Entrepreneurial Open Source

Inductive Automation: How open collaboration is changing and improving the software industry — with Don Pearson

May 12, 2021 Don Pearson, Inductive Automation Season 1 Episode 1
Entrepreneurial Open Source
Inductive Automation: How open collaboration is changing and improving the software industry — with Don Pearson
Show Notes Transcript

On this episode of The Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Don Pearson from Inductive Automation joins to talk about how open collaboration is changing and improving the software industry and how Inductive Automation's product Ignition, used by over 50% of Fortune 100 companies, incorporates open source software. 

Thabang Mashologu:

Hello, and welcome to the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, a show where we discuss the power and practical value of open source in business and entrepreneurship with leaders and innovators from around the world. I'm Thabang Mashologu. On today's show, we're going to be speaking with Don Pearson from Inductive Automation. Inductive Automation was founded in 2003. And their award winning Ignition Platform is used by solution integrators to develop a wide range of industrial IoT and SCADA applications in the food and beverage, oil and gas, transportation, manufacturing and other process industries. Don is the Chief Strategy Officer at Inductive Automation. Welcome to the show, Don.

Don Pearson:

Thank you very much for having me. It's good to be here, Thabang.

Thabang Mashologu:

So Don, can you start by telling us a little bit more about Inductive Automation? Specifically, what problems do you help industrial organizations solve, and maybe a bit about your business model?

Don Pearson:

Sure. I think probably to give a little bit of context to that, I have to at least mention a little bit about our CEO, Steve Hechtman. I've known Steve for over 30 years when this project began, we were just basically friends and our families would get together, and he said he had this idea he was going to start a software company. But it really grew out of his roots in industrial automation integration work. I mean, Steve had been, he's our CEO, founder and president and Steve had really been in industrial automation as an integrator for probably about a quarter of a century at that time. He just wasn't very happy with what he could do for his customers. I'm talking about what software was available out in the marketplace. What was he able to do when the customer said, I'd like to solve this problem?

Don Pearson:

And so, at the end of the day, as an integrator, he really created the actual software for himself first. It was like, hey, I need to solve better problems. I looked around, I don't see what I need so I think I'll start something. And he gathered together kind of his goal though, because he had some IT background. And I know since then, OT and IoT convergence have become a pretty big deal out in the industrial world. But back then, he basically had a simple goal. I would like to get SQL database, I like to get data into SQL databases from PLCs and back again. I would like to do that because I could do so much more with my customers if I could leverage IT technology in the world of SQL databases. And that was kind of, really Thabang, that was the beginning of his thought process was, I need to get data to my customers. We need to find out what's going on with machines, we need to get to the plant floor with data and leverage that data better.

Don Pearson:

So, in the beginning, Inductive Automation as a software developer was, let's use database-centric approach, let's use more standard IT technologies, let's see if we can actually leverage some of what's really common in the IT world, which was very standards-based and they understood how to handle the enterprise better. And then you had all this isolated proprietary technology on the plant floor. So, if you wanted to get out of the proprietary world, you had to look at other technologies. And that's what sort of led him to the world that became eventually the Ignition Platform.

Thabang Mashologu:

Gotcha. Now, you've got a really impressive list of customers. When you look at the sheer variety of industrial IoT and SCADA applications that your software and products are used in, what specific factors and capabilities do you think have contributed to that success?

Don Pearson:

I think you have to kind of broaden, I think there are multiple factors. Some of them business and some of them technical. Let's address maybe a couple of the business things first. One of the things that Steve realized early on, he actually made a list of 25 pain points that he felt as an integrator, that he also thought his customers felt. So he said, if I can address these 25 pain points with my business model and my technology model, I'm going to be useful, as you pointed out, across multiple industries. He did not want to address one industry, he wanted to go with the concept of, let's go big. Let's take a look at what platform requirements are there and my business model requirements.

Don Pearson:

So what ended up happening is, and on our website, you can go and listen to some of the stuff, read some of the stuff he's written there, but he basically said we got to have a new technology model, a new licensing model, a new business model and a new ethical model. He didn't like the way he was treated by some of the vendors he was dealing with, quite frankly. And so, he felt like he wanted to try and do it differently. And in looking at that, he said, okay, from the technology model, we're going to be open, interoperable, standards-based, secure, technology approach to our platform. From a licensing model, this was actually, I mean, in terms of opening up industries, this was I think a huge disruptive move.

