On the latest episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang and Gael are joined by Aloxy CTO Glenn Ergeerts and CCO Frank Gielissen to talk about the company’s journey from research at the University of Antwerp to commercial success in the petro-chemical industry.
On the latest episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang and Gael are joined by Aloxy CTO Glenn Ergeerts and CCO Frank Gielissen to talk about the company’s journey from research at the University of Antwerp to commercial success in the petro-chemical industry.
Thabang Mashologu:
Hm. 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.
Gaël Blondelle:
And I'm Gaël Blondelle.
Thabang Mashologu:
We've got a really great show today. We're going to be speaking with Frank Gielissen and Glenn Ergeerts from Aloxy, a startup in the industrial IOT space. Frank is the chief commercial officer and Glenn is one of the founders and the chief technology officer at Aloxy.
Thabang Mashologu:
Aloxy was founded in Antwerp in 2017 to leverage technology coming out of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre in Belgium and the University of Antwerp. Today, the award-winning company develops innovative industrial IOT solutions for the petrochemical industry and helps improve safety, efficiency, and deliver actionable insights to their customers. Welcome to the show, Frank and Glenn.
Frank Gielissen:
Yes. Thank you.
Glenn Ergeerts:
Thanks for having us.
Thabang Mashologu:
So first off, can you start by telling our listeners a bit more about Aloxy and your business model?
Glenn Ergeerts:
Okay. We're a startup focusing on the chemical industry. We are building an end-to-end solution there for industrial IOT. We're building a sensor, we deploy a network infrastructure, and we have a backend system as well, which we integrate with the customer system.
Frank Gielissen:
We have, we have basically specialized now on valve positioning. So we've seen in the oil and gas that around manual valves and positioning of manual valves, there was really gap in the industry. And we saw that there was an opportunity to apply the low-power, wide-area-network technology on valve positioning. So that's the initial use case that we focus on and that's where the end-to-end solution is built around.
Thabang Mashologu:
Okay. I see. So the technology was originally developed in an academic setting. We've spoken to a number of researchers about the challenges of translating research innovation into commercial products. How did your team go about doing that?
Glenn Ergeerts:
Well, indeed. So we came from the university, we were focused on low power communication technologies, all the technical stuff there, and didn't know anything about the chemical industry at all, but we were doing applied sciences. So we apply it into different projects. And we noticed that we got a lot of questions from the chemical industry, that there was a real drive towards going to IOT. And yeah, all these questions came around the same timeframe. So we decided to start a spinoff there focusing on this industry and that's how it got started. So we added a few of the founders are coming with the backgrounds from the industry and then we founded the company.
Frank Gielissen:
I think sometimes you see that technology is looking for industry or it's really technology push. But I think that in this case, when I joined, I could see that I joined from the oil and gas industry so with a lot of domain knowledge. But I could see that all the decisions that were made were actually not so much analytical decisions, but a lot was already done in conjunction with the industry. And that's also, I guess when we discuss later on our involvement in Eclipse, is because of what we have recognized in the industry, what some of the "do's and don'ts" expressed by the industry has led us eventually to Eclipse as well.
Gaël Blondelle:
Just in terms of open sourcing the core technology, is it something that you did when, before creating the spinoff, or is it something that you did when the spinoff was created?
Glenn Ergeerts:
If you're talking about the wireless communication stack, that was already open source before. We worked on an open source project as part of the university, and we use that in the spinoff as well and continue building on this as well.
Gaël Blondelle:
Does it make it easier to do technology transfer when, when you have a path that is open source or is it something that is more complicated?
Glenn Ergeerts:
I guess it makes it easier because the IP discussion is already open source, right? So you don't need to discuss about this, this part. So in that sense, it's easier. Yeah.
Thabang Mashologu:
And from a sales and business development perspective, does it make it easier to be part of an open source ecosystem and participating in projects as well?
Frank Gielissen:
Yeah, yeah. Definitely in different ways. So in one way, it helps in adoption because it's open source. All the open APIs are available. So it doesn't require any customized adapters or many software hours for us to connect the customer. Also in the fact that there's no brand lock-in; that's also for the customer very comfortable that they don't feel that one day, once they make the decision into this direction, there's no way back and they're continuously committed to us. So there's definitely a commercial aspect that we use.
