from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering LIBOR X 18 brought to you by ptc welcome back we're at the Seaport in Boston at live works PTC's big IOT show this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Volante with my co-host to minimun Doug Smith is here is the CEO of Tech's market he's joined by Linda Salinas was the VP of Operations folks welcome to the cube great to see you happiness you're very welcome having us so what do you think Big Show here the first time we've been at live works a lot of good energy keynote this morning was like an Olympic you know opening ceremony how's the show been the show has been fantastic and again thank you for having us here for us at texmarq being able to see all the different technologies that are being employed here in the United States and around the world has just been fantastic for us that's been really exciting I enjoyed the keynote speakers in the opening session and I I got a lot of inspiration from that I just wanted to go right back to the planned and use some of the things that we saw early on already so we do a lot of these tech events as you know and we talk a lot of tech but people process technology it's the process and technolon process parts that we don't spend enough time on we kind of give it lip service say hey those are really important but let's talk tech let's talk about people and culture maybe the start yeah from an Operations standpoint how do you get people to think about change well we don't think of it as change we think of it as we are doing something now and we need a tool to do whatever it is that we're doing it better and early on when we partnered up with HPE and they said hey we have some IOT solutions to introduce you to I thought oh that's great and I said well why don't you and Doug come out to the our innovation laboratory and Tomball and take a look at the lab and see some ideas and I said well that's great can I bring some friends and they said sure said can I bring 15 friends and they said sure so we rented a party bus and we loaded up people from our ops and maintenance and engineering and lab and admin and we went there and we first sat in on a lecture about what IOT was and then when we saw the lab in the smart city and the medical applications and so forth that all of these all look familiar but then we saw the demo of the censored pump and that just saying to everyone they said wow we have a hundred of those in the plant let's go do that tell me about that and so it wasn't about us implementing changes saying hey here's this new thing go use it it was it was about them seeing what they wanted to do and bringing it back to the plan saying this is what we're going to do boss yes so Doug you guys are actually heading out to discover shortly right yes sir so I've talked about your relationship with those guys it sounds like it's it's growing how is it going sure so once again it's all about people and as Linda said this this journey began with a conversation with HPE and now we have a collection of 13 different ecosystem partners who are helping us with these five different use cases that are built on top of this technology foundation that was supported by HPE so we have CB technology we have a Deloitte we have Flo serve we have any number of people that can help PTC I mean this is a PTC event certainly how they are helping with these different use case solutions and so going out to Las Vegas Nevada we are going to continue this story about people I think the strongest part of this story is that it has been we have encountered bumps along the road where we've had to work together it isn't like the movies where the IOT saves the day we have to deal with it and struggle with it would you agree yeah and that it has been a journey but going back to the people it is about having the partners come to us and say this is what we need to do to implement it we need to install these sensors we need to install the antenna we need to have line of sight to the wireless access points and so forth but from the beginning it wasn't about a contractor or two or three or all of the partners coming in to texmarq and installing everything and then giving us the key and say turn it on we included our employees in the installation process so they know how the sensors went in they know how to adjust the antenna they know on a first name basis all the tech contacts within all of our ecosystem partners so this is not a Linda and Doug project it is their project they have ownership and what's been fun to see evolve over time is that now you know the refinery of the future has become a noun or a verb so they will say hey let's ROTF this problem how can our OTF help us make this process better more efficient so it's really been exciting to see that come back at us yeah so wonder if you could bring us inside a little bit I hear 13 partners and worried a little bit there's the integration there's the training there's the support it sounds like you're happy with it but for for those that haven't gone through it what what did you learn and you know how does that work sure and this is kind of colloquial talk here but what we say at text mark is the first thing that we've learned is you have to get nekkid you have to say here are the problems that we have how can we all work together you have to have this honesty and you have to feel comfortable with the partners and we have set a standard from the get-go of here are our expectations clearly stating those expectations and we have had some partners that have come in and it just hasn't worked out so this clear communication setting achievable goals and when we encounter problems address them immediately and I think that's one of the things that's made us successful did it can we talk about the refinery the future paint a picture for us what's what's the refinery of the past and what was the for finery the future well I think the refinery in the past and the future at its core is still refining we have at texmarq chemicals where a petrochemical manufacturers so we primarily produced through distillation and reaction but at any refinery or petrochemical entire your distillation tower your crackers your reactors loading tank storage and so forth so that's a refinery past present and future but the future one I think employs IOT and technology to do what we're already doing today better you know I think about when I get a coupon in the mail and it's like hey you know one buy one get one free on potato chips so I don't even put a tow chips but that coupons gonna make me go buy potato chips well it's not that way with IOT we don't see a solution to go let's go start doing this in the plant because this IOT thing is really cool it's just the converse we're already have connected workers we're already using two-way radios and clipboards and spreadsheets and whatever but the refinery of the future uses IOT to connect us with technology so that we're doing it better and faster and safer how about the data agenda yeah 13 partners as Stu said you've got a desire to capture the data and analyze it make things better your partners do how do you guys approach the analytics side of this and the data side so I like to think of data I one of the meetings that we had when we started down this road I was sitting in my office and we had