Steve McDowell  0:00  
You ready Matt?

Matt Kimball  0:00  
Dude, I'm ready. You ready, Steve? 

Steve McDowell  0:03  
I'm ready. So I'm Steve. and you're Matt.

Matt Kimball  0:09  
Who do we have with us today? Steve? 

Steve McDowell  0:11  
You tell me, Matt. 

Matt Kimball  0:12  
All right, we have Jason Anderson from Stratus. Virtually anybody who's been in it for more than five years should know who's stripe. This is. Jason heads up product and strategy for Stratus for their further edge. Well, I'm gonna, I'm introducing Jason, why don't you tell us what you do. Thanks for joining. Sure.

Jason Andersen  0:33  
To start, I work at Stratus and we build mission critical systems. So you know, we tend to not be maybe an out front name like in the system space like you might hear an HP or something like that. But you know, most of the credit card transactions around the world are run on Stratus equipment. A lot of landline telephone call switching is done on Stratus equipment and in the last five years We really kind of transitioned the business towards helping our industrial customers run and run their automation systems really well like because basically our stuff just doesn't break. Right? So I run strategy and product management, which means I'm the guy who's kind of out there looking to see what the opportunities for mission critical problems are. And then we figure out how to address those with either products or services or, or, you know, just kind of, uh, you know, talking to people and just trying to figure out how we can help them out with with kind of what's off the shelf, you know, it's pretty, pretty interesting job.

Matt Kimball  1:37  
Hey, so, so jumping right in see said a couple of things in there. You know, Stratus, mission critical resiliency, reliability, all very, very important. And edge and you alluded to, to, to something in there. But, you know, for the sake of our audience, when our audience hears edge they think is Robo. There's nothing Catch with the telcos, there's industrial edge, there's retail, there are all these different kind of, you know, phone calls sub segments, right? When you sit in your office at Stratus, or your home office now because of COVID. You know, and you think about the Stratus solution, both product and services, what kinds of sub segment Are you really kind of focusing in on with with, with your product, or with your products and services?

Jason Andersen  2:27  
Well, I'd almost say that right now, we're almost a sub segment of a sub segment, if you will. And what I mean by that is, is that we do we do focus in on the verticals that industrial verticals so you know, manufacturing, energy and, and as well as know, manufacturing and energy, you know, the big ones and we tend to play in, I would say kind of what they call the, what they call the hybrid segments in the industrial vernacular. So we do a lot of food and beverage pharmaceutical supply chain and transport where you know, so versus say kind of something like automotive manufacturing, which is a little bit different, right? In the end, you kind of have your, what they call continuous which is, you know, stuffs with a flow, you know, your oil, or oil is a good example of water is a good example of continuous, discrete is what you know your auto manufacturing or or semiconductor or something like that. And then hybrid is a lot of stuff in between which kind of has automation and manufacturing elements of both, right. So, foods a really good example of that where you're making discrete units of things, but you're going at a very high rate of speed, right. So that's so when you try to tie that So to your point, what we what we found is that so that's the segment right and then the segment of a segment is you talked about like industrial edge and retail and different industries. There's a ton of stuff going on in the air With respect to data collection and analytics and prevented to me that's really kind of the thing a lot of people talk about. But when we sit down at our desks, it's Stratus. Like you said, Now, we sit there and we say, well, we make the best resiliency stuff. So where's the resiliency, that that kind of areas, is what you call industrial control systems. So everybody's got one, right, they take on a little different flavor. In fact, building security systems, you know, materials, handling systems, all of these things are kind of in this big broad umbrella of industrial control. And those things just can't go down. Right? They can't, they can't go down. And often they're serviced and operated by folks who aren't it people. So you have to make it you know, kind of easy to deploy easy to manage, and, you know, so it's, it's funny because the edge is so, so gigantic now, and it's getting so much hype, that, you know, it's as you just pointed out, the first question you'd ask anybody you edges. All right, what do you do specifically? Because nobody does it. All right, it's, the telco guys got their own version of it, which is kind of a, you know, the, well NFV didn't work. So let's call it edge now. Actually, that's, I shouldn't do that. But that's not fair. But it was really more about it. At the the NFV technologies that were being developed are a great fit and that it totally makes sense. I think edge. I think everybody just got too excited about replacing carrier off, you know, central offices and they should have really, really enough these great friends. So, but it's huge. So we have to, you know, we got to pick and we, the way we picked was simple. We had built a relationship kind of in our called our traditional business with a lot of automation vendors. And we said we sat down and we looked at what they were doing and we said, you know there's change coming, and we want to be there and we want to we want to be part of it.

Steve McDowell  5:56  
But there is a change coming now all of the edge technology you talked about before. We're starting, you know, I've always been managed in a silo by and large. And now we're seeing we're in the midst of and maybe still early days of a lot of those responsibilities are migrating over to the IT departments right and moving under the purview of the CIO. Even some of the telco stuff is we're pushing applications out to, you know, 5g huts. It's a whole different way. It's a whole different audience to talk to, which is what Matt and I struggle with sometimes when we're doing advisory stuff. But it's got to be a whole different way of thinking about the market for Stratus. because historically, you've been writing an IT provider fault tolerant is kind of the history of Stratus.

