Paul Hingley – Business Manager Data – MindSphere| Siemens
[00:00:00] We are now joined by Paul Hingley from Siemens, good to see you both.
[00:00:04] Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Siemens first Cloud AIX poll shows Siemens direct a business within the UK. OK, yeah. So. I can guess why come to Cloud Expo, and I guess she just purchased so many products. What are you looking to, I guess understand from the customers, from the audience?
[00:00:29] Well, from the same perspective, we’re not in that transitional period now of understanding how we position ourselves in this new market, the digital market that’s being developed. What is that digital market? There’s no manual on the digital market. So we have to do our own investigation to find out is it still our traditional customers that are looking for Seamans and being able to interface with Siemens, or are these the new generation of customers? Is this a new and evolving marketplace that’s out there? And the Siemens? We’ve got to make sure that we are working with our customer base wherever that customer base may be. And exhibitions like this enable us to to quantify exactly what that marketplace is for us to identify our strategies moving forward in the way we can work with our customers, guide our customers as they look to us for innovation as well as the agility of the brand. So for us, it’s really important that we take time and make the effort to come to events like this.
[00:01:27] And you see that is a strategic change that is perhaps being seen as a more business to business model before. Is it also becoming business to customer? You’re involved more in direct analytic with the actual end user.
[00:01:42] Yeah, and I think that’s an evolution of the marketplace that we’re in.
[00:01:46] I think this is what this world of digitisation will create, its new new avenues of business that we have to recognise and we have to accommodate the agility that we’ve got to show as being a large organisation that we are across the world. Is the of agility down right the way through the business, right down into the smallest of customer. They can gain access into what Siemens is about, our products, sovietisation customisation, all of these buzzwords that are going around now. It’s all about agility. It’s about this big conglomerate of of a company being able to deal with sometimes really small companies and making sure that they can see the value of what Siemens offers across our portfolio.
[00:02:29] We were talking to the team from earlier on and they were emphasising just how important the Internet of Things or particularly industrial Internet things is possibly important to see as well.
[00:02:41] It is, yeah. I mean, for many years we’ve had an industrial concept based on our terminology is called TIAA Totally Integrated Automation. And that is the philosophy we followed from from the mid 1980s and through. And that technology has always been about the digital transfer of data where automation data. So within our world, availability of data is king. We need to have some 10 millisecond scan times. You need to shift big chunks of data very quickly for synchronisation, for evaluation, et cetera. Now we’re moving into a world where that traditional data that we’ve captured for many, many years is now going to be made available elsewhere. You have to be able the visibility of that data to add more value from the customer’s perspective. And what they want to do is regain their processes and their solutions. So, yes, it’s really important. We have developed a concept around an open industrial Internet of Things connectivity called Moundsville and Mind Sphere is a way we creating a platform where the data can be presented, where people can play with that data, utilise the data, develop their own apps, develop their own interconnections, develop their own value streams, which ultimately allow for the use of our products to become a still a critical part of their solutions moving forward.
[00:04:02] So what does Siemens view is that in between the industrial Iot and just the Iot, we’re just seen as view that that distinction?
[00:04:13] The distinction really is that where we have business ERP systems, the the the executional systems, from a business perspective, we have to be able to present the data from the IoT, from the operational side of the business into into an area where it has ease of access. So what we have what we realise very quickly is that for our customers to take advantage of this new digital transformation, to take advantage of industrial Iot, we had to create a platform of connectivity that one was easy to use and also provide for the security of the data that we had as well. We deal right the way across all the vertical markets, from defence down to companies that have, you know, a very stringent control of that IP. And so we’ve got to make sure that for them to take advantage of this, they have to have an environment of connectivity that allows them to take advantage of it. If we make that too difficult, if we make that access into that connectivity too difficult, then customers won’t use it. So for us, it’s really important not only for our own strategy, but we also believe for our customer strategy as well. So.
[00:05:24] Just to understand that the power lines here, all of the Siemens product, that that becomes the standard for Siemens products to plug into and of to to interrogate.
