Welcome back to How to Handshake, Optigo Networks’ podcast series on OT networking, building automation, and the conversations that actually move the industry forward. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, and YouTube!
One Edge, Two Ways
Computing at the edge isn’t a new concept, but it’s probably not one facility managers and SIs have grappled with… yet. Ping and Ryan are joined this week by Andrew Rodgers, Co-Founder at ACE IoT, and Aaron Brondrum, Sr. Director of Business Development at Neeve, to talk about the reality of edge computing design in OT networks.
Neeve and ACE take two different approaches to edge operations, but does that mean they disagree about it?
We’re also taking the wraps off our latest product drop: Optigo Traffic Capture drivers for Niagara workstations and supervisors. Packet captures natively inside your JACE, and automatically upload to your OptigoVN account!
Transcript
Edge computing is one of those ideas that makes perfect sense. Bring intelligence closer to where the data is generated. and keep data flowing even if the system goes down In a building, the gap between theory and reality is a big one. And the people actually deploying this stuff have a few opinions on how to close that.
Today we’ve got two of them. Andrew Rogers is the co-founder of ACE IoT Solutions, where they’re building an open source edge infrastructure for OT networks. On the other side, we have Aaron Brandon from Neeve. where they’re doing it with a secure edge-to-cloud model.
They’re both pro-edge, but they’re building very different things. I’m Ryan LaFlamme, and this is How to Handshake Episode eight. Hey! Welcome back.
It’s How to Handshake. Episode eight. I’m Ryan with me, as always is Ping . Over on this side.
Hello. And before we jump into the interview this week, I just wanted to take a minute and talk about the new product drop that we had. The Optigo capture tool is now working within the Neeve marketplace and as well, which will be part of our interview later, We also want to talk about the rollout of our new integration with Niagara workstations and supervisors. And I just I’ll pull that up here.
Ping , I will not muddy the waters by trying to explain all the things that are going on, but I will absolutely let you explain to the folks what we have here. Ping , Maybe you can take our listeners through what the new capture driver is for Niagara stations. Yeah. Wonderful.
Thank you. Ryan. Well, everyone knows that Niagara, Tridium Niagara, is the most prolific platforms used in our industry. Millions of these JACEs and workstations, supervisors, whatever, all running Niagara.
It’s been on our roadmap for a long time. So we now have a driver for Niagara 4 to capture BACnet traffic so that Optigo Visual Networks can diagnose monitor your Niagara systems. So in short, there’s a .jar file that you can download at our website here. The link is available.
You can install it on supervisors and JACEs as long as your are running Niagara 4. And it will capture the net traffic and allow Optigo Visual Networks to do its normal diagnostics like looking for duplicates, looking for excessive broadcasts, looking for excessive polling and COV and all these other diagnostics we offer. I think some of the neat thing is that we’ve designed it to work in systems where perhaps the JACEs don’t have internet connections, but the supervisor in the system does. So we have this supervisor mode where the supervisor can go and fetch the captured file from the JACE and upload on their behalf.
So again, the JACEs do not need direct internet connection. And for systems are completely offline, This is still allows you to manually grab these capture files and manually upload them to Optigo Visual Networks, and it makes it a breeze. I know up to this point, there’s been a few extra steps that we’ve had to do to enable traffic capture on Niagara stations, and not anymore. We’ve got at the link at optigo.net/tools-and-integrations, we’ve got a guide, step by step guide.
We’ve put together a couple of videos to show you as well – if you’re more of a visual learner like me. And once you have it up and installed, it’s fully integrated and pretty, pretty self-directed, right? The driver will handle the packaging encryption of and upload of just your BACnet traffic, so no need to bother with messy or clunky Wireshark captures and upload it directly into your OptigoVN account, so it’ll be waiting for you to be diagnosed as soon as you jump over there. So it’s just a one time installation, right?
Yep, yep. So this this capture driver for anyone who is operating running a Niagara 4 system, use it. It will help you either identify problems you think you may have or monitor the system to make sure that you continues to run in a healthy mode. Absolutely.
