>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas, my name is Dave Vellante and this is day three of The Cube's live wall to wall coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE Discover. This is The Cube, the leader and live tech coverage. We have a little reveal here, JR Fuller is here, he's the Global Business Development Manager IoT Edgeline at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Doug Smith, who is the CEO of Texmark. Gentleman, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright lay it on us Doug, what is Texmark all about? We're going to have, like I say, a little virtual reveal here-- >> Sure. And first of all, thanks for having me here-- >> Dave: You're very welcome. >> And, Texmark Chemical is a 50 year-old company, located in Galena Park, Texas, which is right on the Houston Ship Channel outside of the city of Houston. We are a manufacturer of specialty chemicals, one being DCPD, which stands for dicyclopentadiene. We have been making significant capital investments in the physical plant, over the last 20 years. And about two years ago, we realized we needed to move forward in a control system, a new control system, initiative at the plant, as well as a baseline mechanical integrity. Initiative. And so we're a small organization of 53 people and we looked to our contacts and got in touch with HPE and started a conversation. We don't have a normal client-customer relationship. We have a partnership of people, HPE people, Texmark people. >> Absolutely. >> So JR, pick it up from HPE's side. So, you guys have made a big push into this whole IoT business and you need partners like Doug's firm. >> Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of interesting the way we got started. You probably remember last year, we had the big pump. The pump demo, the Filzer pump demo, so that was a project of mine, and Dough had heard about that from a mutual friend and ... Gracious. Very gracious of him, he invited us to come out at Texmark and actually install that at his facility. And he said "I got this bug pond over there, you can put that in there." And then you have a production version of that, 'cause we had the proof of concept version in our lap, and I said "That is really nice and very sweet, but no. "Let's figure out what we can do that will really benefit you, 'cause that won't really benefit you." And that started a dialogue that's, been about a year that we've been talking about this and I think it was in August, I proposed to him and said, "What do you think about "doing a refinery of the future?" And his words to me were, "JR, I don't know what "it is, but I love it." And I said, "Well, let's figure out what it is "for Texmark and let's go from there." And that's kind of how we started the genesis of this entire journey, of what we're doing. >> So you kind of laid out the vision, which is fantastic-- >> JR: Right. >> Sort of your North Star. And then just for the audiences benefit, you know, everyone here discovered there was this amazing floor exhibit, and it was pumps and tubes and pipes. >> JR: We've seen learning and, yeah. >> And it was all kinds of data, that was flowing through there, and sort of I guess, a digital twin if you will. >> Exactly. >> Of the factory floor ... >> Doug: Well of a plant, yes. And that's a great segway into Texmark and how we have synergy between our two organizations is that Texmark, although a small chemical process facility, we have all the equipment that the huge companies have. We have boilers, we have pipes, we have distillation columns, and we need to move forward, with our people to instrument, to gather data, to data analytics on the edge to have a connected facility with wifi capabilities, so that's where the conversation started. >> So much of the data ... Maybe even most of data today, historically anyway, analog data, is that correct? >> It is a combination. >> Dave: Okay. >> What we are doing, once again, we are a small organization. We have one IT person. And that person is contract, so how we're approaching it is, Texmark stays in the chemical, we use the analogy of, swim lanes. We are swimming towards profitability in the chemical business. HPE is swimming in the lane with-- >> All the technology. >> Technology. And then we're working together on this voyage of discovery, out here, that we're figuring out along the way. >> And for sure, you're not IT, you're operations. >> Doug: Yes, sir. >> Right? And you guys are IT. >> Exactly. >> So talk more about the partnership. What is that all about? >> Doug: People. >> JR: It's totally about people and it's interacting with each other, it's showing up ever day, it's working towards things. It's, when you do run into a problem ... And Doug's got a great story of when we had a problem. When you do run into a problem, you have the mutual of how to solve this problem together. In a typical customer-vendor relationship, there's some kind of built-in tension that's there and you know, you're worried about, "Oh, the vendor's trying