Matt Kimball  6:39  
But to get to that, though, that's a good point, Steve. But Jason, it sounds like y'all are still playing in that area or in those segments, sub segments where that demarcation between OT and it is still very well defined and it has not come in and kind of assumed control Have those those control systems? And where are you seeing that happen? I mean,

Steve McDowell  7:04  
talk about that a little bit. Right? What do you see? Yeah,

Jason Andersen  7:05  
it's, it's awesome question. So, you know, I think when if you sat down and looked at a call it our edge history, if you will, um, we what ended up happening was that we were getting, I guess, you know, this conversation. We're all friends here, right? So we kind of backed into it, right. And what I mean by that was, is that four years ago, we were, we were just kind of turning out, hey, here's, here's a technology. Let's make a fault tolerant clouds. Cool. Let's make it fault tolerant. And what happened was, is that it's, you know, we sat down and really looked at the business and said, Let's stop thinking about the technology and actually figure out who's using us and why. Right. And what came out was we said, Whoa, wait a second there. We're getting deployed a lot in like wastewater treatment facilities, or or like the specialty chemical plants. And it really got to the point of your question. It's a great question because we said, well wait a second, we're in the industrial space. But what was happening was is that there's a humongous difference, a humongous difference between and I don't know if it's just rambling, but I don't know if it's a square footage thing or a number of people thing or what the kind of line of demarcation is. But there's a tipping point where like, if you go into a car factory and you go in you're, you know, you're doing something like assembling the cars. You have a data center there already, right? You already have it. You have an IT department there already. But if you're a wastewater facility, like for like a city like Boston or Barcelona, I mean big cities. And you might have 1020 wastewater treatment plants in that city. There's no IT guy,

Matt Kimball  8:54  
plant,

Jason Andersen  8:55  
or the IT guy is so busy. He's just like, I don't know, right? So There's been kind of two things that have started to happen. I think, Steve to your point is that there's this humongous if you're big and you're like, if you're a name brand company, you are probably you have an IT department. And it's it's getting complicated. It's getting containerized orchestrate all this stuff. And what's happening is they're going, Okay, it needs to be involved. And really, what we have to do is kind of take the OT person and make them almost kind of transform them from an IT perspective into a software user. Right? So it's like, okay, I want you to be like an accountant with a spreadsheet. I'm going to give you an historian or an MBs or something. And it's just a piece of software and it's all invisible to you, which is the value of cloud and all that stuff, right? It's all it goodness. But man, if you're running a Creamery or a brewery, you're running Lonestar brewery down in Austin, Texas. So you're running, you know, harpoon up here in Boston. You know, you're a legit business, you're a big business, but you just don't have that staff and you kind of look to the OT guy. Go make it work, bro. And that's us, right? Because that and those people they don't go calling up. They don't call the IT guys for help or they don't call it vendors for help. They're calling the systems integrator and the systems integrator showing up going, Okay, here's the cool part. Here's how I add value to OTS life. I know about pipes, computers, valves, and sanitation or you know, all this stuff. And they can come in and build it for you and or what's happening increasingly, is they're these systems integrators are getting smarter. They're kind of making generic versions of their stuff and Skids. And now they can just bring the skids and kind of strapped together aligned like Lego pieces, which is even more awesome. But but that's the thing is that we don't we see what's happening with us specifically is the kind of regional national level is we're seeing it come in and say just adhere to these standards pleasing, we're cool. But if I went to Ford, it would be like we'd be working with it. Right? We'd be in the But it really does vary, we haven't really been able to kind of say, this is where it flips. But you know, at a gross level, we know where it flips.

Matt Kimball  11:10  
Hey, let me ask you this. You mentioned analytics and data collection a little bit earlier. And there's a lot of buzz in the industry about, you know, all these platforms that are going out that enable like, you know, the real time analytics and even AI driven kind of data collection when when, when you look at, you know, going after the sub segment that Stratus go after, right kind of the, you know, the manufacturing kind of space and not the discrete manufacturing space. And you think about analytics and how it's being used is that more to ensure you know, when you think about real time analytics is that more of a, we have to keep this plant up and running and you're using analytics to ensure kind of resiliency at the at the factory level or the

Jason Andersen  12:00  
Now Yeah, I don't think I don't think real time analytics has really taken much cold yet. I think what's happened is that you have kind of so a lot of batching analytics going on. And Steve made the point earlier, but I t's involvement, what's really brought on eyeties involvement is connectivity, right, the breaking down to the silo of the, you know, the individual plant now, where you start to regionalize, your IT resources and so forth. That's really the driver is conductivity. And this, but it's still not universal. And it's still not necessarily enough. So what you're doing is still a ton of analytics, kind of where you're batching you're pushing it up into a cloud or pushing it up to a data center. And then they're just kind of, you know, they're analyzing it doing, you know, classic Big Data stuff, but it's not real time yet. And to be honest, for us, that's not people aren't going to necessarily want to buy a resilient system for that, because if they lose a little bit of data, it's not Not a big deal, because they're just collecting so much with it.