And if you’re not using OptigoVN, now is a perfect time to try. You can jump in, request a free trial, connect your driver directly to your environment, and give it a shot and see what you’ve been missing. Excellent. Okay, with that, Ping, we’re going to jump over to the interview that we actually just filmed with Aaron from Neeve and Andrew from ACE IoT, and we’re going to be talking about edge processing in OT networks.
Welcome back to the show, everybody. We’re talking edge processing and local intelligence. And I want to say thank you. And welcome to our two guests here.
First we have Andrew here from ACE IoT . And we’ve got Andrew or sorry Aaron from Neeve . I’ll just start by going around in the room. I’ll go clockwise.
So we’ll start with you, Aaron. Who are you and what do you do at Neeve ? Yeah, Aaron Brondum I lead our channel slash partnership business here at niche, helping our marketplace partners like an ACE IoT or other products like Code Labs or Bueno or Nasm networks, along with working through distribution to system integrators. Excellent.
And Andrew, please welcome. I’m Andrew Rogers, co-founder of ACE IoT. I lead our technology development architecture. We mostly support energy engineering services and sustainability service providers with data acquisition that we’ve been doing for the last eight years.
Great. And yes, that’s our that’s our conversation for today, edge computing. It’s a real conversation that’s happening in building automation right now. And I wanted to have you to hear and Ping obviously as well.
Thank you. Oh, and if I didn’t say hello. Hello Ping . Welcome back from your vacation.
We have two very interesting and different approaches, I think, to the philosophy behind edge networking. And I’m just curious to hear the places where we agree and perhaps we disagree. And I also think it’s a great opportunity because we haven’t spoken about edge processing, edge compute in OT networks on the podcast yet. And I’m sure there are a lot of listeners out there who are curious and may not truly understand what it is and how it could potentially be a benefit for networks large and small.
I wanted to make sure we’re starting from the same sort of place. Edge computing in OT gets a fair bit of talk as an alternative to cloud, meaning facilities can run their compute locally. So business. Sorry, a building isn’t dependent on strictly an internet connection or a remote server, but that’s just one part of it.
Obviously, the additional advantages are the pre-processing that data can that can be done closer to the data source before it reaches a central system to lighten sort of that overhead load. So when we say edge processing on an OT network, what does it actually look like to you in a commercial building? Not really in theory, but what’s the physical reality of what’s getting installed and what’s going on then in that network before we’re hitting that central system that BMS or BAS? Aaron, I’ll I’ll start with you.
Then Andrew you can go next. Yeah. Great. So here at Neeve, we take a very different approach, a modern approach.
Number one, we’re a cybersecurity company. So we protect the OT and create an environment that secures legacy BMS and card access anything in the OT space. But with that secure infrastructure that allows for zero trust remote access, we provide an edge compute and cloud connectivity piece as well. And so just like the cloud today, it all runs on containers.
That’s how we manage software. That’s how things are portable. That’s how things move back and forth. And in our eyes, there’s no difference between the cloud and the edge.
It’s the same software environment. It’s just a matter of where you’re putting the processing and depending on the application, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to run on the edge, but there’s some of that that can run in the cloud. And so we take a very modern agnostic approach. There’s containerized Niagara, for example.
You can run your Niagara VMs on a Neeve device. You can also run Schneider Eco Struxture Automation Server. There’s a containerized version of that as well to run on the edge, or potentially on the cloud. So I know we want to have a big debate between edge and cloud.
I’m here to say I frankly don’t care. I think that and that’s a that’s a solid point. Two is is it is it even a debate. That’s a great third suggestion, Andrew, I’ll let you jump in here.
Yeah. I mean, I think Aaron may have stole my thunder on the like “Who cares?”. But to to keep the conversation interesting, I’ll take the position that, you know, the challenge that we see a lot in how. And one of the ways ACE IoT differentiates themselves is more of a white glove approach to the folks who maybe don’t have the networking expertise to understand what should live at the edge and what should live in the cloud.