[00:05:33] Yeah, we have created this platform of connectivity, which is completely open. It’s open on the northbound and the southbound side of what you term as a Cloud philosophy. But we also want to to get across as well. When people talk about the Cloud, the Cloud is not just about the Cloud in these remote services where you you don’t know where they are. There is also On-premise, Cloud as well. And we have a lot of customers that due to the industries they work in, it’s really important from a security perspective that on-premise Cloud structures are there as well and available and mine sfeir as this platform enables all the protocols on the south side of the of of the of the Cloud to, to have connectivity and also allow the openness of that, of sending that to whatever infrastructure the customer wants to look at as well. So at the moment we sit on HWC as a, as a, as an infrastructure. We have connectivities into other infrastructures as well. So the customer has free choice of where they want to collect the data from. And once they have it on the platform, where do you want to send that to? And the ease of being able to do that is what makes it easy to connect.
[00:06:44] Where would you say the vision of the mines then goes, because clearly you’re enabling this amazing collection of data. Yeah. For SD-Wan service because he’s clearly open. So it could move in any number of directions, which is where customers want to take it.
[00:07:00] Yeah. And I think that’s that’s the environment we we’re actually in now. There is no manual for what we’re doing. And I think our customers are actually writing the manual as we’re as we’re speaking now. Each one will have a different idea of how they want to take their digital steps forward, how do they want to interface and use their data in the future? The world of automation is still automation. You still have to physically connect. We haven’t changed the physics of of of automation. It’s electrical conductors, the copper cables and big chunks of metal, etc.. What has changed is the ability to take take advantage of what that information is coming from those those products themselves and how we can best use that, redesigning the products we develop in the products, being able to utilise them in new solutions, being able to gauge them in different solutions. Now the products are working in those solutions. So it allows us to to see how we can be innovative in our product design and product development, but also to look at the way solutions are developing those products as well. What what what’s the requirement for those types of products in the future? What we’ve done with minorities, we’ve we’ve ensured that the we’re only the custodian of data. We are not the owners of the data, that whoever owns the tenant owns the data and the security we built on their means again. We’ve ensured that the conservatism that’s always been within industry, around the shifting of data is maintained as well.
[00:08:30] So I guess, would you have a view on which verticals are finding more benefit today and encouraging others in terms of how online sphere is being adopted?
[00:08:43] I would say that generally across industry, they’re all at different points of the of their steps. Each one of them are in a process of evaluating where they are. Before they take the next step, so if you had a scale of one to 10, all we one, which is or zero or are we at 10 a.m. come across anyone yet? That’s about probably three or four. And what you’ll find in is each one of us has either invested in processes or invested in technology. And now they’ve got to come up with a mechanism of bringing in those two investment criteria’s together. How do you invest in the technology to be able to get the data to the data and then the processes, then to take that data and make further use of the values back into the business themselves and all companies that are different at different stages of evaluation? I would say that certain sectors are far more keen to advance themselves on this digital journey. These tend to be the more high tech companies. However, what we’re seeing now is very traditional companies such as minerals companies from brick manufacturing through to quarrying and looking how they can take advantage of this digital journey. How can they gather more information from from the solutions they have? So does anyone stream leading it? I would say yes. From a technology perspective, there are some like the automotive, like aerospace and so on. But I would also say that a lot of the old traditional ones, metal production, minerals aggregates and so on, are all trying to chase stuff. But that dream of well, of being not being able to add that additional value into their business.
[00:10:24] I’m guessing, as I understand, the industrial part of the IoT is where we’re actually starting to have bad technology products, hardware that was historically extinct. Yeah. And then starting to feed data back to the mine and the Mindscape Winspear Sorry platform, does that rely on Seamans sensors and Siemans products and said no to collect the data?
[00:10:48] Oh no, not at all. What we’ve done is obviously our domain knowledge is based on also the knowledge of our product, the way we’ve implemented our product. But what we also acknowledge and what we have to accept is that there are many other other vendors out there that are the other domain AIX experience and knowledge that as well that we’ve got to capture them and take advantage of. So when you start when you start looking at the at the marketplace itself, it’s critical that whatever interconnection that we have is completely open to all of these different protocols. So whether you’re looking at the standard protocols from Siemens, like profitable DP or proposing that, we also have to look at the other protocols that are out there, such as the new ones, such as them. And there are all of the protocols, traditional protocols that there are also being utilised industry, but also within the sectors. What you have to give is the ability for that connectivity because the development of other types of technology could enhance what we’re doing as a as a solution as well. From a Seamans perspective, we have to be aware of what our what our competitors are doing, but also what our partners are doing and the way they want to interface from protocols they want to use. So it’s really important that we’re as agnostic as possible within that platform to make sure that we can connect upstream and downstream for our customers benefit.
