 Good day, everyone. My name is Anand Tantani and I'm an offer manager working for Schneider Electric. I'm also a member with the Open Process Automation Forum. Inside my role in Schneider Electric, I look after our next-generation automation software platform called EcoStruxure Automation Expert, which is based on a new standard called IEC 61499. Today, I'm going to speak with you about how open and process automation standards can help industrial manufacturers across different market segments to address their ever-changing new business pressures, particularly pressures related to meeting their more stringent sustainability goals and efficiency requirements. Over the last several years, conversations around sustainability have fundamentally changed. This is a new era with new social values, attitudes and preferences, drive, ethics-based business and buying decisions across the whole supply chain. So key stakeholders in businesses like customers, partners, suppliers, employers, employees and the shareholders expect, and in most cases, demand companies, particularly industrial manufacturers today, to proactively combat climate change, which impacts on those plant managers to face multiple challenges, to keep up with this increasing speed of business and the changing business models. And at the same time, to make sure that their productions are safe and cyber secure in integrating those emerging digital technologies, which help in achieving those standards and help as well the enterprise achieve the carbon emissions and other sustainability targets. So each of these play a vital role in determining whether the organization will remain competitive and maybe even relevant as the manufacturing operations are pushed to their boundaries. So as a counterpart to these new targets and the ever-changing businesses, the counterpart, the process automation systems of the future will also need to evolve and be ready to enable new levels of flexibilities, both to adopt the new technologies much faster pace and to adapt to those changing business demands. And some of those changing business demands are dynamic price fluctuations in energy, raw materials and which impacts on the whole product life cycle and unshortens it. So we can achieve efficiency in manufacturing through innovation and technology. And automation needs to be much more flexible and efficient and cannot be a roadblock for that innovation and evolution. So the future of automation is very wide open. So the industry 4.0 and digital transformation principles are clearly put out to enable and overcome the challenge of data connectivity, which is actually the key to achieve operational and energy engineering efficiency. But today's existing automation architectures, which are multi-level and layered, it's really hard to adopt to those emerging technologies. And after 50 years, it is not only more about hardware, it is about software that is driving automation to the next levels. And the IT world has been taking advantage of the technological advancements and the growth constantly and evolving in a much faster pace than that of the OT space. But nevertheless, we believe that automation will stay the key in the future as well with this in industry 4.0 and digitalization journey. It will still stay the key for innovation. But we just need to adapt to those technologies in a much faster pace. So advancements in today's computational power and communication bandwidth are opening doors to possibilities which were not available for OT systems in the past. And these new technologies and new advancements can help us unleash those constraints and really drive a software-driven digital transformation. So today's existing automation architectures were never designed for seamlessly integrating two IT-type applications, which resulted in a non-cohesive and layered architecture. I mean, the existing architecture, they served their purpose very well. They were designed for reliability and availability and they served their purpose. But today's IT advancements and technologies are bringing new additional software flexibilities, which are making it very difficult for the OT industries to adopt. So where is that problem in implementing such solutions on top of existing architectures? So I believe that the lock is actually the proprietoriness, proprietor in nature of the present architectures, software developed to run on a specific hardware platform, which creates a vendor lock for the end users. I mean, both end users and as well as vendors struggle to see that return of investment and value they make in their software development costs or that process applications that they have been using because these softwares and this process applications can only work on that particular hardware architecture. And the key for the future would be to really unlock that hardware and software dependence and have an open automation ecosystem, which enables portability and interoperability of software architectures across different platforms. Because having such an interoperable and portable software applications will actually help in a higher flexibility on that architecture itself and to create a distributed infrastructure, which can simplify the integration of data-driven functionalities like example predictive maintenance for eliminating asset failure, for example, and increase the overall production effectiveness. So instead of thinking about a certain functionality in a certain proprietary system, users could easily integrate IT type applications and software solutions and the best in class software integrated to their infrastructure much more easily. So this is what the end users demand far in the market through initiatives like the open process automation for. And that's what we are driving towards and then creating that open and interoperable automation systems that will act as an enabler to achieve those industry 4.0 principles and let the process