And the industry is figuring that out at a broad level right now. But they’re the expertise. To really understand those trade offs is not evenly distributed. I would say, as you know, to borrow the like, the future is not evenly distributed.
So one of the things that we do a lot with our customers is help them understand, you know, whether they’re using ACEs you know, solution that has zero trust and does a lot of the same stuff that Neeve does, but in a more like, vendor specific way than a vendor agnostic way. Or they’re using our platform on Neeve , a lot of what we do is help our, our clients think through the architecture that makes sense for their buildings or their use cases. And what should which component should live in the edge and should live in the cloud? Just for argument’s sake, though, I would just push back.
Just for the listeners here. I think one of the difference between cloud like public cloud and edge is that is the level of management. Public cloud should mean that there’s one place to go to and everything is there. Whereas in when you go to the edge, you may have multiple edges.
And so you have to manage your edges, but it also means that at the edge again there’s always exceptions. But at the edge the systems at the edge should be smaller than a centralized cloud system. So there is I mean the not saying that one is right or wrong, but you know, when when you’re approaching a small organization that has four sites, perhaps the edge versus cloud has no difference. But you go to an organization with thousand sites, then there is a scale difference between between the two.
It really depends on the use case. Like pick an application. Like if we’re just talking about BMS, I have a hard time… like the amount of data that we collect from a BMS, if we stream every point out of a BMS, it’s so small that the trade offs between edge and cloud are all about management capacity with the organization, not anything about technical capacity.
So pre-processing, all that stuff, you’re just you’re not talking about enough data for it to matter. Now we flip over and we start talking about security camera systems. All of a sudden, do you really want an NVR in the cloud and every event detection on your camera happening? I mean now we’re like that’s becoming hyper edge right?
The cameras are doing have the models running on them. They do the event detection. They pick which segments to send to the NVR You don’t want to have to buy an enterprise, you know, ten gigabit uplink just to keep all your cameras flowing to a network NVR in the cloud. But that’s very different from, you know, BMS, card access control, a few of these, like, you know, more legacy OT systems that we manage.
So I think generally this this conversation almost always comes down to the organization’s capacity and resource availability more than anything tech. I would have to agree with that as well. Now, if somebody wanted to build this themselves. Good luck.
Good luck. It’s hard. It’s really hard to do. It’s very hard.
So it’s you know, Neeve wasn’t around when we started. It’s very hard. Yeah, yeah. If I put my old hat on.
I’m a former system integrator. And I thought I got a customer that says I want to do edge compute Docker containers and run it up in AWS. I would be so overwhelmed, I’d be like, all right, I got to hire somebody. I got to get somebody that’s really expensive to figure this out.
And I got to figure out how. That’s why I’m that’s what I’m saying. Aaron here is that, you know, your claim that cloud versus edge has no difference. That’s only true if you use the right architecture.
Right. For for an organization that doesn’t have the skill, it’s much harder to manage 20 sites than one central place if you just connected to cloud and go to the cloud. So I’m not disagreeing with you, but you have they have to pick the right solution for their organization. I think a lot goes into that as what is the operating system that you’re dealing with at the edge and in the cloud, right.
So if I’m like, I’m going to run some Linux boxes and then a windows VM, that’s really hard to do. If I go, hey, how does the cloud run today? It runs on Kubernetes and Docker. If I’ve got Kubernetes and Docker on the edge and in the cloud, that is, applications are highly portable and can move back and forth.
So it’s it’s it might be the question of edge and cloud. What is the underlying operating system that makes it easier for you to. And that’s a that’s a point I just want to hold hold on here for a second. Aaron do you want to give like a 30-second overview of what Kubernetes and Docker those container ideas are?
We get a lot of people from the facility side who probably might, you know, might be googling those terms right now just to understand what those are. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great point. What a container does.
And the Docker environment is they’re all independent and self-sufficient. If you do something to one application that’s running on one piece of hardware, it’s not going to any other applications. It’s designed to be very portable but also very resilient. So a good example.
