 Hello, my name is Brandon Williams, and I'm co-founder of Silicon Valley Software Company, cplane.ai. And for the last four years, our company has been almost singularly focused on solving the problem of making IT and OT systems work together in harmony as part of an open architecture industrial control system. Coming from decades of experience in the telecommunications and cloud industries, I've seen firsthand the power of open systems to unlock a tremendous amount of value and innovation. When we first looked at how to apply our skills and expertise to the emerging market for edge computing, it really was the extraordinary commitment from companies like ExxonMobil, Schneider Electric, Intel, Phoenix Contact, Georgia Pacific, ABB, and Shell that drew us into the open process automation form. So today, I'd like to share with you the learnings of this journey into the very heart of manufacturing, the transformation of the industrial control system from exclusively proprietary solutions to an entire new ecosystem of products and capabilities that's now emerging thanks to open standards, open architectures, and the incredible work of over 120 leading IT and OT companies worldwide. So the context for my presentation today will be to introduce how an open industrial control system is a critical part of your digital transformation strategy. And this is how I hope the discussion will be useful for you today. By the way, I also hope that this is one of the last virtual events that you have to attend now that COVID is winding down. So hopefully these will be done and recorded in person. But here we go. Here's what I hope that this discussion, this presentation will help you with. So if you're an industrial manufacturer that is disappointed by the results of your digital transformation, I hope to introduce some ideas that bring your past efforts, digital transformation, together and maybe help you deliver real business value going forward. If you are about to start a digital transformation journey, I hope to give you some anchor points for your strategy to shorten the long path and maybe tilt the odds of success in your favor. And if you're a vendor of either IT or OT solutions or services, I hope to direct you, really to direct your attention to a large emerging market of open industrial control solutions. Digital transformation and the open process automation form kind of begs the question, could these two terms or ideas have any connection? Isn't one focused on IT and the other on OT? Doesn't this only apply to large oil and gas producers or manufacturers? The presentation today will be broadly applicable to all industrial manufacturers, whether you're considering a PLC system replacement, a SCADA system modernization. So digital transformation and the open process automation form, could these two terms or ideas have any connection with one another? Isn't one focused on IT and the other on OT? Doesn't this only apply to large oil and gas manufacturers? The presentation today will be broadly applicable, that's my hope, to all industrial manufacturers, whether you're considering a PLC system replacement, SCADA system modernization, or planning for an overhaul of a DCS. This topic of how a control system built on open architecture is critical to your decision making and to your overall digital transformation strategy. Digital transformation is often compared to a fourth industrial revolution. The flow of real time data into very smart algorithms will unlock new insights, new efficiencies, new profits, and perhaps even new sources of revenue. As with any revolution, the promises are many, but concrete results are often elusive. What I have observed in the telecommunications and cloud industries is that how powerful new tools are used and where they create the most value is often surprising. So who thought a DVD rent by mail business would threaten the big TV networks, cable operators, and even compete with 100-year-old movie studios? Netflix is the product of a digital transformation of the entertainment, communications, and consumer electronics industries. The point of looking at Netflix in this conversation or this presentation today is to realize what a surprise it's been to century-old businesses. And it's probably a surprise even to the Netflix team as well. Revolutions are unpredictable. Winners are not predetermined by size, status, resources, or experience. In fact, one of my favorite books on this topic, The Innovator's Dilemma, by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. It studies this revolution innovation phenomena very, very closely. I recommend it to you. So that brings me to our current topic of the revolutions that are taking place in industrial manufacturing. I say revolutions because it's not just one thing that's changing. Digital transformation is not just a flood of cloud or IoT technology into industrial companies. It's the convergence of many technology trends, systems, disciplines, and even the convergence of different departments within your own company. The open process automation forum has been working on a very critical component of this revolution. And the work of the forum is about to have an outsized impact on industrial manufacturing and digitalization. So I've suggested four things that your organization should be focused on to make the most of its digital transformation expenditures. First, as we're looking here, if your digital transformation strategy is not directly addressing and tied into manufacturing operations, it will be awfully difficult to achieve positive results for your business. Digitalization is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Digitalization