 Welcome back to Chicago, guys and gals. Lisa Martin here in Chicago with Ansible Fest 2022 with John Ferrier. John, we've had great conversations. This is day two of our coverage. We were here yesterday, we're here today. We've gotten to talk with great folks in the Ansible community, the partner ecosystem, customers, we've broken some news that they've talked about. Now we're going to talk about industrial automation, ITOT convergence. What excites you about this conversation? This is going to be a great segment. This is one of the feature keynote presenters, customer Rockwell, huge in OT, IT, edge, robotics, plant, equipment, everything that we probably have, they do. This guest has really great story about what's cutting edge and what's relevant in the edge and IT slash automation area. Super relevant, looking forward to this segment. Yes, please welcome David Rapini, the Global Plant PX Business Manager at Rockwell Automation. David, great to have you on the queue. Thank you, nice to be here. Give the audience a bit of an overview of Rockwell Automation. And then let's dig into what you guys are doing there. Sure, Rockwell Automation probably is the largest global automation provider of equipment focused exclusively on automation. About 22,000 employees, about seven billion kind of revenue numbers. We make basically controllers for the automation industry, industrialized software, power drives, you know, some of the robotics content, smart cart kind of applications. And what are your key industries that you're covering? Wow, so that's a broad market. So we do a lot of different industries. So we cover obviously oil and gas, life science, water, waste water. We do automotive. So just about any industry actually, any place that needs industrial automation covering any type of manufacturing process or any type of process application we're pretty much there. You know, it's interesting, IoT has been a word in a lot of things, light bulb, wearables, industrial IoT where you're in is a really key space. It's physical, sometimes it's sensitive, critical infrastructure for governments, businesses. I mean, there's running stuff. Definitely. This is huge. Yeah, and it's a big area for us, like getting that data, you know, everybody talks about analytics and what the world's going to be happening to in that IT, OT space. And Rockwell's really well positioned at that lower level where we actually own the data, create the data for all that analytics that you're talking about. What was your main message today on stage? You want to replay that here and then get into it because I think this is really, we're starting to see real traction and adoption in automation, cloud scale, edges happening, exploding. What was your key message on stage today? Yeah, I think it's that the world's really changing in that space, you know, five years ago you would have had a completely different message around, you know, that connectivity and having that content actually delivered to that space and having like even the connectivity to that OT space is just makes people uncomfortable in that world because there's obviously moving pieces, you know, damage to equipment, you know, God forbid any types of explosions or things like that on bad environmental type conditions. So we're working in that space to really make those connections much more open. And now that those connections are starting to happen and we're getting more and more comfort with that in that layer, there's a lot more we can do in that space which is kind of why we're here. And talk about why Ansible and what it's going to be able to unlock for Rockwell to be able to achieve. Sure, there's a lot of areas that we want to play with but Ansible, but our first targets are really are primarily our servers. So there's a lot of edge based servers out there, you know, we call them a pass server which is the process automation system server and there's an engineering workstation operation those main core servers, some of them are redundant. You know, the OT guys to them it's a burden to manage that content. They're good at making, you know, oil and gas. They know how to do water, waste water. They know how to build cars, but managing servers, you know, not in their wheelhouse. Not in their wheelhouse, exactly right. So having that capability and that connection to get down there gives us some power with Ansible to go ahead and start building them initially. So making that initial builds out of the gate. That makes them really consistent and built together so that every application looks and feels the same and they know what they're going to get when their servers power up. So that's a big one, but just maintaining them keeping them patched, you know, keeping security vulnerabilities down. You know, I was in a facility not long ago that was still running Windows 2000, right? So, you know, they have an application there that's just working, it works. They don't want to touch it and it's been running for 20 years. So why touch it, right? So this was going to kind of hopefully break that challenge. Make sure that you keep that password handy. Yeah, exactly. We've had people leave. How about the security aspect? Because OT has been a lockdown mindset, hardened end-to-end, supply chains, vetted. Everything's kind of tight on the old OT model. Real to secure. When you get to IT, you mentioned vulnerabilities, but the innovation's there too. So how does that reconcile for you? What's your reaction to that? Yeah, we see a big move there, right? So it used to be they were always head to head, butting heads, IT OT, you know, IT focuses on, you know, keeping the system secure, keeping the data down, locked down and reliable. OT focuses more on production, right? Making sure they hit their numbers and their production. So oftentimes, you know, having IT push out a patch in the middle of production line, in the middle of a day and rebooting a server shuts down production and, you know, that those kind of conflicts, yeah, exactly. So those conflicts were pretty common. There's still a lot of that there, but it's getting better, right? And I see more and more of that working together as a team to solve a lot of those challenges. And honestly, I keep going back to the analytics angle and the diagnostics and that world of deep data, you know, big data kind of mining, you know, without the IT space to cover that, the cloud data storage, the horsepower. If you had to kind of like rank the complexity because we were just talking before you came on about, things got to get complex before they can get simpler because that inflection points bring that new capability. What's some of the complexities that you're seeing that are going to be either abstracted away or solved with some of these new technologies like Ansible and others that are coming fast? Because at the end of the day, it's got to still be easier. It's not going to be harder. That can't be harder. Yeah, so I'll give you a real world example which is a little embarrassing. So today we deliver our past servers as a solution and we provide that as a VM image that people start with as the first building block. But once you start to deploy that and actually connect it with the rest of the infrastructure, hook it up to our factory talk directory, hook it up to the DNS service, once you start doing all that work, it's about 700 mouse clicks that somebody has to know what they're doing to actually spin it up the rest of the way and get it connected. With Ansible, we're cutting that number like in half is the hope. And we're going to continue to expand that and make it even less work for the users. Talk about skill gap issue. The training alone on that is to have the right people. That's the second big piece, right? So those OT people typically don't have that skill set. So you have to have a fairly high skilled level person to do that work. We're hoping to take that work off of them and put that on Ansible. That sounds pretty consistent. Do you think, is that the kind of the consistency of the problem space is that the OT just has a different goal and they just need something to be invisible and easy like electricity? Yeah, I think so, especially in this world, right? In that OT space, right? In that IT space, sorry. Yeah, so managing servers and things like that just is not what they want to deal with and it's not what they went to school for and it's not what they're doing when they get hired, right? It sounds to me like Rockwell Automation is a facilitator of the IT and OT folks coming together and actually working better together maybe understanding each other's requirements, goals, objectives. Most definitely. So we're offering a lot of cloud content now. We're continuing to expand that content. We're working with a lot of different IT departments and OT departments to try to marriage those two groups together to try to bring that stuff together. We have a partnership with Cisco where we actually industrialize some of their switch components and sell that as part of our content and that relationship gives us a big inroad with a lot of the IT departments. That's important to have that, be able to speak the language of both sides. Yeah, definitely, right? Knowing and understanding the terminology and just being able to know the challenges that IT guys face as well as the OTs is really a big component of what we do. You know, one of the questions I wanted to ask and because the keynote was very cool but you made a comment that your claim to fame was that you wrote the Coke for the Spider-Man ride at Universal. Tell the story, how does that, or come just, I've wrote them many times, been there. So take us through that little journey. So every time people ask me what we do for a living and automation, you know, I can talk about making cars and things like that but it doesn't ring true. So I did do a lot of work on the Spider-Man ride which is at Universal Studios. You know, it was a real challenge making sure how that connections actually work and I did most of the motion control content for that to make the movements of the cars seamless with the backgrounds. Definitely a lot of fun. So those kind of projects are rare but they're really fun when you get those. I hope you have a free pass for any time you want to go on it. I don't unfortunately, so I try to get in the back rooms all the time at that facility but it's rare to get in there. I mean, it's a high-end roller coaster machine. It's like, I mean, that is as robotics, industrial, because this, I mean, it's an intense ride, all these rides. Yeah, it is, and you know, you never move more than like eight feet on that whole ride and it feels like you've dropped, you know, 2,000 feet out of the sky on some of that content. So it's really amazing. I will say it's a little dated. I've been riding on the, part of my team worked on the Harry Potter rides which are much next generation. I couldn't get on that one, the line was too long. I've been on that one. It's a long way, but it's worth it. Dave, I'd ask you a question on the future for people watching who are new observing industrial IoT. What's the most important story going on in your world today? Is it the transformation? Is it the standards? Is it the security? What are the top two or three things that are going on that are really transformative right now in automating at the edge? I really want to say that it's standardization. It's about using open standards and standard protocols to deliver content in a reusable fashion. So, you know, having custom proprietary content like a lot of automation suppliers or even like a lot of other industries, it's hard to maintain. It doesn't work well with other products. It's great because you can do a lot of flexibility what you want to do, but at the end of the day it's about keeping the thing running and hooking it up to other components. So that open standards based solution, you'll see us