 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE Studios for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the technology industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Digital business is affecting every enterprise of every size, small and large. And the types of solutions that are required, the types of outcomes that are being pursued are extremely complex and require an enormous amount of work from some of the best and brightest people on the business side as well as the technology side. And that means not just from a large company, it means from an entire ecosystem of potential sources of genius and insight and good hard work. So the consequence for every enterprise is how do they cobble together that collection of experts and capabilities that are gonna help them transfer their business more successfully, more completely and more certainly than they would otherwise. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Today we're here with Kelly Ireland, who's the founder and CEO of CB Technologies. Kelly, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Peter, happy to be here. So let's start by finding a little bit about CB Technologies. Tell us a little bit about what you do. I have a IT background, so have been in it for 40 years. In 2001, I decided I had a better idea of how to both support clients as well as my employees. So I opened CB Technologies. We were a value-added reseller. And then, say about five years ago, I decided to do some transforming of the company itself. I saw what was going on in the industry, and I thought this was the time for us to get going. Turned out we were a little early, but we wanted to transform from what you would call the value-added reseller to a systems integrator, because that was the only words they had for what that end result would be. Now I've heard it's the domain expert integrator, which we like a lot better. And what we've done is gone from this value-ad, which we've all seen over the last couple of decades, into actually engineering solutions, and mostly with consortiums, which we'll talk about of the OTIT convergence and what's going to be needed for that to make our customers successful. Well, you just described, in many respects, the vision that businesses have had and how it's changed over years. Where at first, the asset was the hardware, hence the var. Today, the asset really is the data, the application, and how you're going to apply that to change the way your business operates, the customer experiences that you provide, the profitability that you're able to return back to your shareholders. So let's dig into this, because that notion of data, that notion of digital transformation is especially important in a number of different domains. Perhaps no more important than in the whole industrial-internative things domain, that intersection of IT and OT, as you said. Tell us a little bit about what you're experiencing with your customers as they try to think about new ways of applying technology, technology-rich data to their business challenges. Well, you used the perfect word, you said dig, because this is all about layers. It's all about, it was technology and software. Now it's about technology, software, and integration. In fact, the conversations we're having with our clients right now, we don't even talk about an OEM's name, or before you would, but we have in our head what we know what would be best. What we look at now is the first thing you do is go in and sit down with the client. And not only with the client, the executives, or the CIO, or the CTOs, et cetera, but the employees themselves. Because what we've seen with IIOT, OT, IT convergence, you have to take into account what the worker needs. And the people that are addressing it that way, this project that we started with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they started up what we call the refinery of the future. It could be X of the future, it doesn't really matter, but it was getting at least up to five use cases with a consortium of partner companies that could go address five different things within the refinery. And the reason that I think it's been so successful is that the owner, the CEO, Doug Smith, and the VP of Ops, Linda Salinas, immediately wrapped their arms around bringing employees. They're a small company, they're maybe 50. They brought half of them to the HPE lab to show them what a smart pump was for their chemical plant, Texmart Chemical, in Galena Park, Texas. Starting from that, it was like they put them on a party bus, took them down, put them in the lab, showed them what a smart pump was, and all of a sudden, the lights turned on for the workers. These are people that have been manual valves and turning knobs and looking at computer screens, they'd never seen what a smart, censored pump was. All of a sudden on the drive back to the company, ideas started churning. And then HPE took it from there, brought in partners, sat everybody in the room, and we started feathering out, okay, what's needed? But let's start with what are the client needs? What are those different business users within the chemical plant need? And then build use cases from that. So we ended up building five use cases. Well, so let's get into the five use cases in a second, but you just described something very interesting. And I think it's something that partners have historically been able to do somewhat uniquely. And that is that the customer journey is not taken by just an individual within the business. What really happens is someone has an idea, they find someone off in a partner that can help them develop that idea, and then they go off and they recruit others within their business. And a local partner that has good domain expertise and has a time and energy and customer commitment can be an absolutely essential feature of building the consensus within your organization to really accelerate that customer journey. Have I got that right? Absolutely, absolutely. And what we saw with Refinery of the Future was getting those partnerships. HPE started it, created the project, kind of threw information out to many of their ecosystem partners, trying to gain interest. Because the thing was is this was kind of our bet, was a very