[00:12:14] So you raise a really interesting point about competitors. This is why it’s accessible. So, I mean, you work in the ecosystem of medical instrumentation. Yeah, you are part of our ecosystem with other partners and other competitors. Is is that something that you see as being open to all parties?
[00:12:36] It has to be any ecosystem that is locked DDoS generally within three years. So you have to open up the ecosystem or you also have to do is a business that is identify those value streams and be as quick as the smaller, more agile companies to identify the value streams. And what Siemens now has to become aware of is that while you’re opening up that ability to collect this data, you also have to open also as a business to understand that we have to be more to have more agility in our understanding of the marketplace as we traditionally play it. There’s value in there has to be an openness. Yeah. So the openness will breed more openness, more breeds more more availability for us as a business to grow collaborative approach. Absolutely. It has to be. If you don’t do that, then very, very quickly the ecosystem shifts and the ecosystem that you’re in just diminishes and becomes very small, very, very convoluted in the way that it looks into the back into the outside world. So the more open we have the ecosystem, the more benefits we see from not only for ourselves, but also for our customers. They then have the belief that what we’re doing is the right way to go.
[00:13:51] If I can ask some probing question here in the sense that 12 months ago you clearly had a view as to the strategy of mine sphere and the benefit had 12 months on. What has changed? The most for you in terms of where my sphere was 12 months ago and where it is today was really surprised.
[00:14:15] Surprised me is the speed of change. It surprised me about the customer base and the acceptance of this new digital age. The first for data is amazing. Everybody wants to understand how they can get all of this data and bring this data into two to add this value. We we have been surprised by. The acceptance of that, that this is the way forward, this is the way that this industry is moving and that and that’s that’s refreshing because I remember the years back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when we were selling the concepts of of of two wire systems, sending multiple chunks of data for control, you know, on on these new industrial protocols and the conservatism that was an industry that took around about 10 years of a gestation period in order to to become the norm. There’s no way you would ever design an automation system without having a bus system in there for the transfer of data. Where we are now is that there’s a there’s a lot more speed of acceptance for the new technology. And I think that comes as well from us as users. We’re all aware of our smart devices. We all have a lot more trust in the in the products that we use on a daily basis for our personal use. That makes it really easy to transcend that over into industry because that’s where we work. We want to play the same way and not have the restrictions that we we could possibly see from not adopting new technology. So the speed that is moving is the is the is the real defining factor of what industry and the way industry moving.
[00:16:01] Really impressive in terms of the openness, the approach that such a huge brand team has taken here to leading the way, really? Yeah, and there are many others obviously, but yeah. Yeah, this is crucial to accelerating, you know, all the benefits. But in whatever sector, you know, to the end customer, the patient.
[00:16:23] Whatever it is, I mean, we’ve we’ve been quite innovative, we’re engaging quite well with our universities within the U.K. So from a U.K. perspective, we’re trying to be innovative in the way that we we interface with our universities, the way that we are looking for them to develop the that the future, looking at the way they will look for new solutions, being looked at, the way that they want to capture things and progress, things with which we need to to embrace. We’re trying to invest into other areas of industry as well and to push that forward from a technological perspective that’s globally. So we believe that what we’ve done over the last four to five years has been strategic in the where we are today. Some might say that we’ve plodded along to where we are today. What I would say is that we have really been careful to want to ensure that we are maintaining our credibility in the marketplace with the brand that we have. At the same time, we’ve used agility and innovation to be able to move us forward into this new world that’s approaching. And I think that we find ourselves at the point where we’re running on that platform to be able to push forward and allow our customers now to be innovative and have innovation, allow them to have their free minds in order to the way they want to express themselves and how they want to capture their value in the future.
[00:17:42] Fantastic.
[00:17:43] That’s a good spot to wrap it up for being such a great many thanks very much. What a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much.