Frank Gielissen:
And I think maybe for us as a startup, most importantly, is the confidence there are larger companies behind it, that it's not solely depending on a few smart developers in the back of their garage, but there's confidence in the companies behind that are already in the foundation. And that really helps us as a startup when we're talking to global industry leaders who need to install our software on their private instances. You feel that really helps once they see that this is the foundation that we're part of, and this is how we contribute, and other companies have contributed that helps.
Thabang Mashologu:
That makes sense. So previous listeners to the podcast will know that Gael and I work for the Eclipse Foundation. Can you tell us a bit more about your involvement with the Eclipse Foundation and the ecosystem there?
Glenn Ergeerts:
When starting the company, it was a pretty clear, or we chose to use a few Eclipse projects from the start already. That was mainly driven by the fact that our customers made it clear that it would not be an option for them to send their data to some SaaS service we host on a public cloud provider, because the chemical companies often wants the data to remain on premise or in a private cloud, which they control themselves or of their choosing. So some public cloud provider would not be an option, which ruled out the public cloud providers, IOT platforms for us. So it was clear from the start we had to build something which we could deploy anywhere. And yeah, as Frank said, we don't want to reinvent the wheel for infrastructure components you need for an IOT platform. And that's why we got into touch with the Eclipse IOT working group and some projects there which we could build upon and built our custom logic upon these projects. So that's mainly Hono and Ditto, which we rely upon very strongly.
Frank Gielissen:
And I think we obviously use those components, but we are also contribution members. So we feel that the community, it's also important for the developers who choose to work for Aloxy, that they become part of an open-source community that they also actively contribute. And we believe in open source, so having our people also involved in the open source community is definitely supported by us.
Glenn Ergeerts:
Yeah, indeed. So the fact that we could use these stable building blocks like Hono and Ditto and build our solution on top of this, this is of course very important for us from a resources standpoint. So we could move more quickly, I would say, but of course you want to actively participate. So it's also an investment in the community there, and there are people like working in this community as well. Of course, we are a startup, so the effort we can do is limited, but still we get the feeling that we're more and more productive in the community as well. And we get to contribute better as well.
Glenn Ergeerts:
I think it enables us to spend more time on our solution while relying on these components which are already there, but we're actively involved in it and we will be more so in the future, hopefully.
Gaël Blondelle:
So you mentioned Hono and Ditto, so that's two of the big Eclipse IOT projects that were created by Bosch some time ago. So how is it to be a small startup and to collaborate with a giant company like Bosch?
Glenn Ergeerts:
We're not collaborating directly with Bosch, meaning of course they put a lot of resources in the people working there, but they really see it as an open-source project and they manage it that way as well, which is very nice.
Frank Gielissen:
And just recently, we were talking to customers on a more technical level about the AMQP connection within Hono, and then they were asking about another type of protocol, which actually Bosch is part of developing in the Hono group. And then when we mentioned that that was on the roadmap and people from Bosch are developing it, that gives also our customers more confidence than saying, "Oh, it's on a startup's roadmap." So now it's on the roadmap of the Hono project and there's a big company behind it who believes in it as well. That leaves no further open questions from that perspective. So commercially that really brings confidence.
Thabang Mashologu:
You know, we're hearing a lot of buzz words like "digital transformation," "industry 4.0." What does industrial IOT mean to you and your customers on a practical day-to-day basis?
Glenn Ergeerts:
It's right that a lot of buzz buzzwords out there, like "digital transformation," "industry 4.0," "industrial IOT." You could name quite a few, but I think that the essence is about connecting your assets. And in at least in the oil and gas, it's a very asset-rich environment, which means there's a lot of maintenance, and most of the money is made by them not in the initial investment, but by running the plants and keeping them running for 40 onwards years. So maintaining your assets and the whole maintenance around it is key to the industry. And then if you have historically a lot of assets that are not connected, it means you remain on the physical expertise of people walking around, listening, feeling, hearing, and that's, I think where it is. Whether you call it "digital transformation," or "industry 4.0," comes to play in this industry connecting those assets.
Glenn Ergeerts:
But because they have thousands of assets, it's a very costly exercise. On the software side, there's already a lot of analytical software available already 10 years ago, but they didn't have all the data points. So there was a lot of automation already in play, but there was still, I mean, I think 10% of the valves for example, were connected. So those were part of the day-to-day operation and they could do their analytics on, but the 90% of the manual valves were just totally blank.