educated bet. But it's our bet to say, yeah, we think this makes sense. So, like I said, I think there's about 14 partners that all joined in, both on the IT OEM side, the OT OEM side, and then both Deloitte and CB Technologies for the SI and domain expert integration, where you really get into, how do you tie OT and IT together? All right, and so we've got this situation where, this is, as you said, it's not just in the Refinery of Process Manufacturing Businesses, it's in a lot of business. But in this particular one, you guys have actually fashioned what you call the Refinery of the Future. It's got five clear use cases. Just give us an example of what those look like and how you've been, or CB Technologies has been participated in the process of putting those together. The first one was wrapped around predictive analytics. And that was led by Deloitte and has a whole host of OT and IT integration on it. Again, not limited to process manufacturing at all. At all. But, and a good group, you know, you have National Instruments, Intel, FlowServe, OSI soft, Snyder Electric, PTC, Realware, they're such a host in the consortium. And I think what was most important to start this whole thing was HPE came in and said, here's an MOU, here's a contract. You all will be contracted to the overall results, not just your use case, not just one or two use cases you're in, but all five because they all can integrate in some sense. And each of you can help the others think problems through. So that's the first one, what about the second one? The second one is video as a sensor. That was Intel, CB Technologies, I think we have Azure in there as well, doing some of the analytics, some PTC. And what that was all about was taking video and taking a use case from Linda and saying, where do you need some sort of video analytics? Taking that, processing it, and what we ended up doing with that one was being able to identify animals or aggressive animals within the train yard, a downed worker, transients that shouldn't be there because we can decipher between someone that's in text marks PPEs versus somebody that's in street clothes. So taking all that, analyzing the information, the pictures, training it to understand when it needs to throw an alert. A lot of data required for that. And that's one of the major, major drivers of some of the new storage technologies out there, new fabrics that are out there. How did that play a role? As you can imagine, HPE is the underlying infrastructure across the entire refinery of the future from compute with the Edge Data Center into the Rubin network, into nimble storage for storing on-site. What we're finding no matter who we talk to in the industry, it is most of them still wanna keep it on-prem. In some sense, security, they're still all extremely cautious. So they wanna keep it on-prem. So having the nimble storage right in the date, having the Edge Data Center, having everything in the middle of this chemical plant was absolutely a necessity. And having all of that set up, having my team, which was the CB Tech team that actually did all the integration of setting up the wireless network because guess what? When you're in a different kind of environment, not inside a building, you're out where there's metal pumps, there's restrictions because a flash could cause an explosion. So intrinsically safe, we had to set up all that and determine how could we get the best coverage, especially we want that video signal to move quite fast over the Wi-Fi. How do we get all that set up so it takes the most advantage of the facility and the capabilities of the Aruba network? So that's one and two, three, four, five quickly were? Three, worker safety, which hasn't started yet. We're still waiting for one of the manufacturers to get the certification they need. Four, we have is connected worker, which is on fire. Having a worker- Kind of connected worker on fire and worker safety, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, they don't sound. But just think of all the data and having the worker have it right at his fingertips and oh, by the way, hands-free. So they're being able to take in all this data and transmit data, whether it's by voice or on a screen, back to that. From a worker-centric perspective, from one that sustains the context of where the worker is, what stress they're under, what else they've got to do, et cetera. And what are they trying to complete? And how quickly, and that's where right now we have ROI that's in the 90%, which is off the charts. But it's, and what's great about being at Texmark is we actually can prove this. I can have somebody walk with me, a client that wants to look at it. They can go walk the process with me and they will immediately see that we reduce the time by 90%. So I've given you four, what's the fifth one? Asset intelligence, which is all about 3D, point cloud, 3D visualization, actually being able to pull up a smart pump, you know, really any pump. You scan the facility, you convert it into 3D, and then in the program that we're using, you can actually pull up a pump. You can rotate it 360 degrees. It's got a database behind it that has every single bit of asset information connected, videos, CADcams, PNIDs for the oil and gas industry. Everything's in there, emails can be attached to it. And then you can also put compliance reports. So there you might need to look at corrosion, one of those tests that they do on an annual or every five year basis, that's point and click, you pull it up and it tells you where it sits. And then it also shows you green, yellow, red. Anything in red is immediate. That tension yellow is, you need to address it, greens, everything's 100% running. So the complexity that we're talking about, the kind of specificity of these solutions, even though they can be generalized, and you know, you talked about analytics all the way out to asset optimization or asset intelligence, we can generalize and structure, but there's always going to be, it seems to us, there's going to be a degree of specificity that's required. And that means we're not going to talk about package software that does this kind of stuff. We're talking about sitting down with a customer with a team of experts from a lot of different