three different groups in there and there was one gentleman I was watching you is shaking his head and he goes this is a goldmine and I immediately focused in on them and said what what is this goldmine of what you speak here and and just being able to have for example our one of our main processes is for a chemical called dicyclopentadiene tea DCPD as we move along in this project we want to be able to censor the seven pumps that are involved in that process from putting it into the feed stock tank to put in it out on a railcar and being able to tweak it and find that sweet spot and to monetize that Linda could you go in yeah I think also too from a contract manufacturing standpoint we'll have one of the super majors that are that are that are refiners or chemical manufacturers themselves and want us to produce product for them on their behalf and I think that the data part part of our competitive edge is to be able to offer an IOT adder kind of like would you like fries with that to add IOT on to the project that they're approaching us with and say hey would you like IOT with that supersize it yes exactly yes and so and they're like oh tell me more and in fact we had a one-on-one meeting with a potential client when we discovered Madrid and and so now we're having commercial conversations with them about contract manufacturing but because they're so interested in IOT they want to add an IOT element to that and so then we can either surcharge or up charge for that contract manufacturing by the pound we will learn to optimize our processes on their behalf and then we share or sell the data to them they become the owners of it that's a that's a direct monetization as a value creation for the customer that they're willing to pay for yeah yeah that's cool well I think one of the altruistic aspects of what we're trying to do at texmarq is within multiple industries you have this this grain of the population so of the workforce is retiring out and with them they're taking years and years of tribal knowledge so you may have an operator who knows when you're doing this process you need to turn the that you need to adjust that valve this much and to be able to gain that information and pass it to the younger people coming in and then to show with in the petrochemical 'ti that we are utilizing technology this isn't the technology excuse me the refinery of the past this is a job in which you can use cutting-edge technology use this this feels like I was talking we were talking earlier one of our guest it but this whole IOT space it seems like it's not I mean it's disruptive in this in the sense that you seem to be doing a lot of things differently but as you were saying Linda refiners still a refinery so the ecosystem of that refinery to me anyway seems to like largely stay intact it's just a matter of embracing these new processes and changes in culture and obviously technology so the incumbents it feels like they're in a pretty good position is that a reasonable premise or am I missing something no I think I think I think you're right yeah yeah I think about one of the things that I heard in the keynote was that we are one of the early adopters and so I feel like it's part of our responsibility to share our story and to share the lessons learned right absolutely Linda and so she hits on something that humbles me is one of the things that we offer are these showcase tours where we have super majors come to texmarq and we have to censored pumps and there they are so enthralled about us showing it to them that to us we just say we want to show we want to be inclusive we want to be leaders and and so it's a great feeling so anytime we talk about IOT security something that comes up and you know in your line of work also we think safety for your workers but something that also of wonder if you could talk about those dual lasses paramount would you yes my eyes get big and that's where my heart is and I've been in with techsmartt for 23 years and I spent about 18 years doing environmental health and safety compliance and the thing about our five use cases is I can in my mind anyway tie them all back to reducing risk and improving worker safety and reducing our risk our environmental risk and impact the community so connected worker they're connected we either know where they are we know what they're doing we provide them information to make informed decision we have safety and security to be able to direct them in case of an emergency either to go towards emergency if you're a responder or away from it if you are not or if there's a person that fell from a height we know exactly where they are so we can go render aid because they can't raise their hand and say I'm hurt so all of these use cases advanced video analytics to know if we have a hydrocarbon leak or if there's someone crossing our property line whether it's a coyote or a person or someone that doesn't belong on our side of the fence they each have their own application but they all have some sort of tied to reducing risk and improving safety so it's sensors that can detect that type of movement you're not instrumenting humans right it's no no that's right same activity yeah what about now you've got everything connected now is there any concern that rogue agents could you know somehow do something malicious so we take a great deal or we pay a great deal of attention to security of data because that's our secret sauce that's how we are profitable within the world so we have we have put in all sorts of security measures from the sensor to the I walk to the the compute and what I continue to learn is it's a constant battle and so we have to it is something we have to be vigilant about so so what's next what should we look for from texmarq this whole space what are some of the milestones maybe that we should be paying attention to in terms of milestone I'm really excited about the the connected worker tool which allows different personas to approach for example an asset like a pump and Linda could be the CFO and I could be a millwright and we'd be looking at the same piece of equipment and I as a millwright would be getting data what type of service that pump needs and then Linda is the CFO could get financial information about when that pump fails or we're predicting failure in three months that pump will cost X number of dollars in the downtime will cost homesman exactly to the whole production procedure so and the other thing is I'd like to see us develop this use case to the video as a sensor we're working with Intel on that one and so they're excited about testing their equipment as well so and that's another area because we're looking at putting on our railcar loading area involving our railcar loaders on exactly where we should put them what we should look for what they think are the risks in the railcar loading area and so it's really just more of the same kind of continuing to involve our employees and having these projects and become theirs great well Linda and have a great trip to Vegas say hi to our friends from HPE and thanks so much for coming back in the cube really please so much you're welcome I keep it right there everybody stew and I'll be back where the next guest from Boston at live works we'll be right back [Music]

>>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.