>>from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo ALTO, California It is a cute conversation. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube studios for another cube conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the technology industry. I'm your host, Peter Boris. Digital businesses affecting every enterprise of every size, small and large, and the types of solutions that required the types of outcomes that are being pursued are extremely complex and require an enormous amount of work from some of the best and brightest people on the business side as well as the technology side. And that means not just from a large company. It means from an entire ecosystem of potential sources of genius and insight and good hard work. So the consequence for every enterprises, how do they cobble together that collection of experts and capabilities that are gonna help them transform their business more successfully, Maur completely and more certainly than they would otherwise? And that's we're gonna talk about today. Today we're here with Kelly Ireland, who's the founder and C E o. C. B Technologies. Kelly. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you, Peter. Happy to be here, >>so let's start by finding a little bit about CV Technologies to also about what you do. >>Um, I have a IittIe background, so I have been in it for 40 years. In 2001 I decided I had a better idea of how to both support clients as well as my employees. So I opened CB Technologies were value added reseller, um, and then say about five years ago, I decided to do some transforming of the company itself. I saw what was going on in the industry, and I thought this was the time for us to get going. Turned out we were a little early, but we wanted to transform from what you would call it the value added reseller two systems integrator. Because that was the only words what they had for. You know what that end result would be? Now I've heard it's the, um, domain expert integrator, which we like a lot better. And what we've done is gone from this value add, which we've all seen over the last couple of decades, into actually engineering solutions, and mostly with consortiums, which will talk about of the O. T. I t. Convergence and what's going to be needed for that to make our customers successful. >>Well, you just described. In many respects, the vision that businesses have had and how it's changed over years were first. The asset was the hardware. Hence the var. Today, the asset really is the date of the application and how you're going to apply that to change the way your business operates the customer experiences, you provide the profitability that you're able to return back to shareholders. So let's dig into this because that notion of data that notion of digital transformation is especially important in a number of different names, perhaps no more important than in the whole industrial and end of things domain. That intersection of I t know Tia's, you said, Tell us a little bit about what you're experiencing with your customers as they try to think about new ways of applying technology technology rich data to their business challenges. >>We'll use the perfect word you said dig, because this is all about layers. It's all about it was technology and software. Now it's about technology, software and integration. In fact, the conversations were having with our clients. Right now we don't even talk about a no Yim's name. Where before you would. But we haven't our head. What? We know what would be best. What we look at now is the first thing you do is go in and sit down with the client. And not only with the client, the you know, the executives or the C I or the C T. O's et cetera, but the employees themselves. Because what we've seen with I I I o t o t i t Convergence, it's You have to take into account what the worker needs and the people that are addressing it that way. Um, this project that we started with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they started up what we call the refinery of the future. It could be acts of the future. It doesn't really matter. But it was getting at least up to five use cases with a consortium of partner companies that could go address five different things within the refinery. And the reason that I think it's been so successful is that the owner, the CEO Doug Smith and the VP of ops Linda Salinas, immediately wrap their arms around bringing employees. They're a small company there, maybe 50. They brought half of them to HPD Lab to show them what a smart pump laws for their chemical plant text. More chemical in Galina Park in Texas. Starting from that, it was like they put him on a party bus, took them down, put them in the lab, told them, showed them what a smart pump was and all of a sudden the lights turned on for the workers. These are people that have been, you know, manual valves and turning knobs and, you know, looking at computer screens they'd never seen what a smart, censored pump waas all of it sudden on the drive back to the company, ideas started turning. And then HP took it from there, brought in partners, sat everybody in the room, and we started feathering out. Okay, what's needed. But let's start with what the client needs. What do those different business users within the chemical plant need, and then build use cases from that? So we ended up building five use cases. >>Well, so what? Get another five years cases in a second? But you just described something very interesting, and I think it's something that partners have historically been able to do somewhat uniquely on that is that the customer journey is not taken by just an individual within the business. What really happens is someone has an idea. They find someone, often a partner, that can help them develop that idea. And then they go off and they recruit others within their business and a local partner that has good domain expertise at the time. And energy and customer commitment could be an absolutely essential feature of building the consensus within the organization to really accelerate that customer journey. If I got that right? >>Absolutely, absolutely. And what we saw with Refinery of the Future was getting those partnerships HP East started. It created the project kind of through information out to many of their ecosystem partners trying to gain interest because the thing was is this was kind of our bet