You know?

So yeah, I'd say that the analytics thing is happening, but they haven't made the evolution in real time, what they're doing is they're trying to prevent it. And maintenance is a great use case for it. The other thing is a lot of just optimization stuff like machine specific optimizations, like, you know, if you run this kilm, you're doing some sort of ceramics type of thing, you run this killing, at two degrees lower, you save $100,000 a year with the same amount of quality, that type of stuff. You know, when you get to real time, that's kind of the pathway to when, you know, you go from what we call, we say you move from insightful to kind of intelligent, real time will allow you to actually make decisions in real time and alter the process in real time. You know, Oh, geez, I think I just had too much of this in the batch. I'm going to now add this, right. So yeah, so I mean, that's a little nice. It's still okay. At least for us. I mean, you know, I'm sure People are working on it just we tend to be a little bit more in the weeds.

Steve McDowell  14:03  
How do you think about... you do the resilient systems that are edge targeted.. How do you think about software and where to software play there? There's not a one way of doing or even a common way of really doing software at the edge the way there might be for a database system and a data center, right? How do you think about software when you think about edge?

Jason Andersen  14:25  
Well, honestly, it's all we think about. I mean, and let me explain why.

if you when you go talk to an IoT guy about automation, they're going to pull out this thing called the Purdue model, right. And the Purdue model is awesome, in that, I think it was ratified. The year I graduated from college, which was a long time more than a quarter century ago. So it's got some longevity to it. But the Purdue model is very, you know, to put it in it terms. It's an remarkably monolithic architecture. And it's got like seven layers, you know, so it's just really, really, you know, you know, seven layers kind of like the OSI model type of thing. And it when you hear terms like, you know, industry 4.0, right, you know, and it's presented in this very kind of, kind of big story light, it really ends up being that they're trying to take this really kind of older, monolithic, very structured model, right? And translated into something that's a lot flatter. You know, you go from like, say, seven layers to three. And everything's connected by standards based interfaces and API's versus this whole proprietary everything. It's very much kind of like the transition from you know, I hate to say it, but from mainframe kind of style computing, to distributed computing, and ultimately that is it. That is all Driven by software, every single aspect of that is driven by software. So then you can begin to look at something that is an element that basically might be controlling robot. Right now, if you have a robot that's sitting in a factory, and it's welding together a car, right, that has maybe, that has multiple computers and multiple controllers on it, you know, dozen or more, right, per per robot, right, and are reliant and, you know, automotive factory could have 1000 robots, right? So you're talking 12,000, computing devices, just on robots, right? And, and they're all like, proprietary, right? And they're all expensive. So if you could now take the end, by the way, the logic the difference between the controllers isn't that much. It's there's differences. Now, what's going to happen is just like cloud, right, some controllers you can do in software right now. Boom, you're done. Right? Just do it. Put it in a container and you're off to the races. Some controllers might like the robot ones in particular, well, there's a lot of safety controls on those robots. And there's a lot of things built into those controllers to ensure that they're sick. They're safe, right? I mean, you know, it's the same and, but ultimately, there's a lot of work going on at the silicon level, where people are trying to figure out how can we make more standards based things to replace all these individual proprietary devices, and effectively, not only, you know, kind of consolidate all these things into a standardized platform. And I'm really talking control now not data but but it's data is kind of the easier use case i'm talking about the hard one now. And, and you also D laminated so now all of a sudden, people now have choice, right? So now they don't have to necessarily buy everything from Siemens, right? Or if they go buy a new factory, or they want to partner with somebody who isn't Siemens, they can actually share data amongst each other and share information with each other. Because now everything's standards based and kind of driven. And I gotta be honest with you. So that's the big shift. So when people talk about software, it's fundamental the whole thing, right? You know, I mean, we make systems and we build, and really, you know, really everybody talks about we build systems, but the truth is, a lot of our secret sauce is in the operating system. So we either make or, or partner and, and so we do a certain amount of it in the operating system, but it's, it's going to be contained, there's going to be containers around it, and it has to become, in a lot ways. It has to be influenced by by cloud native thoughts, but because of the way it'll be physically deployed, it'll be a little different. So it's, it's don't so it's you can't just take a cloud native app and jam it into the edgy there, but, but really, we want to kind of leapfrog from this monolithic stack stuff towards something that's like kind of more modern. And that's that's a big part of this for sure.