Don Pearson:

He was very frustrated with the fact that licensing was, and pricing was very opaque. You couldn't find out, you're an integrator and you're sitting there Sunday night trying to do a proposal for a customer Monday morning, because all Monday to Friday, you're in the field work, and then Monday you do your proposals. And you can't get a price from anybody, you can't find out what some cost. And then when you're doing a project, what happens there? You got to figure out, am I going to use 5000 tags, am I going to use 10,000 tags, because every time you used more tags or wanted more clients, the cash register was ringing. You had to pay more. So there were all these financial considerations about building out architectures. And when you got all these financial considerations, you create a less optimum solution, even if you could do it, technically, you don't do it because you got price considerations.

Don Pearson:

So he wanted to eliminate the economic obstacles to creating proper architectures. What resulted was the unlimited licensing model of Inductive Automation. It's very common in the IT world, you take a server license, but once you got your server license, you got unlimited tags, unlimited clients, unlimited device connections. You unlimited the world so you take the brakes off innovation, and creating the proper technical solution. So that pricing thing, I mean, really, I got to tell you, that was a senior thing. And when I came on board, I'm not technical in background, I came on board basically, at the time, I was the group publisher and executive vice president at a new media company, a group called the Government Technology Group. And so Steve and I knew each other and he was the engineering. And so, we started working together, he said, I want to do a company in the software world. So I brought a different element of skills to the party to become part of the team, because my background was marketing and sales and really the business and the people side of it.

Don Pearson:

So basically, when we came together, I went, this is a great model because from a sales viewpoint, you give a person so much freedom. And I'll tell you, that is one of the key things that has been disruptive early on was, people thought we wouldn't survive. I mean, I remember going to first shows, [inaudible 00:07:41] down in Houston, this is like 2007. And the other people were saying things to Steve, like, come on, the SCADA market is wrapped up. It's owned by the legacy players, you're never going to make any money. You're talking licensed by the server, you're going to go broke before you get a foothold.

Don Pearson:

What wasn't realized by industry overall was that if you really gave people the freedom to create the kinds of systems they wanted, they wouldn't just have a limited view of SCADA somewhere on the plant floor, they would begin to start thinking about bringing together the entire enterprise. They would go from sensor, now we talk sensor to cloud, from the plant floor to the top floor, we have lots of things we say about that. But that became so important in the beginning, and that was part of the philosophy.

Don Pearson:

I mean, Steve, that's where open source comes in is basically, in the beginning, creating the platform, the OPC UA standards weren't even out yet. We were the first company that [inaudible 00:08:40] and created OPC UA client, OPC UA server. We basically developed that because the only way you could do what Inductive Automation was trying to do was you had to open up data flow, it had to be available, you had to get to all those protocols out in the field and on the plant floor, because if you wanted big data analytics, you had to have big data access. And that meant opening the floodgates, and that meant a more of an open source viewpoint.

Thabang Mashologu:

Now, Don, can you give us a sense of the journey that you've been on trying to figure out the approach to open source that would maximize the benefits for your customers and for your organization, what to consume, what to contribute, how to give back to the communities that you're involved in? I'm sure you've had some forks in the road where you had to make some really tough decisions.

Don Pearson:

That is really I think an insightful question and very, very spot on in terms of what was the journey. I mean, when Steve started out, he basically gathered together some IT guys. They actually came from UC Davis computer science, they didn't have any [inaudible 00:09:57]. And he basically said, as I mentioned, I want to get SQL database, I want to get PLC data into SQL databases bidirectionally so I can do more. So we basically got a guy, his name is Coby, from UC Davis. And he went to work on it. The first product was called Factory SQL. It was actually developed in Dotnet then. And then all of a sudden, in a week's time he had a prototype going, and Steve thought he died and went to heaven. He called Factory SQL the Swiss Army knife for the integrator because you could do so much with it.

Don Pearson:

As soon as he got that, he said, man, I got to see something here, I got to have some visibility. Well, Coby had a friend, brought on his friend, Carl. And Carl developed Factory PMI, which is now the Vision Module and the Prospective Module, that was the visibility. So get the data and then see it and do something with it.