places and working together and applying that to achieve customer outcomes. Have I got that right? Absolutely, and what we did with the consortium, looking at everything, how they first addressed it was right along that line. And if you look at software development, agile, following agile process, it's exactly what we're doing in for IIOT or OTIT convergence. Because if you don't include all of those people, it's never going to be successful. I heard at a conference the other day that said, POCs go to IoT to die. And it's because a lot of people aren't addressing it the right way. We do something called innovation delivery as a service, which is basically a three to four day boot camp. You get all the right people in the room. You pull in everything from them. You boot out the executive team partway through, and you really get in depth with the workers. And you have them say what they wouldn't say in front of their bosses. This happened with Doug and Linda. And Linda said it was mind blowing. She goes, I didn't realize we had so many problems because she came back in the room and there was a million stickies. And then she said the more she read it and the more we refined it down, she said it was absolutely delivered, the use case that she would have eventually ended up with, but loved having all the insights from the workers. Well, too often tech companies fail to recognize that there's a difference between inventing something and innovation. Inventing is that engineering act of taking what you know about physics or social circumstances, creating hardware or software. Innovation is a set of social acts that get the customer to adopt it, get a marketplace to adopt it, change their behaviors. And partners historically have been absolutely essential to driving that innovation, to getting customers to actually change the way to do things and embed solutions into their operations. And increasingly, because of that deep knowledge of what the customers are trying to do, they're participating more in the actual invention process, especially on the software side, as you said. Yeah, yeah, I think what's really interesting in this, especially with IOT, when I look back a few years, I look at cloud and everything was cloud and everybody ran to it and everybody jumped in with both feet and then they got burned. And what we're seeing with this whole thing with IOT, you would think we're showing these ROIs, return on investments, we're showing all this greatness that can come out of it, and they're very slow at sticking their toe in. But what we've found is no one, or I should say, the majority of corporations anymore don't wanna jump in and say, let's do a two or five or $10 million project. We see your PowerPoint. No, let's dip our toe in. With what we're doing, it's a really small amount of money to go in and really direct our attention at exactly what their problem is. It's not off the shelf, but it's off the shelf with customization. It's like we've already delivered on connected worker for oil and gas, but now we're also starting to deliver multiple other industries, because they actually walk through Texmark. We can do tours at Texmark. That was kind of the trade-off. All these partners brought technology and brought their intelligence and spent, we're now on two years of proving all this out. Well, they said, fine, open the Kimono, we'll let your customers walk through and see it. That probably makes Texmark look like a better supplier as well. Well, it's enhanced their business greatly. I can tell you, they're just starting a new process in another week, and it was all based on people going through a client that went through and went, wait a minute, I really like this. They were also being able to recruit technologists within the use in the industry, which you would think Texmark's 50 employees. It's a small little plant. It's very specialized. It's very small. They pulled one of the top, sorry, I lost my train. I'm trying to think of what the name... There are a small number of employees, but the process manufacturing typically has huge assets. And any way you look at it, we're talking about major investments, major monies that require deep expertise, and my guess is that Texmark is able to use that to bring in even smarter and better people to do that. Smarter and better people that are looking at it going, they're ahead of the curve. They're so far ahead of the curve that they want to be on board. They're bringing in millennials. On their connected worker, Carlos, is their train load lead, and he dropped an intrinsically safe camera, and it broke, and he tried to glue it together, tried to super glue it together, and then he ran back to Linda and he said, I broke the case, and this case is like 10 pounds. They call it the brick. They got to lug it up. They got to climb up the train car, lug it up, take a picture that they have sealed the valves on all the cars before they leave. Well, he had used the real wear head device, and he went into Linda and he said, I know there's a camera in there. There's camera capabilities. Can I use that until we get another case? And she's like, yeah, go ahead. Well, he went through, started using that to lean over, say, take photo. We engineered that it could go directly back to the audit file so that everybody knew the minute that picture was taken, it went back into the audit file. This is where we found the process was reduced by 90% of time, but he turned around and trained his entire team. He wasn't asked to, but he thought this is the greatest thing. He went and trained them all. And now, about every two weeks, Carlos walks in to my team that sits at Texmark and comes up with another use case for connected worker. It's amazing. It's amazing what we're developing right out of the customer by using their workers and them proactively coming to us going, hey, I got another idea. Let's add this, where I think at version 7.0 for connected worker because of that feedback, because of that live feedback in production. Great story, Kelly. So once again, Kelly Ireland is the co-founder and CEO of CB Technologies. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. And once again, I want to thank all of you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time.