Matt Kimball  19:00  
Yeah. So stepping back for a second and going off on a different topic, you mentioned this earlier about, you know, one of the customers stress customers that you have out there were industrial customers in general, you don't typically go to they typically go to an integrator or a partner. Do you find that that's kind of the normal delivery method for, you know, Stratus led projects, if you've got, you know, these, these systems integrators of ours that are on site and have a specialty and, you know, yeah, that article and kind of build solutions around it or

Jason Andersen  19:40  
in America? Yeah. United States. Yeah. It's

the it's a little different in other parts of the world.

like Japan. You know, there's a lot of gigantic conglomerate companies there and they have their own in house stuff that make they make their own Technology for their, like Mitsubishi or Hitachi or companies like that. And we we partner with them a little bit, but it's a very different experience in that country versus the US and Europe's kind of in between. and Asia, parts of Asia are kind of in between to Europe tends to buy a lot more from the vendor themselves. So they'll go direct to a Rockwell or Siemens or ABB. Here, it's much more driven by an ecosystem. So that is different. The other differences, the emerging difference, which I do think the machine builder thing is going to be massive over the years because so many, so many automation efforts now are bespoke. And with the kind of emergence of different different types of standards not only on the machine side, but also on the compute side, you're going to be able to take and like I said, drop skids in and literally lashed these things together as if they're on a bus. or something and make make a process work. And that and like I said, some of our partners who are sighs now are just building, they're getting into that business because they realized that that's kind of the future. And to us that's, that's going to be kind of you really, you know, in the in the technology world for so long we've taken it for granted that it's like build by partner, but over there, it's like build, you may partner to build but everything gets built right now definitely seeing this kind of movement that that's this flexible manufacturing stuff. That's really you know, and there's a pharmaceutical industry is really taking this on with they have this thing called the bio forum that we're part of. And the pharmaceutical manufacturers are basically created a consortium to work with, you know, vendors like us to say, Okay, how can we build, how can we make this much more flexible so we can get drugs to market in a better way we can do better clinical trials. We could scale up like pandemics a perfect example of this is that, you know, getting an answer as to what the virus will be is only part of the answer right, then we have to figure out how to make about a half a billion of these darn vaccines, right? So if you had this flexible factory idea that you're doing, it's you could scale it you could get from approval to scaling so much faster than you do with the current way. And really, again, standards based computing and standards based interfaces between the things are how that's going to happen. It just is happening with like, real live analog stuff and pipes and stuff versus computers. Right. So super cool. Now here's the funny part. You know, who's figured that that the flexible manufacturing thing out and they got a really good and wired, China? China, they've really worked out pharmaceutical manufacturing, they got it worked out. So they understand this. And so there's there's elements of this that there's certain industries that are looking to these these businesses who figured out scaling and they're building products for company He's here in the United States and in Europe to mimic what can happen in these high scale operations. You see semiconductor and pharmaceuticals in Asia.

Steve McDowell  23:07  
So you mentioned you mentioned a lot of verticals, are there some that seem to have more traction and others or some that are maybe going from closer to zero to fully embrace in the model?

Jason Andersen  23:22  
I think everybody's thinking about it. It's a question about how hard it is to get there. Right. Like refining is super hard. Right? oil refining, especially chemical super hard. Retail, not so hard. Right? Um, so yeah, I'd say everybody's thinking about it. It's it's a maturity thing. I yeah. Yeah. Okay,

Steve McDowell  23:45  
man, I cut you off. I'm sorry.

Matt Kimball  23:46  
No, that's okay. That's okay. It was a good question. awesome

Jason Andersen  23:48  
question. By the way, it's a good one because I really, I really firmly believe that I think everybody's thinking about how to make it better now with the pandemic for sure. But it's really a function of complexity.

Matt Kimball  24:01  
So, going back to the server Pentagon around on this, but going back to the software and some of the it conversation from earlier, you know, I know that we know that, you know, startups just released, had a product announced yesterday and I know a lot of it has to do with kind of provisioning deployment management. You know, and I know you mentioned this being your secret sauce, and he can you speak a little bit to kind of how Stratos manages that, you know, think about that, that edge device you put out there and managing it through its lifecycle from deployment provisioning, to ensuring you know, consistent uptime, etc, etc.