has to drive changes to operations in a cost-effective way. Second, proprietary control systems for the last several decades have lulled many industrial manufacturers into a dangerous reliance on their favorite vendors. Digital transformation is a revolution, folks, and the establishment very rarely offers the insights on how to take advantage of sudden shifts in technology, markets, et cetera. Your legacy vendors can be very important partners with you, but industrial manufacturers have to take control of their digital transformation strategy to achieve success rather than just acquiring maybe the next shiny object. Third, the industrial control system is the very heart of industrial manufacturing. And as such, it has to play an outsized role in the successful transition to this fourth industrial revolution strategy, to your manufacturing strategy. Many companies have shied away from incorporating the control system into their transformation strategy because it's hard. And it's hard because of closed proprietary systems. It's also hard because of the risks associated with manufacturing processes. The open process automation standard is the key to allowing you to incorporate the industrial control system into your digital transformation strategy. Flexibility, security, new capabilities, all of these things come with the open process automation standard and the control systems that are being built on that standard, no matter what you manufacture. Power, water, chemicals, beverages, mining, pharmaceuticals, anything. And lastly, you have to embrace open, open systems, open architectures, open standards, open technologies, and the vendors who are truly supporting them. This won't surprise you at a presentation at the open group. But the emphasis is important to highlight that openness is one of the four keys to a successful digital transformation strategy. Demand this from your vendors and your partners. So before we dive into more detail on these four keys to success, I'd like to set the stage with a couple of concepts. Start off, I just want to discuss the breadth of the concept of digital transformation. As I go through this list of buzzword bingo, which ones of these phrases do you most strongly relate to? Is your company relying on vendors or consultants for answers? Are you setting your own agenda? And what open systems or standards come to mind with each of the phrases that I'm going to go through here is this aspect of digital transformation connected to your control system or to your control system strategy. So here we go. Think about these one at a time and how they connect to your strategy. Well, not surprisingly, Industry 4.0. We've got digital transformation and industrial transformation. How about industrial IoT, remote operations, and autonomous operations, smart factory, smart manufacturing? How about additive manufacturing, augmented reality? You know, as if the kind of the COVID reality wasn't enough, we need augmented reality. How about digital twin, machine learning, predictive maintenance, and co-bot? Yeah, no, no, that's really, that really is a term. It's a collaborative robot. Yeah, that's a thing. So by listening to all of these terms or looking at them, I hope some questions arose in your mind about how they affect your business and what strategies you're relying on to achieve digital transformation with our buzzwords. Okay, so the second topic I'd like to touch upon before covering the four keys to success is the relative pace of innovation in the IT arena versus OT. And it's worth asking, how will this affect our digital transformation strategy? So I begin with the thesis that Industry 4.0 or all of the buzzwords that we've seen actually is equivalent to or must include an open control system. If you go back to the 1980s and really what's thought of is Industry 3.0, where you have IT technologies starting to come into control systems for manufacturing and really the birth of DCSs and some of the advanced SCADA solutions. But when you fast forward to today, to 2020, to 2021, and we start talking about Industry 4.0, we see an enormous difference in terms of innovation capability, cost, you know, dollar per value or unit of cost, unit of value. And the disparity is really high. And I guess one question we can ask is what happened? Well, the IT industry adopted open standards and the OT industry did not. And I think that's what we're seeing today. So if you're looking ahead of where to go and maybe really the crux of this presentation is that open systems is gonna make this equalize. If you think of these as two tanks side by side, how do you get the pressures or the levels equal? And that is what the open process automation standard does. It's either a gate valve that is carefully regulating the flow of modern IT technologies and strategies into OT solutions or you can think of it as I have depicted here, you know, the 120 companies that have come together to pump IT technology and capabilities into OT. So it's not just about the adoption of IT into OT, but I think that's a good way to think about how do you get the capability of a control system up to the expectations that we all have around everyday electronics like your laptop or your iPhone or, you know, many of the devices that we interact with. And the key to that is open systems. The purpose of any digital transformation strategy is to produce a measurable benefit to the business. And some of these benefits may be intangible, such as security, flexibility, or maybe competitiveness, but many benefits will be measured. And in terms of inputs and outputs, total cost of ownership, total lifecycle costs or total, you know, harmful