I do a lot of Niagara deal with a lot of Niagara stuff. I did a lot of Niagara stuff back in the day, and you guys just came out with your awesome new Niagara plugin, which is really cool too, is if I’ve got to update a JACE, for example, how long does that take? What do I have to do? There’s a lot of steps and sometimes it takes a long time depending how big it is, and it can take minutes, half an hour maybe to run that update based on that hardware.
In that operating system, if I’m running that same JACE environment database on a containerized version, it’s updated in 30s. And then if that fails, if that update fails, the way this infrastructure with containers is, it’ll automatically revert to the last known best image of it as well. So it’s a big mind shift on on how software is managed. And frankly, just like we all know, our industry is 10 to 15 years behind the IT industry.
We’re starting to catch up to it. And you’re starting to see that shift of system integrators, building owners asking for managed services for these automated software updates that are done in a modern way on a framework like this. I wanted to ask about things that our facilities folks are probably a little bit more familiar with, which is some of the hardware that’s on site that you just can’t get around the idea of, you know, the controllers that run HVAC are lighting, access control. Some of these things are built as we know.
They were built more for longevity than high performance. So we’re talking limited memory, slow processors. How can the idea of edge processing help, and what is the reality given that hardware or those hardware limitations, can it? How can it help and or will it will be bottlenecked by by some of these, some of these devices on this hardware?
Yeah, it’s a reality we live in. Right. It made major capital investments ten years ago into a building management system. Right.
And now I want to do this modern stuff. I want to get an AI. I want to do some, you know, advanced analytics and fault detection. You can’t rip it out.
Nobody’s going to pay for it. And so it’s it’s supposed to last 15 years. Most people hang on to it for 20 years, right? Some 25.
And so the reality is how do you supplement that and do that in a, in a, in a smart way, in a secure way. Right. And some of the approaches we take it Neeve is is we secure and basically put a moat around that older technology, and provide a way to secure it today, then be able to enable edge applications to run, to then potentially optimize it the best it can with what it can do. Right.
Sometimes you’re limited to polling rates and how often you can see make adjustments to set points and things like that. Right. But then also it provides a pathway for the future state as well, to there are things out there that are cost effective ways to secure what they have, provide a framework in the plumbing to be able to leverage some of these modern applications. Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s exactly what we enable for our clients.
I mean, we have we have platform clients who build products on top of our product that do advanced system optimization on these legacy networks. And part of the reason why you might want an edge environment for that is that if you’re going to implement something like demand control ventilation, and you aren’t going to do that capital rip and replace to, you know, to, to to build that into the underlying control system because it’s not feasible, then you don’t want that dependent on an internet connection. You don’t want all of a sudden, you know, as soon as your network has a hiccup or you don’t want your whole building to suddenly go back to the energy performance of 1984. So that’s one of the justifications that we see for the edge is that people want things like advanced scheduling management.
They want some of these more advanced applications. They don’t want to replace the underlying legacy systems. They can implement that in an overlay or advanced system optimization layer at the edge. And that, you know, our clients, you know, have their proprietary ways of doing that.
People do it in things like Niagara and Neeve , but like these are what they’re doing. They’re taking an advanced application to a legacy network and generating the value to the building. The building doesn’t care how long the control system has been there or how old it is, as long as it’s functioning right. I think the common thing between Ace and Neeve is that this argument that Ping is making about, you know, organizations do or don’t have this capacity, we’re sidestepping that because we’re bringing the management layer to our clients.
They have already recognized they don’t have the capacity to do either. I just wanted to make sure that that statement, that cloud versus edge has no difference, is qualified. You can’t just take that out of context and just go to an organization that doesn’t know what it requires to make it agnostic, to make it so that it’s a choice that you can make. You can’t just go to an organization that’s running a bunch of windows XP and go, oh, we’re just going to choose to go on the edge.
Oh, no. But that that organization is broken already. And like, moving to the cloud is not going to help them. Moving to the edge is not going to help them.