Jason Andersen  24:42  
Yeah, I think

you know, the real inspiration from it came from, we had a partner who approached us in the early days designing the same week, we had a well but all we say is, we had a product we have a problem That we sell a lot of in the industrial space, which is like a server that's just redundant. It's a it's a mirrored server. It's called ft server, we've had this product in market for 20 years. When I talk about wastewater and some of these facilities, it's deployed a lot. They're got gas, gas, compression stations, things like that. And we started, we were realizing, we realized that there was this kind of change happening. And the change was is that the OT person loves the programmable logic controller, the PLC, right, that's kind of their domain of expertise. And there's a lot of them out there and they're like controllers and you can like lash them together. And and pretty much they're programmable by like these arcane script languages that they only know right and stuff like that. And then there was these and but once they got to us, and what was happening was there was this kind of thing that was funny that was going on with all these things. producing a ton of data. So I'm going to slap like a gateway into that network of PLCs. And I'm just going to pump the data somewhere. And, and then we'll figure it out later. And literally, it was like, let's get the data and then we'll figure it out later. And what we what people started to realize was that just kind of pumping the data around wasn't really adding value. So then they started deploying more powerful computing servers at these sites, which is where when we started kind of really seeing ft server take off. But what was happening was people were coming to me going, you know, you know, we like your product, and we like that. It doesn't fail for years. But here's the problem. I want to now send somebody out there who isn't an IT guy. Or I'm going to test somebody we're doing this job who doesn't know what doesn't? You know what they know. They know how to work a PLC. Yeah. And we said, huh, okay. And we started to realize that we had had we had some we had some technology In house that we were we were using. And we said, you know, what if we was, we had some software, basically an operating system that had this pretty easy to use interface. And we said, What if we made this like, idiot proof? Right? Like, let's make this like setting up a router at home. So we basically took the idea of a fully virtualized Linux server and said, let's make this as easy to use. You know, we kept saying, like, you know, we kept throwing things around like, we want like a seven year old to be able to show up and provision it in 30 minutes. And we have a video that we have a seven year old who did it 30 minutes. So but the idea was, is that we wanted to build something that was from a deployment perspective was the experience is almost like, like I said, like a gaming console, you open a box, everything you need is in the box. You don't have to like call CW and go where's my wire? And then there was like a five page like plug the blue thing into the Blue Hole, right? We did all that stuff. And people were able to get this thing. up and running and maintain it really easily. And that was good. Um, and then what started happening was we said, well wait a second. Now that we're adding this value, and people are starting. So here's the funny part was, so we were really proud of ourselves because it's a dual system. The cool part is you plug the first one in, you get it up and running. The second one, you plug in, it syncs automatically. Awesome, right? But when we started to realize, okay, we solve the easy part. And since it was redundant, it didn't if something broke, the other system picked up automatically. It was it was gorgeous. And, and the problem was, was that

we weren't.

A lot of the places weren't really connected, or they were just on board with getting connected or whatever. And as soon as they started getting connected, we said, well, now there's a new problem. There's two new problems. The first problem is security. So we started to really focus in on how do we harden this device? How do we make it like so it doesn't break and how do we make sure access to secure and all this stuff? stuff. And then it kind of dawned on us that well now people want to know now that we have a connected device and now that it's secure, and now that it's easy to use. Well, now how do we make it to your point? How do we make it drivable from remote so now, because what's happening with ot by the ways with budget cuts and everything else, and people retiring because the OT demographics are very skewed towards retiree, you know, guys approaching retirement, especially here in the US and Europe, what was happening was is that they were regionalizing, the OT guys and gals. So now all of a sudden, they had to control more stuff. So he said, Well, now we got to give them a set of management tools to allow them to control this thing remotely. So that's what we're working on right now with the new release in the next release that's coming in the fall. Because we kind of went through this journey. And and by the way, your audience is it folks, so they're going You gotta be kidding me basically showing these people virtualization and like remote management, like we've been doing this for 20 years. Give me a break, so Yeah, but guess what, outside of the data center, this is like, this is like fire, right? Like, this is like fire to caveman type of stuff. Because like, we're like, Wait a second, you've got four PCs, we can just take workloads off those and put them on this box. And they're like one box, Oh, my God. But that's literally the level of compute sophistication these folks have. So what we did was we just kind of, like I said, we kind of started at one thing, and we said, well, we just built on top as we went. Yeah. And now we have something that, again, as you just pointed out, we're really proud of it because people, it's just easy, right? You know, and it's like a PLC and they get it, right. It's not forcing them to learn a new thing, in a lot of ways. And that's, that's super powerful, right? That's super powerful to us. And I think it's super powerful to be ot person. And, and again, I think that's the funny part about this is that it's the OT person Just it's just another user. If you're an IT person, the OT person is just another user. They just come with a lot more requirements than, say, the marketing department. Right?

Matt Kimball  31:13  
Yeah, I like to explain ot to it is they're just like you except they wear a hard hat. They don't work pocket protectors, right? I mean, they're they're different kind of nerd. They're nerds, nonetheless, smartphones.

Jason Andersen  31:26  
Right? But But well, there's one more difference, Matt, is that the OT user recognizes that most of the time where they work, you can die. There's, there's a good distinction, or there's robots that can go awry, or there's, you know, things that can fall and melty crap, you know, so yeah, so that's, to me, that's the thing and like, that's the thing that kind of is funny because it just feels to me like it's just an IT in general. We're always kind of repeating the same pattern. We're just taking on a harder challenge. Yeah. Right. So You know, so it was like it like it was like the same way with cloud was like, Okay cloud is really great for websites. And cloud got really great for this. And cloud got really great place and lo and behold, everything's on Cloud. It's gonna be the same thing with edge edge is like really great right now data collection. Yeah. But in five years, it's going to be really great machine control. And then in 10 years, it's going to be really great. It autonomous machines. Yeah. Right. And then in 15 years, we're all just gonna watch the robots work and drink, pina coladas all day and it's gonna be awesome.

Or we'll be enslaved by the robots.

I don't know how the 15 years ends out yet, but I got pretty good feeling for the next three to five.

