 just getting the data unlocked and providing it to these companies is valuable right now so we believe the pie system once you install it brings value to those customers and then you can overlay projects over time and really drive the value up over time so like you said a customer that's had pie for 30 years is still going through optimizations they're still bringing value to their company through those optimization techniques I'm curious how many of these kind of opportunities for the individual you just mentioned did they know or there they just couldn't they just couldn't put a data point on it they couldn't put their finger on it versus how many of them are oh my gosh I had no idea it's a complete green field opportunity for efficiency that we never even thought of how's it kind of break down I definitely think it's 50-50 it varies by customer you'll see a lot of customers that start off with a very known problem so let's say they know that they've been having challenges with transformer failures right so they go in they look at the data they can find a signature and they deploy it but then the next group comes along and say oh hey wait I could use that data too I could use that to prevent parallel cycles so we could improve the efficiency of that conversion and it becomes almost more of this culture they say well wait a minute if I could do that actually you know what we're collecting information from our security substations we could compare logs of who's entering against who's supposed to be in there so I'd say that first one tends to be very directed but then it becomes contagious and people realize that what else could I be doing right and you really see it just spread through so at our conference last year in London a water company deployed the pie system to basically manage how the water was flowing throughout their utility once they finished that project the customer was so happy he goes why am I not utilizing this to monitor my network so that a secondary project that he did not have funding for he deployed it to monitor his network the same way he's monitoring water flow throughout his complex and he was able to say wow I love it as a network monitoring tool so it really speaks to the approach that we take which is this infrastructure approach we focus on moving the data and marry that with our customers creativity to use that data for things that we never even thought they could do so it's this infrastructure approach where we take care of the data flow and then marry our customers on top of that where they just light up that creativity so speak a little bit about the opportunity and the challenge that now all this stuff's going to be connected it's all going to be IP based we're going to have 5G coming out over the next couple of years so the speed and the quantity of the data that's now available so huge opportunity for you guys but obviously a huge change in the marketplace as well where you've been dealing I assume with a whole lot of proprietary you know individual systems for all these sensors that weren't necessarily built to IP protocol so great opportunity got to be a little scary as well I imagine oh absolutely and you see definitely industries that are on different parts of that spectrum so let's say you think about shipping when that ship is out at sea they've got maybe satellite and that's it and but the people on shore still want to be able to monitor right so you have to get very, very diligent about what pieces of information you're going to send over while you're in that constraint of being out at sea now once you come into port no problem, hook right up and you can do that full dump and come back out so I think what we're going to see in the next five, 10 years is a very deliberate selection of what we send and what we decide to move on with I'll add on top of this is our CEO and founder Patrick Kennedy has very much kept us focused on this data infrastructure approach and the reason why I bring that up is we're always looking at several years out in order to provide this robust infrastructure we're constantly looking at the market and technology and trying to project where our customers are going to be so that we can provide them the tools so right now, absolutely we see lots of challenges or maybe opportunities coming into the market same side yeah, same point right different side of the same point as everybody connects let's say cyber security is going to be forefront in everybody's mind how do we secure all this data so that our customers can really trust that their IP is being protected one data ownership so that's another one that's coming out is as everybody shares this data sometimes companies buy companies who owns that data so data ownership is going to be critical and these are the things that internally we are already trying to build solutions for because of our singular focus on this data infrastructure around the pie system so it's really that approach of our job is to collect this data and share it with everybody so it's fantastic me and Penny often say there's no better time to be in the operation space with all this new technology and also the disruption in a lot of the business models that these companies are going through deregulation a lot of the things that are happening in business are directly related to a need for data and really driving value from that data well it's just so interesting we cover a lot of big tech shows and everyone's so excited for the marriage of IT and OT and we've covered GE we've covered Ford so we've covered some of the more of the industrial side as well but it's just funny that you guys have been kind of silently doing your thing for years and years but I would imagine the opportunities now to integrate with, I see the SAP as a gold sponsor and some of the classic big IT companies love to get connected with you guys and have you feed all their analytics systems and all this stuff they're working on as well because it is a marriage of these two systems which is so important Oh, absolutely and I mean you think about how dirty a lot of this sensor data is right, it's coming to raw it's real time, there are no do-overs there's communication gaps and so how do you prepare that cleanse that because I think a lot of times the operational environment you think about dusty, dirty it kind of matches the type of data right, you think of IT systems and they're a nice clean temperature controlled server room so somehow you're going from this really dusty, dirty data to something that needs to be able to be brought into a very sanitized environment so a lot of what we've been focusing on is around being able to clean that data, massage it, take the gaps out that's where the Pi integrators have worked out really well I mean we have customers that have been able to get value out of these big data projects six months faster than what they would have done otherwise and it's really then when the data scientists pick up picking up at a point that now they're doing the stuff you paid them to do right, they're not, they're not clean and they're not doing the janitorial work they're actually creating the model training it and helping drive forward so I think it's an interesting it's an interesting dichotomy to see and I think IT folks are also starting to get excited because finally this dirty, dusty data is now becoming accessible to them and I've talked to a couple folks that get really excited when they look at the Pi system they see how the Pi system can help also reference all these other data sources they've been dealing with we can touch into ERP but we don't have to fully expose that they look at it, they look at Pi system as almost a data directory that switchboard that allows people to come in one stop shop and get everything they need for IT that means they just have to manage that one point of entry not the 1020 that they would otherwise be dealing with right yeah and if we look at it as let's put the customer at the front and center right they are trying to do something to drive value we don't determine their partners or who they use or what technology they use so we want to bring a rich infrastructure of partnerships to really go to the user focus on the user right so whether or not the SAP, Microsoft, Google all these ones right whatever the customer wants to use we want to light up right and that's really our partner strategy and this again as being the technology guy I get excited because these partners are also bringing their expertise to the table right so some of the technology that they're working on we just love because we can apply it against the data right so it really is this rich ecosphere where we're putting a customer at the center so they could drive a lot of this value it's it's it can see my energy yeah no it's cool story and all the use cases you know are just fantastic there's so so many their household names they're doing really simple things in terms of being able to recognize the value you know reducing loss in the water system you know increasing efficiency in the gold output I mean it's all very discreet and easy to understand stuff so exciting times and congratulations to you both all right thank you all right so Chris and Penny thanks for stopping by I'm Jeff you are watching theCUBE from OSI Soft in downtown San Francisco thanks for watching