Getting them the resources they need to understand the risk mitigation strategies that can be put in place in these legacy systems. That’s what they need. Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, to get them to move, something bad has to happen.
I get a call every other week from a system integrator that says, my customer says, I got to get this windows machine off the network. I’m not allowed to do it. What can I do? What can I do?
What are my options? Andrew, you guys are working, ACE IoT is working on what’s called the Eclipse or Volttron platform, and open source platform, to to build. What are the advantages of working for that for a building owner? And you know, what are, say some of the trade offs versus going for a purely proprietary platform you build yourself?
And then, Aaron, I’ll give you a chance to to answer from the other side, where Neeve is taking a more of a proprietary approach. Well, so so I can talk a little bit about ACE’s history with Volttron, why we why we chose it when we did, as I said, before, Neeve existed. Open source as a fear mongering tool. Like sometimes people use that in industry, but every product that we’re talking about, every product deployed in the building today has open source technology in it, every single one of them.
So we sort of, you know, built what we do around that ethos of, hey, we’re going to solve problems, but we’re going to solve them in the open so that people, other people can learn from how we solve these problems and build on them. We just like the ethos. And then, you know, there was another thing that at the time when we got started, you know, this conversation would be very different because everybody on the call be saying, there’s no way in hell you’re putting a computer on my network like that, has some software on it that I don’t know about. That didn’t come from my Johnson rep or my so at the time, Voltron being built by the National Labs.
One of the great things about that is it was being built for use by utilities and doing demand management programs and that sort of thing. So security was paramount. And DOE, the Department of Energy, the US Department of Energy, invested in security reviews, pen testing, all the stuff that a that like Neeve has to do for their product. They were doing it for the whole platform, which enabled us to leverage that as a small company early on.
So Neeve’s solution in comparison to Volttron I think is more aligned to like a modern cloud system. There’s nothing really wrong with Volttron. We’re actually kind of building out some of our own infrastructure to replace some of the key Volttron components as we speak. Oh, interesting.
Just because. But but we’re going to try to keep as much of that open source as we can, because we still have that ethos. And Aaron, I’m just curious why why Neeve took a slightly different approach. So for a long time we’ve been saying there’s a gap between IT and OT.
We’re all pretty familiar with that. It’s a purpose built solution to serve the OT. We came out of let’s build something that serves the OT space that provides security, provides zero trust remote access because you need to get your vendors into to support all these different facilities in a secure way and keep track of them. But then how do we layer it on?
And so, you know, just like Andrew was talking about, we picked Voltron because Voltron had all this security in place that the national labs and all the investment behind it. We’ve created a framework where these providers can put whatever application they want, was open source stuff that runs on our our environment. I used to be work for a company that was providing optimization to buildings, and always in the back of my head is, man, we’re going fast. What about these devices?
What about the operating systems? Who’s going to manage and maintain? And this is a problem. What happens in 5 or 6 years when these things start to run out of gas and start to fail and things like that.
And so with Neeve , it’s a subscription base. The hardware is included. You can run whatever app you want on it. You can plug and play, you can try different things.
And full disclosure, we should say, is that Optigo networks is also in the Neeve marketplace as of, I think about it a month or two months now. But yeah, here’s a question. How hard was that? Ping .
How hard was that? I didn’t know how to do it. It was very easy. It was so easy.
Words failed him. That’s right, that’s correct. It’s always easy if a provider has already started doing stuff in containers. I’m.
I love that we’re kind of settling here, I think, on the idea that both approaches are equally beneficial. It’s it’s like you said, it’s what is the solution that works best for you? I wanted to jump to some of the benefits, the proposed benefits of of the idea of doing edge processing. And one of them that I came across when I was looking, putting together questions here is this idea of energy efficiency.
Decarbonization. Does edge processing actually move the needle on things like energy performance in a commercial building, and to the point where you would say to a building owner or facility, a facility manager, this is something you should really look at now, don’t wait until you know, for example, the energy 2050 for the Department of Energy’s goals. Where do you guys meet out on that? Are there are there tangible goals now to edge processing, or is it a sort of give it a couple of years?