to do this to me" , or "Oh, the customer if trying to get something from me." And we don't have any of that. We actually have a very solid partnership and occasionally, if one of my team or one of his team gets off track on that, we bring them back to the fold and say, "No, no, no. We're plowing road here." We need them to cut trees, we need us to cut trees, we all need to be heading in the same direction. You can't stop and go, "How come this isn't paved?" Because it hasn't been done before. >> And it's that shared objective of the refinery of the future that you're working towards. So, can we describe in a little bit more detail, the refinery of the future. >> Doug: Sure. Let me just jump in on that, because in this voyage of discovery, with these conversations, we talked about, what do we need to achieve the goals that we want? And so, first there is the hardware component. What do we here to achieve these goals? We'll just take the example of the pump. The pump is the heart of any process facility. If you have a critical pump go down, it can put you out of operation. There's a cost associated with that, and so what we need to do ... There's a cost associated with putting wiring from our control center to an actual pump. If we can have a wireless network and a censor on a pump, we eliminate the cost of physical wiring. The wireless network was provided by one of our content partners, Aruba, and so that is installed. We are working-- >> Dave: You know those guys? >> JR: I do, I do. >> He's heard of them. So then, what do we do with that data when it comes in? So, we have two Edgeline servers in there, and we have one in our control room, and then we have one, and it's super. They have one here, on the floor here, at the Discovery, the Micro-data center, which is for our place, everybody's like ... (sings) (laughter) >> It's fantastic-- >> Dave: It's data in a box. >> Yes, sir.And what that does, we have the ... I'll just give you an example. So we have our old system, the old server over here, size of a refrigerator, and I have used this numerous times when explaining the project to people here at Discover is that, I have to explain what we're doing to my 81 year-old mother. And when I say we have a refrigerator over there that used to run the plant, and now we have this one little thing the size of a little tablet-- (JR laughs) >> She goes ... And it saves money. It increases efficiency, she gets that. So those are some of the phases of the project, and now I'll pass it over to JR 'cause we then identify how are we going to use this cool hardware to achieve objectives? >> Yeah. So when we look at the refinery future, we usually have a three phrase project, alright? You don't boil the ocean, you bring it down into ... So phase one for us was putting in the Aruba wifi network out in the entire facility. We've done that. And because it's a petro chemical plant, it needs to go into a special enclosure. So we have a partner with Extronics, out in the U.K., that creates this protective enclosure. >> Dave: Like militarize. >> Yeah. Well, it's actually even beyond that, because in type one, dib one environments, there is a potential for hazardous gas to be out in there, and so electronic equipment would be sparking and stuff like that, and gas that can explode. Not a good combination. So, these div one boxes, make it so that, if there is an interaction with a spark, and some flammable gas, and there's an explosion, it's contained in that box, and not contaminates to the whole factory, which would be-- >> Plant. (laughs) >> Plant, the whole plant. Where it would actually create problems for everybody else, so that first phase was putting those div one compliant wifi AP's out there from Aruba. We also put in our beacons, with our location-based services, the meridian system out there, so they can do wave-finders and get to the right pump to fix it. And also, they're clear pass, so putting clear pass out there so it's a secured network, right? We don't want anybody to be able to go in there and mess with anything. >> So basic productivity, the security to allow that, all that basic infrastructure. >> So that was to-- >> To connect the ... >> Exactly. That was phase one. Phase two was, they had rack of other people's compute in there and we replaced all of that, like Doug said, with two of our Edgeline EL 4000 Converge systems. >> Dave: Okay. >> One of those, we actually mounted on the control room floor, so right out on the Edge, not in a data center environment, not in a temperature-controlled place, per say, and what we consider our data center. And then that other one, we actually did get an HPE Micro-data center, and we put the other one in there. It's secured, it's badge-access only. Only a couple people in Texmark have badge access to actually be able to get that. And when we look at the compute needs growing, that's where they're going to probably grow into, is that data. >> So phase two was bring the the compute. >> So I call those two, phase one and phase two, my