emissions that the company makes, whatever the measurement, incremental investment in digital transformation has to be weighed against cost and the effort. So I ask you, is your company investing in the right things? The goal of digital transformations to have a positive return on investment. And so far, there's been enormous investment in gathering data, right? So when you gather lots of data, what you end up with are data lakes. And if you think of this as a huge container of data, and I know many companies are spending a lot of money gathering data and a lot of money storing data. So they're starting to run sophisticated analytics on that data. And from that analytics, you get insights, but it can be very difficult to make operational changes or to implement the changes that are helped, that are driven by those insights. So how do you implement changes and operations? And that's just what I think of as action or control. If you are not taking the data that you're gathering, the insight that you're getting from big data analytics and converting that into making changes to your manufacturing system, you're really gonna have a hard time getting ROI. So an open control system is really the wheels on the truck. It's where the rubber meets the road, as the saying goes. And if you're not modernizing your control system, then achieving an ROI from digital transformation is gonna be difficult. Success key number two, industrial manufacturers must lead. And I'm gonna make this point through a couple of business analogies that I hope resonate with you. Ford Motor Company was started in 1903. Henry Ford had already had actually several unsuccessful attempts. In 1903, started what we think of today as Ford Motor Company. And in 1909, there were 500 fellow manufacturers of automobiles. And right at that same time, Henry Ford very famously introduced the Model T. And the Model T rolled off the Ford assembly line and changed manufacturing, changed the automobile industry. And by 1929, there were only 44 manufacturers remaining. So that's a great story about a transformation, right? About industry 2.0, I would say, and that innovation. But in 1908, there weren't any motor car assembly line solution vendors that were lining up, bringing their latest complete end-to-end assembly line to Henry Ford so that he could build a great automotive company. And it was the manufacturer themselves that had to reinvent manufacturing. I think that holds true today. There's a lot of consultants and vendors that are bringing digital transformation technologies, but it has to be the manufacturer, the industrial manufacturer that's leading. Another example that I saw firsthand was in the networking industry, where you had a single large vendor, AT&T, the world's largest, made a statement in 2014 that they were going to stop buying proprietary networking equipment within a certain timeframe. I think it was like six years and that they were going to transition to software-defined networking or software-based network services. So a couple of things, this might resonate with current industrial manufacturers that traditional carrier networks aren't adaptable. They're hard to scale and aren't as cost-effective as they could be. That sounds like a lot of discussions I have about control systems. And a time like this requires an urgent call to action. I use this as an example of, it's very similar to what's happened in the process industry, where ExxonMobil started this effort over 10 years ago and really stepped up to lead everyone to change the ecosystem of, into open technologies for their control systems. AT&T has had a lot of success with this strategy. And I would just again point that it takes the large, what I think of as manufacturers or customers in the industry, are the ones that really have to make the change. So success key number three is that the control system is critical. And I like to talk about this in terms of how all of these digital transformation initiatives fit together, because a lot of it is driven by IT. And where you get into the, what are often thought of as cloud technologies, right? If that's the corporate data center and the ERP and business intelligence systems, there's a lot of gathering of data, as I mentioned earlier in these enormous data lakes and an industrial system, you might think of that as the story as well. And then there's a lot of analysis going on, this process optimization, big data analytics. So when people think about digital transformation, a lot of times these are the things that they're focused on. There's another side to it as well, the emergence of the internet of things or industrial IoT is leading things like predictive maintenance and machine learning and applying artificial intelligence, being able to draw data out in real time or near real time and maybe have some insight into equipment that's gonna fail, how to improve operations, that kind of thing. But the real heart of any industrial manufacturing system is the control system and it sits right at the center. And I think what we all know is that there is a proprietary wall and moat that has been dug around the control system and it's really holding back your whole digital transformation strategy. So when you think about digital transformation and the objectives that you wanna meet as a manufacturer, you have to consider the control system and where it fits. Success key number four and my last point of my four keys for success, embrace open. Now, if you're here at the open group, clearly you've made some kind of commitment or interest to open systems and open technologies. And I just wanna talk briefly about why this is so critical for