Well, edge processing is happening now. It’s just how is it being processed? And we have our our primary controllers, like a Johnson NAE and a Tritium JACE and a Schneider automation server that has a pretty good processor in it and does some edge computing. So then the question needs to come down is, how do I do it and why do I do it.
So if I’ve got an energy project and I want to get BACnet data out of a building to the cloud, streaming BACnet data directly from the building to the cloud, it can work in a small retail store, but a big building with thousands of data points? It’s not going to happen, guys. It’s not going to happen. And so you have to have something on the edge to to compensate for it.
So then you have to ask your question is, as we evolved from say like the traditional like LONworks to a primary controller to MSTP BACnet to a primary controller. Now those are all IP. Do I need that primary controller anymore or is there a better solution? Is that is that the advantages you see with edge?
It’s that because it’s a shift, right? It’s a mindset of, “am I’m doing this to meet the spec and to get the job if I’m a contractor, or am I a building owner that says I’m looking at the total cost of ownership of this, and how do I operate and maintain this, and how do I do it in a cyber secure way?” I think it’s a it’s a bit of a misnomer to claim that edge is new, right? Building automation systems have always been edge systems. When we talk about edge here and we talk about modern software stacks, this gets back to what I think this whole industry needs more of, which is choice.
So in the past, your hardware, your edge environment, which was your BMS, it was, you know, if you pick Johnson, you had Johnson, you know, VAV controllers, you had Johnson N2 wiring in your building. You had, you know, NAEs supervising those VAVs. All of that up. Right.
That was your whole that’s all edge environment. That’s all edge. But it was locked. And when we’re talking about edge now, we’re talking about the same decoupling of hardware and software that the cloud provided to enterprise IT systems.
I can decide that I want to keep all my BACnet controllers, but I want a new BMS. And instead of having to go, you know, set a new panel next to the old panel and install a new BMS management server device. You know, hardware, software integrated into that panel cut over things. It’s dropping another container into the environment, pointing it at the BACnet controllers, you know, building your graphics and moving on.
That is giving owners more choice. Those contract negotiations are a lot easier for the incumbent vendor when you have to go tear out wiring to choose a different vendor, but when you can drag and drop a new vendor into your building, that’s giving those owners those folks who have long term portfolio views, that’s giving them the choices they need, like our our clients that deliver ASO on top of our platform. They’re saving building owners 30% energy without changing any capital equipment. That’s huge.
That gives an organization budget back to do some of the deferred maintenance that they’ve that they’ve been putting off. So that’s a that’s a huge value prop. I think as we move forward we’re going to find more and more. And the beauty is once you have that hardware that’s agnostic to the application in in situ, you the cost to delivering new value on top of it is similar to spinning up a server in the cloud.
I want to follow up from what you just said, Andrew start and then we’ll go to Aaron. We talk a lot about what is better and so on. But in our ecosystem still today, we have the building owner, the system integrators, the product vendors and then the tenants who’s responsible for deciding to incorporate this edge computing as part of a portfolio. I mean, I’m going to give you the engineer’s answer, which is it depends, right.
Like but I think it’s back to the fallacy that like even that commercial real estate is a homogenous environment. You know, there’s building owned by buildings owned by REITs, buildings owned by, you know, flagship tenants who have their own, you know, portfolios. There’s buildings owned by REITs, managed by third party property managers, who are occupied by fortune 100 tenants who dictate everything from that, like so it’s just that’s just in commercial real estate, right? It could be the base building owners wanting to save money on the on energy.
Could be the base building owner wanting to have better ESG reporting. It could be the primary tenant wants to have better ESG reporting. So like it it really depends. But what it is, what I think probably is in common, Aaron can back me up on this, is that the folks that come to find us are ones who have had trouble with the old way of doing things, and are ready to find something new and are ready to have that decoupling of the hardware and the software.