manufacturers concentrate on achieving their sustainability goals and efficiency goals instead of worrying about the technology itself. Because the technology to do such innovations do exist in the markets and one of such technology and standard is IEC 61499 and it is one of the standards that OPAF adopts with its standard of standards approach. We in Schneider Electric believe that IEC 61499 has the potential to become that open next generation automation standard due to its nature of enabling portable and interoperable applications. Just to briefly introduce the standard itself, the standard is based on even driven functions. So an automation engineer would see a function block or an IT engineer would see a object, a black box, a software component. So each function is a software component but even in and even out at a data in data out structure just like an object oriented programming. The programming language inside that function is flexible and today we use IEC 61131 the well-known PLC standards but in the future that could be that could evolve into something else and it uses this black box principle that can be used to model distributed systems and because of the even driven nature it really helps in mixing the real-time process data with an actual right time data like a digital twin to run your simulations for example because we do have that advancement in that computing power to do to run such IT applications like simulations directly on the edge level. So you have the freedom of and the freedom of that programming language inside that function so it's easier to integrate to the IT world through IT type technologies like web sockets or method calls. So it's much more modern than the existing traditional proprietary architectures and the second point being the hardware independence of the standard helps in creating a highly distributed architecture. So you can create an application independent of a device or an underlying hardware platform and and and distribute it to a resource in a later stage and and and the resource could be anything from a smart smart device or a traditional controller or a container running in an industrial PC or a full-blown virtual server environment and this gives a full flexibility and freedom on the architecture choices for the end users and this freedom also helps in creating a future-proof architecture because if the traditional architecture of different layers and having redundant controllers works for a certain segment of industries then fine so you have that flexibility to create that architecture and if it makes sense to have a complete distributed architecture where you can run applications and intelligence on smaller devices and or on the edge levels you are fully flexible to do so. This hardware independence enables and it's the basic for that application portability so because the applications we develop on top of this it's much more valuable now for the end users and and they will move forward in that digital path. So open automation we believe will break the traditional automation world or the way automation world was working into three main parts rather than one monolithic system. Think of one layer of an abstraction between a software runtime from the underlying hardware platform and the second part which is a development environment of software that would be used to program that runtime and on the top an ecosystem of applications in an in an app store which will solve some specific problems in a in a in a concentrated way and and this and the main differentiator from this to today's world is that abstraction of software runtime and underlying hardware platform because we can get an architectural flexibility making it easier for the constant changes in manufacturing world or to handle hardware obsolescence in the market and and on the other side the softwares which we create on top of such a flexible platform will become portable and this would encourage companies to start building applications for this ecosystem specific to energy management or to sustainability or predictive maintenance machine learning so there could be applications developed by specialists in those fields to solve that particular problem just like our mobile phone worlds today so I could choose an app based on my likes and and what fits me and more the ecosystem grows you will have more options on those industrial applications which will indeed make a so-called plug and produce environment possible so we are moving from a low value proprietary applications where software applications are developed for one specific hardware platform to suddenly a high value application which will bring back the the return of investment for the vendors will give more value for the users and in turn the users in such an environment can concentrate on addressing the more important problems in hand like the quality flexibility and the sustainability targets that they need to achieve on right so this is an evolution of an ecosystem what we call as an universal automation where we achieve a software-based control based on the IEC 61499 standard in this case to achieve an open automation ecosystem and in turn create an interoperable and portable software components because this will help today's business managers and process manufacturers who are today focusing on controlling traditional business values things like revenue written of investments time to market but those values are changing in the new era to carbon neutrality and sustainability so with such an open ecosystem the business owners will no longer be limited they will be able to control not only the traditional financial based outcomes but for the new business values and outcomes like sustainability as well and as part of open process automation forum together with this IEC 61499 standard we are we are trying to achieve that interoperable and sustainable open automation ecosystem thank you for joining this session