Glenn Ergeerts:
What makes this era exciting is that new technologies like LPWAN all of a sudden make the business case or the use case at a different cost level acceptable. So now we're connecting an asset, let's say in the old OT style. So it was maybe three, 4,000 Euro per asset where we can do it now with a [inaudible 00:13:39] of a 200 Euro.
Glenn Ergeerts:
So now we get more data points and now we enrich the data. And now these customers are not only talking about analytics but they're also talking about digital twin. So building a totally digital twin of the plant, and that takes that whole software analytics and predictive maintenance and all to the next level. Definitely in this asset-rich environment, it makes a lot of sense. And it's exciting.
Gaël Blondelle:
It's moving there. So in the industry, a lot of the OT worlds, which are installations, which are there from the eighties, wired, doing control systems and stuff like this. So these are all in place. And then more and more, you now get the IT world there as well. And the IOT sensors basically crosses this bridge a bit. So you get a lot more data directly into the IT world, and you see that as all the companies are starting to get into this and get something out of the data.
Frank Gielissen:
And it's maybe even the perfect storm because you can, at same time, you can see a lot of experienced operators are leaving the plants; the new ones, the knowledge is not always there. Also, you see a movement from having all the capabilities of maintenance inside one company is moving towards contractors, so people are saying goodbye to their own employees. So there's this whole movement already on the people side and now this additional layer of data coming in just accelerates all of that.
Thabang Mashologu:
That makes a lot of sense. Now you are active in the Eclipse IOT working group. Are you seeing other opportunities for industrial collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation?
Glenn Ergeerts:
Yeah, I think so. And besides of the IOT working group, which is what is very relevant or becoming more relevant is the Edge Computing as well there. And there's also the Edge native group where the plan is to move more into that direction as well. Because you can do a lot of things in the cloud platform, but still in these plants, the control systems are on the field. So you need some hardware there as well, so we can imagine moving more into this direction.
Frank Gielissen:
And we even see it also in practicality. So we talk to customers who have these remote platforms in the middle of the sea, where they say, "We want to keep the data there." It doesn't make sense to push all the data to the cloud and then take it back in. So yeah, that whole Edge discussion is definitely something that we are also eager to tap into as well.
Frank Gielissen:
So to get back to your question, for me it's interesting from a commercial perspective to see when I, for example, send people the Ditto API, that's it, end of discussion. They look at it: "Oh, okay, great. You have this MQTT or you have this," and it's automatically done. So that's typically a good sign that when there's no more questions or no more, "Do you have this? We actually want this." So yeah, I think it addresses the needs of the industry very well. And it fits us for that reason, very well.
Thabang Mashologu:
Now, are there any particular projects that you're interested in building on top of to deliver value-added capabilities to your clients?
Glenn Ergeerts:
As I said, there's a number of projects on the Edge which are very relevant for us; the backend side as well, we're using different projects there. I think what is also important here is it's all cloud native and the Kubernetes ecosystem, which is also an enabler for us to deploy. It's basically anywhere, which if you go back to five years ago or 10 years ago, it would have been a more difficult story. You also see that a lot of companies are getting to know these technologies and also buying into this. So I think that's also important that you have an infrastructure runtime, let's call it this way, which you can either have in the cloud or on the Edge. And especially on the Edge there's a lot of things moving to get it there as well. But if that's the case, then we can more easily deploy stuff at the Edge as well.
Thabang Mashologu:
So looking forward, are there any particular use cases that you're working on addressing or any specific capabilities you have on your roadmap that you can tell us about? Yeah,
Frank Gielissen:
What is important in the oil and gas is that there is a very large barrier to entry, which is the certifications. And so everything needs to be explosion-proof, all the hardware. So initially, and that's by itself a core competence as well, developing your IOT products in a way that they are explosion-proof and then getting them ATEX certified or FM certified, and in the different regions. So we have gone through all of that, and our ambition is initially to build up a range of these ATEX sensors in different application fields. So we're looking at gas detection, for example, as well, because we also, for example, sitting in the industry verticals from the LoRaWAN work group and the feedback there from the industries as well, we need more ATEX sensors.