Matt Kimball  32:41  
I think Arnold Schwarzenegger is involved in the 15 year plan. Right,

Jason Andersen  32:44  
right. Yeah, why does he own donkeys? Right? There's got to be more stuff that

donkeys

Matt Kimball  32:54  
hate so I do. Do you think following on what you just said about Kind of like, you know, five, you know, this, this whole kind of concept of consolidation, these concepts that are common to it are like revolutionary to a lot of ot shops. Do you think going back to the earlier question, do you think this helps accelerate that kind of merge, if you will, between itno T or the folding in of, you know, some of these functions into it? Or do you think you know, those, those, this is my shop? I'm a plant operator, and I'm going to, I'm going to control everything in here, kind of.

Jason Andersen  33:34  
Yeah, I mean, no, I actually think it's going to be different. I think that what's going to my prediction is that I actually have this this thing, I believe it out. This is how I got kind of the idea sold that Stratos was that there was no there wasn't the definition of DevOps wasn't what it was before cloud. Right. So you're right. And what it came down to was, you had no and I was I was a j boss for a while. So I was there, right as we were moving from kind of the middleware stack to the idea of, you know, what is now at Red Hat is what is now openshift, right, that kind of transition from kind of the middleware stack deployed on site to this kind of cloudy middleware thing. And I worked a bit with the chefs and stuff. The The, the, the DevOps role came from the fact that there was a persona in the business that had a problem, and that was the developer. And the problem was that they just couldn't be agile enough. They had Scrum and Kanban and all these great new techniques. And it the IT operations, if you will, are holding them back. Right. So what happened was, is that, you know, what do they do? Well, they realized that the only way that they could fix this problem was to self empower. And that self empowerment was brought on by like the Amazon ECS and s two and stuff like this. Okay, so wait a second. I'll just administer it myself. Right. And of course, you know, that makes the people in, you know, GCR in the organization, right, your global risk and compliance guys, they're worried because it's like, Wait a second, now you're doing computing outside of my walls, I can control it, it starts throwing a fit. And all of a sudden, but there was this in that process, there was this recognition of Wait a second, if I can automate the tooling I give to the developer. And the developer takes care of their own app. Wait a second, this is goodness, right? And there's a new role. And that's what that was kind of the birth of DevOps. Right? Well now take that to ot. We so when we started out what we were what was happening and this was happening all the time was an OT person would see our solution or a Rockwell partner would show them the solution or something like that, or the VA or whoever. And the customer would go the OT guy, I want that I want one of those stratis things right that sounds great to me right? And we get put in the would get put in the proposal and our sales guys would get all excited, you know, normal stuff that happens in IT companies and and what would happen Is that then it would show up and go on. It'll look at you by the computer. Wait a second, what's it tell me about this. And then all of a sudden, I was like back to square one, we had to go talk to the IT guys all this other stuff. And the thing about it was is that the, the IT people are always showing up at the end of the process. And you know, and it was just this whole thing, right? And it wasn't in what I started to realize was that our most successful customers were the ones who basically self empowered and said, I'll take the risk on Stratos. And it started out we call it rogo. t that was originally important, right? Because we're like, okay, these guys are going rogue the Mavericks, right, they're gonna push this, these are the guys who are going to make digital transformation happen, right? They're gonna, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna learn it and make it happen. And that was we really identified with that user and that was we said, we're going to build for this guy, right? This person, right? Robo T. And I'm the only one we started to realize was, wait a second. It's not it's not rogue. Won't be rode for long, what will happen is, is that eventually it is going to go, you know what, I just want to give you the tools you need to be successful. Yeah. And then that was when we kind of kind of, you know, in the early days of Stratos when we were talking about industry, we talked about the kind of use called the rise of hybrid ot. And that's what it really so I really, that's what I really think is gonna happen. And I, you know, I've been talking about this for four years, and I'm more committed now than ever is that, what's gonna happen is, there's a more my guys love when I say this, there's a more digitally woke person entering the IoT space or leaving University, they live on Netflix, they have devices, they get it, they're now entering that workplace and they're expecting these tools, it is going to be more than happy to provide them and now you've got guys who are going to be able to, you know, have a farm of 3d printers to make auto parts or something, and it's going to be beautiful. And so I really do think that the OT role is going going to go through a significant Renaissance and if you look at what There's companies out there that we're meeting right now that are doing it right now, big companies, you know their name. In building materials. We talked to some guys, I don't know if I can say their name, but the point is, is that yeah, I mean, these guys, and it's happening. Yeah, they're, they're literally running the factory like remotely, and they know what they're doing. Right. So

Steve McDowell  38:19  
counselling service.