was a very educated bet, but it's our bet to say, Yeah, we think this makes sense. So, you know, like I said, I think there's about 14 partners that all joined in both on the I t om side the ot oh am side and then both Deloitte and CB Technologies for the S. I and like expert domain expert integration where you really get into How do you tie OT and I t together? >>All right, so we've got this situation where this is not As you said, It's not just in the refining process, manufacturing businesses. It's in a lot of business. But in this particular one, you guys have actually fashioned what you call the refinery of of the future has got five clear use cases. Just give us an example of what those look like and how you've been RCB technology has been participated in the process of putting those together. >>Um, the 1st 1 was pretty wrapped around Predictive Analytics, and that was led by Deloitte and has a whole host of OT and I t integration on it >>again, not limited to process manufacturing at all >>at all, but and a good group, you know, you have national instruments, Intel flow. Serve. Oh, it's ice off Snyder Electric, PTC riel, where they're such a host >>of the >>consortium and I I think what was most important to start this whole thing was H P E. Came in and said, Here's an MOU. Here's a contract. You all will be contract ID to the overall resorts results. Not just your use case. Not just one or two use cases you're in, but all five because they all can integrate in some sense so >>that all can help. Each of you can help the others think. Problems. Truce. That's the 1st 1 about the 2nd 1 >>The 2nd 1 is video is a sensor that was Intel CB Technologies. I think we have as you're in there as well, doing some of the analytics, some P T. C. And what that was all about was taking video. And, you know, taking a use case from Linda and saying, Where where do you need some sort of video analytics Taking that processing it and what we ended up doing with that one was being able to identify, you know, animals or aggressive animals within the train yard. A downed worker transients that shouldn't be there because we can't decipher between you know, someone that's in text marks p p ease versus somebody that's in street clothes. So taking all that analyzing the information, the pictures, training it to understand when it needs to throw and alert >>lot of data required for that. And that's one of the major major drivers of some of the new storage technologies out there. New fabrics that are out there. How did that play? A role? >>As you can imagine, H p E is the under underlying infrastructure across the entire refinery. The future from compute with the, uh, EJ data center into the Reuben network into nimble storage for storing on site. Um, what we're finding, no matter who we talked to in the industry, it is. Most of them still want to keep it on Prem. In some sense, security. They're still all extremely cautious. So they want to keep it on Prem. So having the nimble storage right in the date, having the edge data center having everything in the middle of this chemical plant was absolutely a necessity. And having all of that set up having my team, which was the C B Tech team that actually did all the integration of setting up the wireless network, because guess what? When you're in a different kind of environment, not inside a building, you're out where there's metal pumps. There's restrictions because ah, flash could cause an explosion so intrinsically safe we had to set up all that and determined how? How could we get the best coverage? Especially? We want that video signal to move quite fast over the WiFi. How do we get all that set up? So it takes the most advantage of, you know, the facility and the capabilities of the Aruban network. >>So that's 12345 quickly were >>three worker safety, which hasn't started yet. We're still waiting for one of the manufacturers to get the certification they need. Um, four we have is connected worker, which is on fire, having a work >>of connected worker on fire and worker >>safety. >>Yeah, they don't sound, but just think of all the data and having the worker have it right at his fingertips. And, oh, by the way, hands free. So they're being ableto to take in all this data and transmit data, whether it's by voice or on screen back >>from a worker central perspective, from one that sustains the context of where the worker is, what stress there under what else? They've got to do it said. >>And and what are they trying to complete and how quickly? And that's where right now we have r A y that's in the 90% which is off the chart. But it's and and what's great about being at Text Mark is we actually can prove this. I can have somebody walk with me, a client that wants to look at it. They can go walk the process with me, and they will immediately see that we reduce the time by 90%. >>So I've given your four. What's the 5th 1? >>Acid intelligence, which is all about three D Point Cloud three D visualization. Actually being able to pull up a smart pump. You know it really? Any pump, you scan the facility you converted into three D and then in the program that we're using, you can actually pull up a pump. You can rotate it 360 degrees. It's got a database behind it that has every single bit of asset information connected videos, cad cams, P and I. D s. For the oil and gas industry. Everything's in their e mails could be attached to it, and then you can also put compliance reports. So there you might need to look a corrosion. One of those tests that they do on a you know, annual or every five year basis. That's point and click. You pull it up and it tells you where it sits, and then it also shows you green, yellow, red. Anything in red is immediate, attest that tension yellow is you need to address it greens. Everything's 100% running. >>So the complexity that we're talking about, the kind of specificity of these solutions, even though they can be generalized. And you know, you talked about analytics all the way out to asset optimization Intel intelligence. There are We can generalize and structure, but there's always going to be, it seems to us there's going to be a degree of specificity that's required, and that means we're not gonna talk about package software that does this kind of stuff. We're talking about sitting down with a customer with a team of experts from a lot of different places and