digital transformation. Number one is that open technologies are gonna be the best way to continually meet the evolving security threat. I think we've all seen the incredible impact that cybersecurity threats can have on our economy, on companies, on the food supply, on the availability of automobile gas for large segments of the population of the country, at least in the United States. And so if you're not embracing open systems and modern systems, then the risk of a cybersecurity threat is only gonna get worse. And this is particularly true as you dive deeper into the control system. Another important issue is that openness is an enabler of sustainability. ESG or the sensitivity for environmental issues, social issues, governance issues is really rising to a critical success factor in corporations. If you don't have the flexibility to change your operations or to measure improvements in your operations, then you're really gonna be behind in sustainability. Openness is the way to enable a sustainable measurement of your sustainability as well as to improve your sustainability. We've talked a lot about IT and OT systems coming together to help you in digital transformation. Open standards, open systems are the only way to converge IT and OT. I think as I demonstrated in an earlier slide, the divergence of capability and sophistication between IT and OT systems is really driven because of one is proprietary and the other has been open. And the only way to equalize this, as I showed through the open process automation standard is to have this flow of open architecture and open systems and open standards into the control system or into the OT side. And that's exactly what's happening through the open process automation forum. The last thing I'll mention here is that open systems prevent future points of stress. One of the things that we're seeing is that proprietary systems are one of the main roadblocks for implementing digital transformation. They're one of the main roadblocks for having a significant upgrade of cybersecurity protection. And by making that choice of a proprietary system 20, 30, 40 years ago, it has now come to a point where you can't make the changes in your business because of that. And it's pretty clear in the cloud industry and the telecom industry how moving away from proprietary systems and moving towards open systems really eliminates these future points of stress, allows continuous innovation going forward. And you'll see that open systems prevent you from having this point of stress in the future that creates brittleness or maybe makes it easy for things to break in the future. Okay, so those are my four keys to success for digital transformation. And all of that ties back to the work that's being done in the open process automation forum. And really the goal of the forum is to help bring the control system into the digital transformation strategy as well as to bring a lot of modern security, flexibility into control systems. So where are we with the standard? You know, perhaps is that version 2.0 has been approved and is released. You can download it right here and the link on the screen. And we've just started work or actually been pretty engaged in work on version 3.0. And so the things that are being worked out right now are really again, where the rubber meets the road. It's no longer just concept, but it's moving from concept to reality. The things being discussed right now in version 3.0 are the physical platform, application portability as well as system or systems orchestration. So I wanna conclude today by just looking at the next steps for success. If you're not involved in the open process automation forum and in any way you're connected to digital transformation, I think honestly you're missing a very important ingredient. Not only of community and an ecosystem of vendors that are committed to this transformation, but really the insight understanding how the control system, how your operations really are gonna be affected and can best use all of the power and things that are happening around digital transformation. So step one, need to get involved. There's companies that are joining every year. The amount of enthusiasm and participation has grown each of the four years that I've been involved. And so that is step one. Step two is if you have not included the control system as part of your digital transformation strategy, it's time to start. And it's time to start exploring how you can experiment and learn and see what's going on with open architectures and industrial control. I think you'll be surprised. So make the control system part of your digital transformation strategy. And the last thing I'll mention today is that if you're a vendor and either an OT or an IT vendor and you're providing hardware or software or services and you're looking for a market to grow, the open architecture of the industrial control systems is being formed right now. Alliances are being formed, products are starting to are in development that'll be coming to market soon. And it is a really, really exciting time. And if you're looking to break into a new market, you're looking for opportunities for growth, I encourage you to become involved in the ecosystem and now is the right time. I wanna thank you for your attention and appreciate the open group giving me the opportunity to talk about the importance of digital transformation and how it's connected to the work at the forum. Digital transformation is going to remake industry. It will be like the assembly line that the Henry Ford developed for the Model T and that work's being done right now and this is an important part of it. Thanks so much.