Frank Gielissen:
So that's definitely an area where there's still a lot of potential, but simultaneously we're getting requests from other industries like water. Water is enormously exposed, water grid, wide areas; it's a different architecture. So it's not so much a private network. So especially on the communication aspect, it requires a different perspective than setting up a private LPWAN network. But it will lean more towards narrowband IOT, most likely, or public LoRaWAN infrastructures. So that's where we're also leaning towards, because that's where our current sensors could immediately be deployed. Those are the two areas where on one hand, if there are large industries where our existing solution is possible, it's a new market approach. But from our roadmap development, we're looking at new applications in oil and gas.
Gaël Blondelle:
Yeah. So you talk about your devices and explosion-proof devices, et cetera. So I see your website and your presentations, and I love the yellow of your devices. So I just wanted to know, is it part of the standard or is it your choice and do you plan to have maybe, I don't know, to change to an orange color for something different?
Gaël Blondelle:
I actually have to give credit to the original founders and then the company they've worked with for the design. The sensor actually won a design award, which is from an industry perspective is not really useful, but I do feel it really helps in terms of your marketing and your representation. The van de Velde award, which is a design award in Belgium, was won by the design studio who actually developed our sensors. But the yellow is a choice of the founders and the design is by the design studio. We're really happy with the result from a marketing perspective. For me, it really helps that it's actually a good-looking product.
Gaël Blondelle:
Yeah. Well, that's really cool. Yeah. It's not because you put that in the oil industry that it cannot be looking good, so that's great.
Frank Gielissen:
Yeah, exactly. And now when you look at a picture, you see, "Oh, okay. That's what it does." Even though that you're looking at maybe a complex infrastructure picture, but then that box, that Aloxy Pulse, stands out. So people immediately know, "Okay, that's, that's the thing they're talking about," which helps in terms of the marketing communication. And yeah, definitely would with future designs, we will stick with this studio. I think they they've deserved that.
Gaël Blondelle:
So I love the idea that open source helps, design helps, so that's all the cool stuff that helps you make business.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, no doubt. When you say that being active in an open-source community has helped drive brand awareness and even generated leads for your business?
Frank Gielissen:
I did have a handful of leads because one of our software engineers did a presentation on one of the Eclipse events. And that presentation is online somewhere. And people find that and they told me, "I saw Bob doing the presentation," and then it's like, "Oh, okay. So you've seen the Eclipse presentation." And so definitely all of those things help, especially for us, because what we see is that, of course this is a niche and it's not just about getting seen, it's about getting seen by the right people. And obviously the people who search on specific items in open source or watching Eclipse videos, those are the right people for us. So that definitely helps. It sets a good filter.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah I can totally see how it's a great filter. Now, what advice would you have for a company that's considering an open-source based strategy? Any words of wisdom that you can share based on your lessons learned?
Glenn Ergeerts:
I would say, if you need a generic component, which is not specific to your use cases, first look if it's an already-solved problem in an existing open-source project. It makes a lot of sense to reuse that, or even consider starting a new project, even, because more hands lower the investment and, and more eyes catch more bugs, obviously. So it's good to cooperate on that level, especially if it's not your added value. It's some infrastructure which you rely on. So if you can share this, and I think that the governments provided by the Eclipse Foundation also de-risk that for these investments, in terms of legal aspects and the vendor neutrality is also very important, of course.
Frank Gielissen:
And now I would like maybe to add to it that maybe a lot of companies use it, but they don't express it or they don't present. Don't be shy: It's an opportunity to be part of the community and use it in your marketing. Because I don't think enough people really understand the benefits of open source. So use them because open source automatically benefits for your company once you are actively participating.
Thabang Mashologu:
Yeah, absolutely. And that makes me think of what we've heard from other guests, which is that the maximum benefits from open source come when you give back and actively participate in the ecosystem, and that extends to talking about it and acknowledging that it's core to the way you do business. So where can our listeners connect with you online?
Frank Gielissen:
Yeah, obviously our website is the central place, www.aloxy.io. From there, it leads you to our YouTube channel where we have some general short videos. We have the support section now that we'll fill in. So that's one aspect. And obviously on our LinkedIn page, we communicate a lot of the new stuff and what we're up to, and you can just follow us as a startup and what we're up to. So those are our main two platforms we communicate on.
Thabang Mashologu:
Okay. Thank you again, Frank and Glenn, for coming on the show. You can find out more about A-L-O-X-Y dot IO and that's about it for this episode of the entrepreneurial open-source podcast. You can find us online at entrepreneurialopensource.com and at OSS4Biz on Twitter. We'll catch you next time on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or any other place that 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.