working together and applying that to achieve customer outcome. So I got that right >>absolutely, and what we did with the consortium looking at everything. How they first addressed it was right along that line, and if you look at software development, agile following agile process, it's exactly what we're doing in four I I o T o R O T I t Convergence, because if you don't include all of those people, it's never going to be successful. I heard it a conference the other day that said, POC is goto I ot to die, and it's because a lot of people aren't addressing it the right way. We do something called Innovation Delivery as a service, which is basically a four day, 3 to 4 day boot camp. You get all the right people in, in in the room. You pull in everything from them. You boot out the executive team partway through, and you really get in depth with workers and you have them say what they wouldn't say in front of their bosses that this happened with Doug and Linda and Linda said it was mind blowing. She goes. I didn't realize we had so many problems because she came back in the room and there was a 1,000,000 stickies. And then she said, the more she read it and the more you know, we refined it down, she said it was absolutely delivered, you know, the use case that she would have eventually ended up with, but loved having all the insights from, >>well, work. Too often, tech companies failed to recognize that there's a difference between inventing something and innovation. Inventing is that engineering act of taking what you know about physics or social circumstance Secreting hardware software innovation is a set of social acts that get the customer to adopt it, get a marketplace to adopt it, change their behaviors. And partners historically have been absolutely essential to driving that innovation, to getting customers to actually change the way to do things and embed solutions in their operations. And increasingly, because of that deep knowledge with customers are trying to doing, they're participating. Maurine, the actual invention process, especially on the softer side of you said, >>Yeah, yeah, I think what's really interesting in this, especially with Coyote. When I look back a few years, I look at cloud and you know everything was cloud and everybody ran to it and everybody jumped in with both feet, and then they got burned. And what we're seeing with this whole thing with I o t you would think we're showing these are lies, return on. Investments were showing all this greatness that can come out of it and and they're very slow at sticking their toe in. But what we've found is no one arrives should say the majority of corporations anymore don't want to jump in and say, Let's do it two or five or $10 million project. We see your power point. No, let's let's depart Owen with with what we're doing, it's, you know, a really small amount of money to go in and really direct our attention at exactly what their problem is. It's not off the shelf. It's but it's off the shelf with customization. It's like we've already delivered on connected worker for oil and gas. But now we're are so starting to deliver multiple other industries because they actually walk through text mark. We could do tours, that text mark. That was kind of the trade off. All these partners brought technology and, you know, brought their intelligence and spent. We were now on two years of proving all this out. Well, they said, Fine, open the kimono will let your customers walk through and see it >>makes text mark look like a better suppliers. >>Well, it's enhanced their business greatly. I can tell you they're just starting a new process in another week. And it was all based on people going through, you know, a client that went through and went. Wait >>a minute. I >>really like this. There are also being able to recruit technologists within the use in industry, which you would think text marks 50 employees. It's a small little plant. It's very specialized. It's very small. They pulled one of the top. Uh, sorry. Lost not. I'm trying to think of what the name >>they're. They're a small number of employees, but the process manufacturing typically has huge assets. And any way you look at it, we're talking about major investments, major monies that require deep expertise. And my guess is the text Mark is able to use that to bring an even smarter and better >>people smarter and better. People that are looking at it going they're ahead of the curve, for they're so far ahead of the curve that they want to be on board were that they're bringing in millennials on they're connected. Worker Carlos is there trainload lead. And he dropped an intrinsically safe camera and it broke and he tried to glue it together, tried to super glue it together. And then he ran back to Linda and he said I broke the case and this case is like £10. They call it the Brick. They gotta lug it up. They got to climb up the train car, leg it up, take a picture that they have sealed the valves on all the cars before they leave. Well, he had used the real where had, you know, device. And he went into Linda and he said, I know there's a camera in there. There's camera capabilities. Can I use that until we get another case? And she's like, Yeah, go ahead. Well, he went through, started using that toe like lean over, say, Take photo. We engineered that it could go directly back to the audit file so that everybody knew the minute that picture was taken, it went back into the audio file. This is where we found the process was reduced by 90% of time. But he turned around and trained his entire team. He wasn't asked to, but he thought, this is the greatest thing. He went in trainable. And now, about every two weeks, Carlos walks in to my team that sits a text mark and comes up with another use case for connected worker. It's amazing. It's amazing what you know were developed right out of the customer by using their workers and then, you know, proactively coming to us going. Hey, I got another idea. Let's add this where I think at version 7.0, for connected worker. Because of that feedback because of that live feed back in production. >>Great story, Kelly. So, once again, Callie Ireland is a co founder and CEO of CB Technologies. Thanks for being on the tube. >>Thank you for having me >>on once again. I wanna thank all of you for joining us for another cute conversation. I'm Peter burgers. See you next time.