Jason Andersen  38:22  
Yeah, it's going to happen. And it's, you know, and I really think that, you know, I think some of the people who got too excited about IoT in the beginning, you know, like, everybody likes to, you know, and that's the worst part of this whole thing. The downside is I see nothing but awesomeness, but the downside is that I keep looking at it and I go, there's so risk averse because like I said, you know, there's a lot of money at stake lives are at stake in some of these situations. And they always want to throw out like, we'll never go cloud because predicts or something like they'll say, well predicts failed. So obviously the whole it's like no, you know, predicts I don't know why predicts didn't go well, but the point is, is The market wasn't ready for it. But the idea was good. I mean, it was like, Hey, we're going to give you a toolset, you're gonna be able to use it, leverage it. And it just hasn't really caught fire yet. But I think over time is certainty people matriculate out of the OT role and new people matriculate in or there's a geopolitical shift and where manufacturing is going to happen, which, by the way, is a very real situation right now in the world. You can see a whole bunch of new Greenfield stuff and that's going to drive new innovation. That's exciting.

Matt Kimball  39:30  
We have it folks have listened to us as well as Steve's parents that listen to us every week. And you know, everybody is hearing edge edge, right? Or there and this this is coming at you without any preparation. So I apologize, but you know, there are there any like lessons learned or like, Hey, if you're considering edge or considering edge projects, you know, here are five things to think about. Here are three things to think about. kind of off the top of your head that you find valuable?

Jason Andersen  40:05  
Well, I think the first one is that

the first quick tip and this is gonna sound weird, but is the if you have a customer relationship management system, if you have Salesforce or whatever, if you're like an it dude, and somebody said, or lady or woman or whatever keep saying dude, but you know, that's kind of where my brain is today, I guess. But if you if you're an IT, somebody comes to you and says, I need you to deploy an edge project. My quick tip is go talk to whoever's doing Salesforce in your organization. Yeah, here's why. Salesforce is the richest analytics application in your organization, bar none? Probably probably. So go learn from them how they figured out how to get data lined up, right? Because there's this data. This stuff is, like you're talking about a whole bunch of old legacy machines or new machines. They're all drawn data all over the place. How do you make sense sensitive, right? So, so that so step one goes, try to find out some best practices for kind of leveraging analytics in your organization, whatever that might be right? Then the next step is you best figure out the whole data science thing that might mean hiring outsourcing because you're gonna get more data than you know what to do with and you don't know what to, to really optimize. Because to me, this is all about optimization. And, and at this stage, if you're just starting out in edge, it's really about optimization. And what can you learn to make your business perform better? And that's why the analytics thing is so big right now versus say control. And then I'd say so those would be the first couple things is really understand the data and find some real good help and understanding how you can make sense of it. That's the first part. I'd say the second part of it really comes down to that. Think through roles, right? I haven't gotten the technology yet but really think through the role of ot in it. Take some time to understand what these folks do. Because I've been nothing but blown away by how ot people compared to other people in a business. They are the true like, you know, two inches deep and three miles wide type of people, they have to know a little bit of everything. And they really can help you understand the gotchas. Right. You know, and they can almost teach you something. So that's the third thing and then figure out how you can help right now, you know, going with kind of a, you know, that whole servant leadership type of attitude, like, Listen, I'm here to help tell me your problems. And then I think when it gets to technology, I really do think this is that you could, you can do a lot with a little IoT technology at the edge. Right, you can do a lot and so once you hear those problems, I do think you've got a probably a pile of tools that you can leverage there and figure out how to do so that would be my other friendly advice is that like, you know, if you're if you're amazing VMware shot VMware doesn't talk about the edge a whole lot. But guess what, there's a lot of value VMware cloud at the edge. Yeah, right. So you know, or it's going to be, figure out how to, you know how to kind of align the right standard, set the right standards in place, put the right governance in place to make sure that if you want it to be self empowered to make their own decisions, that's good, but still have a governance model that says, You must kind of adhere to these rules, you still may be able to buy your own technology. But if you do, then therefore, you have to adhere to these rules and governance. So governance would be Thing number four. And then Thing number five, we're finally get to some real technology stuff I would say that really dig into, you've kind of got the data stuff solved. Now think about process innovation. And once you start to get the process innovation and automation, now you're talking about control. And at that point, that's when things get To us, we look at that and go, that's where the big money is, is when you start to change, automation and control, you're gonna have the biggest ROI. But it's the hardest thing to get to. Yeah. hardest thing to do. So kind of work your way up to it.

Matt Kimball  44:12  
Yeah. And by that point, you've already made a very allied Oh, you know that Oh, tea shop and those folks with it, so it

Jason Andersen  44:21  
makes that process easier. Anyway. And you now have you now have a rich base, you should have a rich base of analytics to build a business justification for the art project.

Matt Kimball  44:32  
Yeah, yeah. So that ties in to now I need to go find some cool platforms to throw out there. And, you know, Stratus makes some pretty cool platforms or IDs, etc, can you you're not just a hardware company, not just a software company, you do a lot. You want to talk a little bit about kind of? Sure.