spending more energy on, you know, part of the Ansible open community thing is nice in that space as well. And you'll see us doing more stuff in that place, that play. Talk about your influence there in the community. You know, we've been talking the last couple of days about Ansible as nothing, if not the power of the community, the collaboration within. Talk about being able to influence that and what that means to you personally as well as to Rockwell. Yeah, so open communities are big for us. We have, you know, obviously a customer advisory board and things like that that we deal with, but we also have an open community forum where people can share dialogue and share ideas. We have large events. We have a process solution users group event where we bring in hundreds, not thousands of engineering people to talk to all of these problems that they're facing and it's not a Rockwell event, it's a, you know, community event, right? Where we actually are talking about, you know, what industry problem people are seeing. And a lot of the ITOT convergence thing is really top of mind. A lot of people say it don't mind, especially the cybersecurity content. What are some of the things that you heard the last couple of days announcement wise? Obviously big news coming out today that excites you about the direction that Ansible's going and how it's responding to the community. Yeah, I think a lot of their feedback that they get and sending a lot of these sessions, they get a lot of interesting feedback from their customer base and the reacting to that I think is very high on their priority list. And what I've been seeing here, you know, some of the AI stuff that they were showing on automatically like defining some of the scripts for their code and the intelligence behind a lot of that content was amazing. I see a lot of that moving forward and we're heading the same direction at Rockwell as well with more AI and our content. The data is a big story too, coming out of all the devices, analytics, great stuff. Yeah, pulling that data up into the cloud space and trying to do something valuable with all that data. It's, you know, we've had big data for a long time. It's just figuring out analytics and how to actually act on that data and get it back into the control to do something with it. All kidding aside, my serious question on this is that, you know, is it the year finally OT and IT converge? It seemed like it's been trying for about a decade. Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So I would say it's not there yet. I think there's still a lot of conflict in that space. You know, the OT guys still have a long history of that space, but as you see more retirement and more people phasing out of that and younger crowds coming in, you know, the automation space is ripe for that kind of transition because coming out of college, you know, jumping into automation isn't always the top of the notch. A lot of people want to go work at the big Amazons or wherever. There's a lot of stuff going on in space. It's pretty cool, a lot of physical. I've seen a lot more machine learning and physical devices in the industry we've been reporting on. It's interesting, I think it's close to a tipping point because we saw machine learning and the trivial apps like Chatbots never really took off. Let me just, expert systems basically, but they're not really going to the next level. So now they are, you're starting to see more, you know, of wisdom projects, you know, different models being adopted. So I see AI now kind of kicking up, similar to OTIT. Yeah, most definitely, you know, we have a lot of projects in that space like doing predictive analysis on, let's just say something simple like a pump, right? If you have pumps out there that are running for years and years, but you notice that there's a trend that on day 305 or whatever, you know, a bearing starts to fail all the time, you know, that kind of analytics can start doing predictive maintenance content and start pushing out work orders in advance before the things fail because downtime costs millions of dollars for these manufacturers. Down time also incidents, right? So you never know, right? What's going on? Exactly, right, right. So it's good to have that safety net, at least from a manufacturing perspective. Final question for me, what's the most exciting thing going on in your world right now if you had to kind of pick one thing that you're most jazzed up about? I have to say, you know, Rockwell is doing a big shift to cloud-based content and more big data numbers like we were just talking about for that AI. That complexity of what you can do with AI and the value that you can do to, like, just, you know, if I can make quality of a product a half a percent better, that's millions of dollars for my customer and I see us doing a lot of work in that space and moving that forward. That's big for me, I think. And what are some of that, my last question is, what are some of the impacts that customers can expect from that? Yeah, so everything from downtime to product quality, to increasing production rates and volume of the data that come out, you know, we do something called model predictive control that does, you know, very tight control on control loops to improve, like just the general product quality with a lot of the big data numbers that are coming in on that. So you'll see us moving more in that space too to improve, you know, product quality and then downtime production. And really driving outcomes, business outcomes for your customers. David, thank you so much for joining us on the program, sharing what Rockwell Automation is doing. We appreciate your insights, your time, and we want to keep watching to see what comes next. We're glad to be here. That's great. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. I'm John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've watched theCUBE live in Chicago from Ansible Fest 2022. Thanks for watching.