infrastructure phase, 'cause now I've got what I need to do. Now phase three is really interesting because that's where we're going to start doing IoT stuff, right? So there are five projects that we're doing on IoT. So the first one is predictive analytics. This is both at the discreet and the process level. So, when we talk about that pump that we saw last year, that's a discreet machine. We're doing predicted analytics on that machine. But that machine feeds a process, so how can we predict what's happening on this machine, what's the impact of that to this process? So that's the first one. >> Doug: Can I hop in? >> Yeah, go for it. >> So, JR is using the example of the pump, and I mentioned the pump earlier, being the heart of the organization. So, it's been interesting being at Discover for the first time for me and the way that I have been talking with people, you have people that are extremely interested in the human component, and how is it affecting people? Also there is, the critical bottom line. How is it going to make me money and save me money? >> Dave: Right. >> So this pump is an excellent example that addresses both of those. So, if have a pump fail, there is a significant cost if it shuts us down for the day. We're a seven acre facility, and let's just throw a number out for easy math. Let's just say it costs us $100,000 a day, if that pump goes down. If you have a facility that's 100,000 times larger, just let me pull out my calculator and your math can tell this solves a problem. From a human perspective, it's just like your heart stopping, there's a risk associated with that pump going down within the facility. >> Okay, so we're very tight on time. >> Sorry. >> That's okay. So, you got the five phases for five IoT projects, within phase three, predictive analytics. Let's run through them and ... >> The second one is video is a sensor, so this is-- >> Cool. >> Using video to detect things that are going on and using the Edge analytics to be able to power that. The third one is safety and security. So these are things like, man down. Directive response, those types of things. The fourth one is, connected worker. And I define this as, location-based context-aware content. So, just very quickly, if you have three different people at the pump. One is a operations person, one's a maintenance person, one's a finance person, and they're all using that augmented reality that we saw, they're going to see three different dashboards. Locations base, context-aware content. And then the fifth one is, we're going to tie into the two sister projects that are going on out there with the DCS upgrade and the aneo-spalatio mechanical integrity program, and do a full life cycle as that management. So these are big projects. >> Dave: So now you've got the fully instrumented refinery is where you're at. Now you got all this data flowing. What happens to the data? Where does it get analyzed, where does it end up? Where do you go from there? >> Sure, so of course, having the Edgeline servers there, we're doing data analytics on the Edge so we can have real time, right there information to help our workers work safely and efficiently. And then we have this wealth of historical data that we can start analyzing, either on-premise or off-premise, to help us-- >> JR: Help probe the models. >> Better. And then also, this is one really cool aspect from a Texmark perspective is, we do a significant amount of total processing. That means, somebody comes to us and says, "Here, Dave. Make this for us." And we will run it through our equipment and give them an end product. If we can improve the way we cook, whatever our process, whatever it is that they want, there is a significant value added to that. >> Dave: And that historical data, in the lake if you will, lives on Prim, it lives in the Cloud, or you don't know yet. >> Everything is on Prim. The Cloud applications that we'll probably use are around safety and security when talking about weather, humidity, and those types of things. >> Dave: So bring in some outside data or models that you apply. >> Right. Yes. Texmark is a single facility, so leveraging the Cloud to communicate to other locations and things like that isn't really a necessary driver. Although it would be, completely would be, for some of the target customers that we want to sell this to initially. >> But the vast majority of the data is staying at-- >> JR: On Prim, yeah. >> Correct? So, it confirms the assumptions that we've been making, that 90% of the data is this world is going to be analyzed at the Edge and maybe trickle some stuff back, some nuggets back to the Cloud. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, we got to go. That's a fascinating story. Thank you so much. >> Thanks, you could tell I like the camera a lot in this. Thank you, Dave, I really appreciate it. >> Dave: My pleasure, thank you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest as The Cuber live from HPE Discover in Las Vegas, 2017. We'll be right back. (electronic music)