Don Pearson:

So, in the beginning days, those were things that empowered him. So we had these IT professionals. And then Travis came on right after that, these were all friends from UC Davis that came through a friend of mine, a mutual friend of ours that we all kind of hung out together. And he started getting this expertise. So the OT skill and the IT skill came together, and it started really helping the integration company, which he had at the time.

Don Pearson:

There was a fork in the road to your language, an exact fork in the road, where it was like, you know what, do I keep this to myself? It wasn't even the technology and the coding, this was now the business model? Do I keep it to myself and build a big integration company with these great tools for end users, or do I empower other integrators and end users directly? And that was a very distinct business decision because if you're going to get into the software business, you got to be all in. You can't kind of be a software company. There's horror stories of integrators trying to figure out and do both, and they don't do both well. So that was a fork in the road, that was the decision early on.

Don Pearson:

And I will say this, just as a commentary on that, that's about the time when I was getting more involved in it. But you had Carl and Coby, they're co-directors of software development, they developed it, they're our senior people in technology right now, they've been with us since the beginning. And understood how you could bring the IT world and the OT world together. Steve had the expertise in the industrial space. But in the early days, Travis, Carl, Coby, they were out in the field doing projects. They were really earning their stripes in the field, because it was always Steve's view we have to be customer-centric and solve problems. We do that, we're going to be successful.

Don Pearson:

And that rolls around to your point about how did we end up with so many industries. I mean, the pie chart of the industries we're in is pretty unlimited because Steve's concept was build a platform and give people the power to innovate and solve problems. You can take our software, you can put the ignition platform on a computer as he said many times, and it'll sit there and do nothing for 10 years. It doesn't do anything. People with innovative ideas and skills do something with it. It is not something that out of the box makes everything happen. So, empowering people to innovate was part of the philosophy, and therefore, they could take their domain expertise, their vertical expertise, and come up with a food and beverage solution, come up with an oil and gas solution, come up with a fulfillment solution, come up with a baggage handling solution and transportation and logistics.

Don Pearson:

And it just spread not because we had the expertise. We created a platform that they could take that expertise and extend it. They could take the API and use our SDK that was free and they could develop their own module. So when you open up innovation like that, Thabang, it's amazing the expertise that exists across the industrial sector, but you got to take the chains off and let people innovate.

Thabang Mashologu:

Absolutely. Now, you are actively involved in the Eclipse Foundation's ecosystem, specifically the Eclipse IoT and Sparkplug Working Group. Can you tell us a bit more about the open source projects you're involved in and why you chose those projects?

Don Pearson:

Well, historically, even before Sparkplug and even before that working group, there's an Eclipse project called the Milo Project, which actually that particular world is an open source implementation of OPC UA. And it includes high performance stack channels, serialization, data structure, security, all that stuff that goes along with that area, as well as client and server SDKs that are built on top of that stack. So, I say that because Milo was started, we realized when OPC UA wasn't even out as a spec yet, and we needed it in order to make our goals happen for an open software that people could innovate with, that we needed to solve that problem ourselves. So Carl and Coby got busy and went to town developing that very first OPC UA server client combination.

Don Pearson:

Kevin Herron, who's our senior software architect, I mean, if you go to that project, you see the contribution from him is phenomenal. Milo was actually, I said, where did the name come from, that was the name of Kevin's cat. So he's sitting at home doing all this open source work and everything, and he needed a name for the project. So they named it Milo after his cat at the time. So that was early on. This is like 2007, 2008, right? It was part of our roots that Steve wanted something open. He knew we would be part of an ecosystem but we weren't going to contain all the skills and expertise, either technically or industrial domain expertise wise, you needed to connect people.

Don Pearson:

And I think just as an aside to this, really Thabang, I read this stuff like Gartner's trough of disillusionment they talk about when they talk about the stages of adopting technology. And it talks about the excitement at the beginning, and then the trough of disillusionment and how do you get to productivity. I believe the trough of dissolution is because you get all these great ideas of what can be done, and all the barriers, the restrictions, the proprietary mindset, many things that are in where someone has the idea that in order for them to win, someone else has to lose. In order for them to be successful, they have to take away market share. That's a very limited view of the world. It's a zero sum world, and that's not the truth. The truth is, if you bring value and you have a piece of the puzzle that's going to bring together a solution, you get more value, if you have more people playing. It's kind of like more people have access to data the more things happen.

Don Pearson:

I remember back even long ago, what I used to give the example of Metcalfe's Law, which has to do with the degree of functionality, or value of any particular solution is a function of the number of users squared. The simple term is if you give two people a telephone, well, great, you have functionality, they can talk. Watson can talk. If you give two billion people to telephone, now you got some serious functionality.

Don Pearson:

That philosophy I think is at the foundation of how we view what we're doing with the platform of Inductive Automation's Ignition, because if you give people access to this and you may [inaudible 00:17:39], just take a look at an enterprise. Why do you isolate data on a plant floor? You want data available to whoever needs it whenever they need it, and that means that executive has his dashboards, that person on the plant floor has real time screens they can look at. And the entire enterprise is connected. Now you get good decision making, now you can start leveraging technologies like machine learning, advanced analytics, things that are going on right now. You can't do that if you have a clamp down viewpoint on your access to data.

Thabang Mashologu:

Totally. I see that you have a strategic partnership with Arlen Nipper and the folks at Cirrus Link. They're also members of the Eclipse community. Can you tell us a bit more about how that relationship came about and how you work together with them?

Don Pearson:

Six, five years ago or something, Travis met Arlen and Arlen ran into our platform. Arlen is a co-inventor along with Andy Stanford Clark from IBM of a project 22 years ago to develop MQTT, co-inventor of MQTT. But basically, there was always a missing link about, he said at some point, you'd be going smoke and mirrors to your customer because you didn't have everything. He jokes with us and says, he was waiting 17 years to have the Ignition Platform show up. And I joke with him and say the guys who created the Ignition Platform were still in high school when you were wanting them to do that. So give them a chance to grow up.

Don Pearson:

At the end of the day, what happened is Arlen showed up at our conference, this is probably five years ago, the Ignition Community Conference here in Folsom. And he had taken our SDK, just too the SDK over the weekend and develop the MQTT engine module. And he developed modules on our platform that would allow auto-discovery and instant access to tags. And what he did with that is, he did a presentation, I was in the room, Steve was in the room, Carl, Coby, we're all in the room. And this guy sits on the stage and does a live demo where he connects up with 80,000 tags and I think 400 or 500 PLCs, and auto-discovers the entire infrastructure in 15 seconds.

Thabang Mashologu:

Very cool.

Don Pearson:

We didn't know what the heck happened on there but we knew that something big had just happened. Arlen and his team at Cirrus Solutions, they have developed the modules that leverage MQTT, which opens the door to data access and opens the door to proper utilization of bandwidth because of its report by exception view, it doesn't waste bandwidth. Now you can take that 80 or 90% of the data that was stranded on the plant floor, stranded in the field, stranded on those 10,000 oil wells out there, you can bring it together and create an architecture [inaudible 00:20:29] a middleware architecture that allows you to really leverage and get all that data and give it to people who need it when they need it and have access to it. It opens up the free flow of data.

Don Pearson:

So that was a huge activity. And obviously, that's the roots of, when then they develop, they realize this, if you remember back to the internet of people, let's say, the internet of people had two things that made it take off. It was HTTP and HTML. It's like, how do you transport something and what is transported? In the industrial space, you actually have MQTT and then a blank slate. You could do anything with MQTT, that was great. The biggest problem was you could do anything with MQTT. There was no standard. There was no spec.

Don Pearson:

And then Arlen and the team got together and created the Sparkplug spec, Sparkplug B. But it came real clear that at some point in time, Thabang, people would ask, who owns Sparkplug. Does Inductive Automation own Sparkplug? Does Cirrus Link own Sparkplug. It just became very much the case that that particular intellectual property created by Arlen and the Cirrus Link team would be better stewarded, you could steward it in the Eclipse Foundation, it could have stewardship and development. It could go open, you could get more contribution. It really didn't make sense to own that by one organization. That was Cirrus Link's decision, they did that, we completely supported that. And then the Sparkplug Working Group emerged, Cirrus Link, Inductive Automation, we sit on the steering committee of that with many other organizations. And basically, when you do that, then you take that open source philosophy and you allow people to contribute.

Don Pearson:

So Chevron can come in and look at it from that viewpoint, or Canary Labs can come in and look at it from their viewpoint. You really opened the door to bringing all this talent and expertise in to making sure that that specification matures and is useful and gets broad adoption. So, probably a longer answer than you wanted but that's a little of the background.

Thabang Mashologu:

No, not at all, that was super helpful. Now, as we talk about open source foundations and working groups and steering committees, what would you say is the importance of commercially friendly governance and processes that you have found at the Eclipse Foundation?

Don Pearson:

I don't think you do it without that level of governance. I don't think you can. You want to open to the innovation, but there has to be some, if we're going to bet the farm, so to speak, on technologies that are open, interoperable, standards-based etc, we sell ignition, ignition is a commercial product that goes out to people and it opens the doors to doing many things. But it's also founded on many open source technologies that are utilized. The reason for that philosophically and business model wise is, let's let people do what they do best if we can source a solution and have so much talent input into it. And then we can do what we do best, which is how do we commercialize what we do have, keep the doors open to the innovation, not stifle it, and yet serve a customer who needs to know, I mean, come on, you got to run that plant 24/7, you've got production quotas. If it goes down, they want to know who they can get on the phone right now or in the plant right now to get it up and running.

Don Pearson:

We've got customers who 100s of 1000s of dollars goes down every time they're down for an hour, they count on for mission critical solutions. So, we want to know that when you're talking about the technologies that we apply and utilize, we just take Sparkplug and MQTT. It better work and it better work well. But at the same time, the challenge here is, how do you get the governance that you need over the intellectual property and over the development of the spec that's going to keep it able to be depended upon by all these industrial organizations, and at the same time, have the innovation and the confidence that you're getting the best?

Don Pearson:

I feel like it's a nice balance that you say each organization and group of individuals needs to do what they do best. So, we're not in the business of governance, Eclipse can do that. They do it best, let them do what they do best. And if we have to go out and serve mission critical customers, we got to make sure that those 10,000 oil wells, you know exactly their performance, and we're able to help them go better, or whatever it happens to be. That production line with 180 robots producing an automobile or the baggage claim system at the Toronto Airport. I mean, these are important industrial applications that must work. And when I look at some of those, I mean, really Thabang, I look at some of that stuff and I just go, it blows my mind the level of complexity and the demand for performance that happens.

Don Pearson:

So you want the best technology available always developing, and there's always a balance between velocity and stability, velocity and stability. Yes, you want to go faster and go better and do more, but you also want stability. And I think the reason adoption is going so rapidly now in the industrial space with Ignition's industrial application platform is because we've struck a pretty good balance. In fact, even our head of software development, Carl Gould said that with Ignition 8.1, which is an LTS version, long term support version of Ignition 8, we are going to focus on all of 8.1 stability and performance, stability and performance, because when you bring in something new, you got to stabilize it and get the performance working well. Industrial customers are not going to adopt newer technologies if they unseat the working installation. Come on, you got oil and gas companies with 45 year old hardware. It's still working, they ain't changing it. So what we need to do is enhance the operations technology, not unstabilize it.

Don Pearson:

And I think Eclipse Foundation is a perfect way to look at stabilizing the development and evolution of these specs because really, the industrial, IoT world took off because you have MQTT and Sparkplug. And that's the Internet of Things. You're connecting billions of things, that's the way to do it. The Internet of people took off because you had HTTP and HTML. So it's like, how do you transport and what are you transporting? We needed both. And now with Sparkplug and the Working Group and the Eclipse Foundation, we can develop that specification well and bring the confidence level up for adoption in the industrial space. If people do what their core competency is, at the end of the day, our mutual industrial customers win. So, that's kind of a summary of why I think it's more important what Eclipse Foundation does, and that we do what we do best.

Thabang Mashologu:

100%. Now, Don, does open source come up in your conversations with customers and prospects? Is this something that you actively talk about?

Don Pearson:

Yeah. I think I'm getting a little, I know I still serve as our VP of sales and marketing, but I have to confess, I'm getting a little distant from the daily conversations now. Our director of sales, Melanie Hottman, is a pro on all that, does a great job. But I will say this, in our discussions, what does come up in discussions is flexibility and freedom to do what you want. So, that means if we're going to say, go to our module showcase and look at all the things that are done that are being provided by people to our customers to better improve their ability to do things, there's no way we could do what we do with our technology without the connection to open source, and the model that it puts out there. If you take a look at that our discussions do go into, if you're talking to an integrator, you can say to that integrator, you've got expertise, we've got discussions going on right now with one of our top partners, who's very, very strong in life sciences.

Don Pearson:

And they have expertise we'll never have. So what we want to do is give them the freedom to develop the modules to extend the functionality to be open enough that they can win with it and have some of their own product that they can use to go with their expertise. I think that's the only way discussions are going to play successfully is giving customers freedom to leverage their knowledge through our platform. And that really is kind of how the discussion goes. I remember early on discussion when I introduced, Arlen met our CEO and we were sitting down in Steve's office having a little conversation. The guy started in Oklahoma 42 years ago in the oil and gas industry. Mr. Nipper has, and when he left that discussion and we talked about various things about that, Steve turned to me and he said, "That guy has probably forgotten more about oil and gas than I could ever learn in a lifetime." He just knows that area. But now it's broadened to other fields in other areas. But the solution and the technology of MQTT was originally developed for an oil and gas solution.

Don Pearson:

So basically, I think the goal is that we want our customers to feel like, whatever direction you need to take our platform because of our approach to be an open and interoperable and standards based, you've got the freedom to do that.

Thabang Mashologu:

So it sounds like the combination of open source, open standards, open specifications, what that translates to is freedom and flexibility for your company, your customers, your partners. Does that resonate?

Don Pearson:

Absolutely. I think it resonates totally. And just as one example on that, on the side, Travis and I a year ago December were at, we went to some partner meetings in Taipei with some of our hardware partners that are now part of our Ignition Onboard program where you can put Ignition Edge on a piece of hardware. The discussions we started with them that led us to go to their conference and have meetings with their partner organization and become more involved, they started because they were trying to move up in value. You have a piece of hardware but what you really want us to be part of a solution. So they wanted to be what they call SRPs, solution ready products, then they have their different acronyms and things.

Don Pearson:

But the whole point was, we need to come up in value, and that means, don't think of ourself as a distinct piece. Yeah, we have a sensor, yes, we have a PLC, yes, we have a product. But that product is only valuable if it's part of a solution. So that sort of pushed us much, much further into saying, we need to facilitate the entire ecosystem because the whole world is saying, I don't want to buy a product, I want to buy a solution. So, that's really where open source comes in is, can we connect all the dots? Can we bring the technologies that are necessary to really empower that industrial organization to be successful?

Don Pearson:

And so yes, I think the ecosystem is what is so, the open viewpoint, the open source viewpoint, unleashes an ecosystem of companies and people and talent, that if properly brought together, everybody wins more. It really pushes away that viewpoint of a zero sum game. And I realized that's threatening to many industrial organizations that have basically tried to capture a customer, and basically say, anything you need whatsoever, but you're tied to us. It completely pushes that mindset out and says, let's go with the fact that all of us win more if we collaborate together and bring our mutual talents together in a more effective approach to solving problems.

Thabang Mashologu:

And let me just play that back to you. All of us win more when we collaborate and bring our talents to the table. Powerful stuff. Now, I was on your website and I came across the Ignition Exchange Platform, which seems like an environment for community collaboration in its own right. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how it came about?

Don Pearson:

That is so interesting that you went there and saw that because that is so at the core of our viewpoint. What originally had started with Travis had an idea that if you had a solution, you had a piece of something, a way to visualize some data, you wanted to share it. You originally started that connected to the Ignition platform, we have something called Cloud Templates. And if we were able to create a template someone could use, let's put it in the cloud, let anybody download it, and build on it, if they wanted to. And then it was like, let's get bigger about that. We have over 3000 integrators across 110 countries now. Those folks come up with good things. Some of it they want to be proprietary, but some of it they want to share. So let's open it up in exchange because the community will be stronger and better to their customers if we allow that.

Don Pearson:

So, our sales engineers and our engineering folks, they'll put things up in the exchange. Our top customers, our premier integrators, we actually encourage them as part of community participation to put some sort of a product into the exchange. And so, you're seeing it build. And so, we launched it a couple of years ago and it's really taken off, and it's amazing to me. And that's just the whole open source viewpoint, the whole community. It's amazing to me how many of our integrators put things into the exchange to share with other integrators.

Don Pearson:

Instead of this viewpoint that if I compete, I got to stop you from winning business because I got to keep it to myself, that's how Steve started when he did it, that's how Arlen looked at it when he put Sparkplug into the Eclipse Foundation. So let's open that up to our community and let them share whatever they want to share. On the exchange, you can put a product up there, you can put a solution up there. You can keep it private for your own use or you can make it public. You have a choice. So it really is a place to gather all these great things people are doing with the ignition platform and share them, and the whole community wins as a consequence.

Thabang Mashologu:

Now, Don, what do you have to say to other companies that are considering an open source based strategy? First of all, do you consider Inductive Automation as being an open source based business?

Don Pearson:

I think so. I think if I just try and reflect back on, when Steve first talked to me about what he wanted to do, I have to totally confess that, from my own background, when he said, let's get PLC data into SQL databases, I knew from my public sector background and the information systems I was involved in what SQL databases were. But I had to say what the heck is a PLC, what is this thing? Programmable logic controller, that's what people do to control machines, and that's where the data comes into. And so, that was the beginning of my learning curve. I really took to heart Steve's philosophy and viewpoint, that if you went at it, those 25 pain points over the years have grown to I think a whole graphic chart we have of 100 pain points.

Don Pearson:

If you always look to solving a pain point in the most effective way to be better able to serve your customers, if you keep that front and center, that's going to be a good guiding light, a good North Star, if you will, against your entrepreneurial challenges. If you have a different philosophy, which is, I'm going to create something and hold it to myself, and I'm going to basically use my knowledge to then capture customers and lock them into my business model, I think that's yesterday's news personally. I don't think that actually works going forward because it's too much that zero sum game. I mean, what has been the history, if you think about it, of many companies in the past, and it worked, is we do some research, we find a niche in the market, we develop a product to fill that niche, we market the heck out of it and sell the heck out of it and make sure we keep it away from our competitors.

Don Pearson:

I say that philosophy should go out the window. It is basically a limited viewpoint. Is the opposite of an open source viewpoint. If you say, wait a minute, we're going to crowdsource this, we're going to get other people looking at it. What we will do is we will basically build our business around a close connection to the pulse of our customers and always solve problems in the direction of more customer value. And that doesn't mean owning everything. It means being a conduit for solutions to our customers, and that value will not go away just because other people are also contributing.

Don Pearson:

I guess my words of advice would be, think about the fact that you're going to get a lot more value for your company if you don't think of locking down views, of knocking down your technology, but opening it up, while at the same time, keeping your business model focused and know where your value is, know where your differentiators are. We work to differentiate Inductive Automation from anybody else daily, and that's part of our strategy going forward.

Don Pearson:

But by the same token, having a platform that's open interoperable standards-based is a huge asset, and I think there's a lot of room in the market for companies to take that more open entrepreneurial approach to it. They won't just sell a product or win a project with the customer, they will become an actual partner to their customers in their digital transformation journey, which is a long journey and we want partners we can count on for the long haul. And I think this open source viewpoint is much more conducive to those kinds of relationships between a supplier and the buyer of that particular product or service. The end of the day, everybody wins more with that philosophy and strategy going forward.

Thabang Mashologu:

Yup. Couldn't agree more. Now, Don, we've covered a lot of ground today. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners, any parting words of wisdom? And also, where can folks connect with you and Inductive Automation online?

Don Pearson:

Well, you can certainly search for Ignition or Inductive Automation, you'll get right to us. Inductiveautomation.com. Also, I want to say in terms of where you can find us also, we several years ago, just one thing I want to say about being open because I missed this and I think it's worth pointing out here. This is about knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing at the end of the day. And if you think about this, many years ago, and this is a lesson I'll take from our CEO, he said, we are going to start Inductive University, and we're going to share the knowledge of the Ignition platform globally. All of that became an early on realization that knowledge transfer without a paywall is a huge contributor to the unleashing of innovation. So whether you go to inductiveautomation.com or Inductive University, we try and do as much as we can to make information available so a person can make their own informed choice of what's the best direction for them to go.

Thabang Mashologu:

I think that's a great place to leave it for today. And as Don mentioned, you can connect with Inductive Automation at inductiveautomation.com. Thank you so much, Don, for coming on the show. That's about it for this episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast. You can find us online at entrepreneurialopensource.com and @oss4biz on Twitter. We'll catch you next time on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other place you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Thabang Mashologu:

The Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast is sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of software developers and organizations of all sizes across industries with a business friendly environment to collaborate on open source software innovation. Visit eclipse.org to learn more.