Jason Andersen  44:51  
So when we well, I'll just say that we have, we have four different product lines. Three of them are sold in the edge, right, but just to make it real quick Because we actually have a lot of our credit card processing customers have this system called boss that's been in the market for a very long time. So so that really kind of is our foundational technology. And we, again really sold very heavily until telecommunications and, and credit card space. So you know, we really appreciate those customers, right? But we, when you're talking about site wide computing, so if you're if you're kind of putting a computer in to manage a whole site, you're probably looking for a solution that looks more like a traditional IP solution. And so we have a product called ft server, their FTP server, like I said, been in the market for a really long time. We got thousands of these around the world. And it's, it can run Windows, Linux or VMware so runs REL Linux. Shout out to Red Hat, one of my favorite companies. So basically, the idea is let's make a fault tolerant server that can plug directly into It backbone. So it's really good for those types of, let's call it more advanced scenarios, right? But it's super resilient and has a lot of other capabilities that kind of your normal server might not incident, you know, remote monitoring, management, things like that. Yeah, DTC is actually more for the machine or the line level of deployment. So, if you if you're saying, well, I want to deploy a, let's say, a controller analytics solution for the, for this, you know, you know, Fauci may have like, you know, 20 different lines, doing different products or doing different tools or whatever, you can put one at each line and put one in each machine. The idea is it's it's a, it's a smaller device, a little bit less powerful, but it's really a complete end to end edge stack. So unlike ft server where we say, Well, hey, plug it into your own it backbone, this is really built for the IoT person, which means it's, we put our own Linux layer on it, we put our own available management tools on it. The good news is that we provide, you know, the API's and the connectivity to it so you can manage it remotely, or monitor remotely or things like that. So, basically, we've made that a little bit more kind of built to fit. But it's really powerful tool set, because, again, super easy to deploy doesn't need it intervention, you know, meets most itune standards, it's got built in security. So it's, it's really, you know, we basically said, Let's go build this the way we want it done the way we think our ot customer wants it. So it's a little bit of a different product, but, you know, again, environmentally rated, it can be deployed outside can be deployed, we just got a certification for explosiveness with with with it with the right type of enclosures and stuff like that. So, you know, it's built for rugged, outdoor, you know, out of out of the data center use,

Matt Kimball  47:51  
you know, and, and you build all the, as you mentioned, all the software tools to manage and all the hooks to to integrate into your account. have, you know knock of choice? You all right? Or your management platform? Exactly.

Jason Andersen  48:05  
The other thing we do is we we offer, in addition to kind of your normal break fix service that a lot of people have, we actually monitor all of our systems too. And so you can buy a monitoring package where we're kind of like the knock, right. So it but I want to be really precise about this because I don't want people to think we're kind of like trying to do what a man or service provider does, it's not really that what it is that we're able to monitor, we monitor the system. On FTP server, we monitor the hardware up to the virtual machine, and on etc, we monitor the hardware up to the virtual machine and some of the elements inside of virtual machine weird or or it has a failover event or you know, or you start to get to capacity. It'll let us know and or you know, so we can either send the flag to you or to us and if it sends it to us, we can sit down and go Okay, we're gonna go tell the customer to do these things to the system, or we're going to just send you a replacement or something like that. So we do that. And in the, I would say it's in the credit card processing space, not in the edge space bank credit card processing will actually manage the environment for you, too. So we do, we have a pretty rich kind of services, import capability that a lot of people think of us as computer manufacturer, but the truth is, is that we do have a very significant capability to help you kind of run or really augment your kind of runtime team, right? augment the IT team. You know, so we didn't do that for a long time. We're really good at it.

Matt Kimball  49:38  
And lastly, so if you know one of our listeners is kind of listening and say, Man, I need to learn more. Is it just, you know, go to startups calm kind of thing, or is there a

Jason Andersen  49:47  
Oh, for sure. Yeah, yep. Yep. You can come to Stratus calm or, like I said, we are in the, in the United States, Europe, Asia. We're a global company. And now we have partnerships all over the place. So Literally, you know, in addition to new product, we launched our new partner portal this week. So you can look up and find out you know, who Who's your local local systems integrator channel provider, you can look all that stuff up online and you know, you'll get directed to them. So if you don't want to come to us direct, you can go through a partner you're familiar with locally, and we'll be more than happy to help you out.

Steve McDowell  50:19  
Excellent, Jason, man. Thanks for joining us. I learned a lot.

Jason Andersen  50:23  
Wow. Okay. I talk fast. Sorry.

Steve McDowell  50:26  
I made a lot of notes. You taught me what I need to go learn, right. This is still kind of a new area for me as a traditional IT guy. Yeah. Do you have anything you want to say?

Matt Kimball  50:38  
No, like you said, Thank you This is I really appreciate conversations like this because it really starts to peel back. Everyone here is edge and they think one thing, right or they don't, or they think many things but he never really kind of get to those targeted conversations where you get some substance to me and this this tip me kind of it just goes down one of those kind of segments of aging really kind of explores more deeply. So yeah, so this

Steve McDowell  51:07  
one will continue to revisit.

Jason Andersen  51:10  
Thanks. Yeah. Stay in touch. I love doing this stuff. So a lot of fun. I appreciate it guys.

Matt Kimball  51:16  
make you a regular contributor. So, alright.

Steve McDowell  51:19  
Hey Matt. I think that wraps up another podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai