 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering OSI Soft Pie World 2018. Brought to you by OSI Soft. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the OSI Soft Pie World 2018. They've been doing it for like 28 years. It's amazing. We've never been here before. It's our first time and really these guys are all about OT, operational transactions. And we talk about IoT and industrial IoT. They're doing it here, they're doing it for real and they've been doing it for decades. So we're excited to have our next two guests, Tyler Duncan. He's a technologist from Dell, Tyler. Great to see you. Thank you. And he's joined by Ed Watson, the global account manager for channels for OSI Soft. Glad to be here. OSI Soft, excuse me. Thanks Jeff. I assume Dell is one of your accounts. Dell is one of my accounts as well as Nokia, so. Oh, very good. There's a big nexus there. Yep, and we're looking forward to Dell Technology World next week, I think. I think it's the first Dell Technology, not Dell EMC World with it. That's right. I don't know how many people are going to be there, 50,000 or something? There'll be a lot. There'll be a lot. But that's all right, but we're here today. We're talking about industrial IoT and really what OSI Soft's been doing for a number of years. But what's interesting to me is from the IT side, we kind of look at industrial IoT as just kind of getting here. And it's still kind of a new opportunity. And looking at things like 5G and looking at things like IP, all these sensors are now going to have IP connections on them. So there's a whole new opportunity to marry the IT and the OT together. The nasty thing is we want to move it out of those clean, pristine data centers and get it out to the edge of the nasty oil fields and the nasty wind turbine fields and crazy turbines and these things. So Edge, what's special about the Edge? What are you guys doing to take care of the special things on the Edge? Well, a couple things. I think being out there in the nasty environments is where the money is. So trying to collect data from the remote assets that really aren't connected right now. So in terms of the Edge, you have a variety of small gateways that you can collect the data. But what we see now is a move toward more compute at the Edge. And that's where Dell comes in. Yeah, and so I'm part of Dell's extreme scale infrastructure group, ESI, and specifically I'm part of our modular data center team. So what that means is that for us, we are helping deploy compute out at the Edge and also at the core, but the challenges at the Edge is you mentioned the kind of the dirty area. Well, we can actually change that environment so that it's not a dirty environment anymore. It's a different set of challenges. It may be more that it's remote, it's lights out. I don't have people there to maintain it, things like that. So it's not necessarily that it's dirty or ruggedized or that it's high temperature or extreme environments. It just may be remote. Right, there's always this kind of balance in terms of I assume it's all these applications specific as to what can you process there? What do you have to send back to process? There's always this nasty thing called latency and the speed of light that just gets in the way all the time. So how are you redesigning systems? How are you thinking about how much compute and store do you put out on the Edge? How do you break up, that you send back to central processing? How much do you have to keep? We all want to keep everything. It's probably a little bit more practical if you're keeping it back in the data center versus you're trying to store it at the Edge. So how are you looking at some of these factors in designing these solutions? Well, Jeff, those are good points. And where OSI saw PI comes in for the modular data center is to collect all the power cooling and IT data, aggregate it, send to the cloud, what needs to be sent to the cloud, but enable Dell and their customers to make decisions right there on the Edge. So if you're using a modular data center for telecom, for cell towers, for autonomous vehicles, for AR, VR, what we provide for Dell is a way to manage those modular data centers. And when you're talking geographically dispersed modular data centers, it can be a real challenge. Yeah, and I think, you know, to add to that, there's, when we start looking at the Edge and the data that's there, I look at it as kind of two different purposes. There's one of why is that compute there in the first place? We're not defining that. We're just trying to enable our customers to be able to deploy compute however they need. Now when we start looking at our control system and the software monitoring analytics, absolutely, you know, and what we are doing is we want to make sure that when we are capturing that data, we are capturing the right amount of data, but we're also creating the right tools and hooks in place in order to be able to update those data models as time goes on. Right. So that we don't have to worry about if we got it right on day one. It's updatable and we know that the right solution for one customer and the right data is not necessarily the right data for the next customer. Right. So we're not going to make the assumptions that we have it all figured out. We're just trying to design the solution so that it's flexible enough to allow customers to do whatever they need to do. Well, I'm just curious in terms of, you know, is obviously important enough to give you guys your own name, Extreme Scale. Well, I mean, what is Extreme Scale? Because you said it isn't necessarily because it's dirty data and hardened and kind of environmentally, but what makes an Extreme Scale opportunity for you that maybe some of your cohorts will bring you guys into an opportunity? Yeah, so I think for the Extreme Scale part of it is it is just doing the right engineering effort to provide the right solution for a customer as opposed to something that is more of a product base that is bought off of Dell.com. Okay. Everything we do is solution-based. And so it's listening to the customer, what their challenges are, and trying to, again, provide that right solution. There are probably different levels of what's the right level of customization based off of how much that customer is buying. And sometimes that is adding things. Sometimes it's taking things away. Sometimes it's the remote location or sometimes it's a traditional data center. So our Extreme Scale infrastructure encompasses a lot of different verticals. And are most of the solutions that you develop kind of very customer-specific, or is there, you know, you kind of come up with a solution that's more of an industry-specific versus customer-specific? Yeah, we do, I would say everything we do is very customer-specific. That's what our branch of Dell does. That said, as we start looking at more of the, what we're calling the edge, I think there are things that have to have a little bit more of a blend of that kind of product analysis or that look from a product side. I no longer know that I'm deploying, you know, 40 megawatts in a particular location on the map. Instead, I'm deploying 10,000 locations all over the world and I need a solution that works in all of those. So it has to be a little more product-based than some of those, but still customized for our customers. And Jeff, you know, we talked a little bit about scale. It's one thing to have scale in a data center. It's another thing to have scale across the globe. And this is where PI excels in that ability to manage that scale. Right. And then how exciting is it for you guys? You've been at it a while, but you know, it's not that long that we've had things like Hadoop and we've had things like Flink and we've had things like Spark and kind of these new age applications for streaming data. But you guys are extracting value from these systems and making course corrections 30 years ago. So how are some of these new technologies impacting your guys' ability to deliver value to your customers? Well, I think the ecosystem itself is very good because it allows customers to collect data in a way that they want to. Our ability to enable our customers to take data out of PI and put it into Hadoop or put it into a data lake or an SAP HANA really adds significant value in today's ecosystem. It's pretty interesting because, you know, I look around the room at all your sponsors, right? A lot of familiar names, a lot of new names as well. But, you know, in our world, in the IT space that we cover, it's funny, we've never been here before. We cover a lot of big shows, like it will be at Dell Technology World. So you guys have been doing your thing. Has an ecosystem always been important for OSI soft? It's very, very important for all the tech companies we cover. Has it always been important for you or is it a relatively new development? Well, I think it's always been important. I think it's more so now. No one company can do it all. We provide the data infrastructure and then allow our partners and clients to build a solution on top of it. And I think that's what, you know, sustains us through the years. Right. So final thoughts on what's going on here today and over the last couple of days. Andy surprises, you know, hall chatter that you can share, that you weren't expecting or, you know, really validates what's going on in space. A lot of activity going on. I love all the signs over the building. This is the infrastructure that makes the rest of the world go, whether it's power, transportation, what do we have behind us, distribution. I mean, it's really pretty phenomenal, the industries that you guys cover. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of the sessions are videotaped. So, you know, you can see Tyler from last year when he gave a presentation. This year, eBay, PayPal are giving presentations and it's just a very exciting time in the data center industry. And I'll say on our side, you know, maybe not as much of a surprise, but also hearing the kind of the customer feedback on things that Dell and OSIsoft have partnered together and we work together on things like a Redfish connector in order to be able to, from an agnostic standpoint, be able to pull data from any server that's out there, regardless of brand, we're full support of that, but be able to do that in an automatic way that with their connector so that whenever I go and I search for my range of IP addresses, it finds all the devices, brings all that data in, organizes it and makes it ready for me to be able to use. That's a big thing and that's, they've been doing connectors for a while, but that's a new thing as far as being able to bring that and do that for servers. That if I have 100,000 servers, I can't manually go get all those and bring them in. So being able to do that in an automatic way is a great enablement for the edge. Yeah, it's a really refreshing, again, kind of point of view. We usually look at it from the other side, from IT, really starting to get together with the OT, but coming at it from the OT side where you have such an established customer base, such an established history and solution set, and then again, mirroring that back to the IT and some of the newer things that are happening and that's exciting times. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for spending a few minutes with us and congratulations on the success of the show. Thank you. All right, he's Tyler, he's Ed, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from downtown San Francisco at OSI Soft, PyWorld 2018. Thanks for watching.