Aaron, what do you think? I’m not going to tell you what I think. I’m going to tell you what I heard. I was on a panel at AHR earlier this year, and I had a an owner representative of a major property owner in Canada, president of one of the largest system integrators here in North America.
And somebody asked the questions, who’s responsible for cyber security and all this software stack? And the owner said, I’m responsible for it. I own the building, I own the asset. So I say ultimately it is the owner’s responsibility.
Now the problem we have is are the owners technical? Do the owners understand the decision that they’re making? And so here’s the opportunity. It’s really the opportunity for the system integrators to, you know, one, they’re typically the most trusted vendor in these buildings.
And they’ll be able to talk and work with those owners and let them know there’s a different way to do this. There’s a more modern way to do it. There’s a more secure way to do all this. And ultimately, what they have in front of them is a chance for new revenue and to create new business for themselves and to get even stickier with these owners.
Both of you. I 100% agree, I think larger institutional – and I’m going to use the institutional term here fairly loosely – there’s a huge opportunity for system integrators, consultants, service providers to step up and catch these new projects and offer to them a new way of doing things. Yeah, just take a look what happened in the IT industry 15 years ago. Like it all shifted to managed services to this type of platform.
We feel like we’re at the cusp of a very similar crossroads in our environment. And so these system integrators, you know, stop being a controls contractor, be that system integrator, and say, I can take care of the entire OT, at least the network for you, and then dictate it and help you, and they’re going to create new business for themselves. But just as a warning for system integrators who are listening, it’s a big investment. It’s an investment.
It’s a process. Because, I mean, you may be going off to projects that are quarter million dollars, and then now you’re doing a subscription based that’s a couple of thousand dollars. It’s a very different economy landscape. It requires new people, requires investment, and you’re going to fail for the first two projects.
You just have to accept that it’s it’s yeah, yeah. But it’s it’s they don’t have a choice. They really don’t. I agree, I agree.
Don’t think they have the choice. I mean, they have a choice. Do I get on board and have a good profitable business in five years? Or do I keep trying to do what I do all the time?
And it’s it’s very interesting. I came from an IT based SaaS company to here. And my initial impression is, you know, when we started talking about system integrators was, well, that sounds a lot like managed service providers. It sounds a lot like MSPs.
And since then I’ve learned that there’s actually no there’s a big difference between them. But but systems integrators, I do agree, I think will have to go that route of moving more towards the managed system provider solution. As we say, they’ve got to get out of break fix, right? And where did those MSPs come from?
They were integrators in the IT space that transform their business. Yeah, I think that’s the difference is integrators who don’t transform will become installers. Oh that’s a that’s that’s a good that’s a good line I like that. Say that again Ping s just to agree to what both Aaron and Andrew is saying here.
There’s an opportunity to transform service providers and those who don’t transform and race IT infrastructure OT technology at the edge and the cloud, understand cybersecurity, understand these aspects. Working to develop this environment for their customers. They will become installers. We still continue to need installers, right?
Because in the end we are in this physical world. Things will have to be installed, but margins are going to be much lower and there’s a massive gap in that OT space. Huge difference, massive gap. Yeah, I mean we we thought that when we started our company, we thought, man, all these controls vendors are going to have to switch to being managed service providers.
They’ve been very resistant. And I think part of it is due to healthy margins and new construction. And, you know, it’s hard if you’re making money to turn and fail a couple of projects to learn the lessons beings talking about. It’s really hard, but it is coming and it has to.
That’s the difference in an MSP and an installer. An installer comes in and you say, put the TV on that wall, plug it into this network port. That’s a very different relationship from I need a display in this room. Solve it for me.
Tell me the best way. Tell me. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to Andrew, to Aaron for help.
But you own your own problem, I agree. Yeah. Good. So I’ll throw this out to you for a facilities director or a systems integrator for somebody who’s listening to this right now, who’s been thinking about where to go on this, they hear people talking about it.
Edge what is the most honest piece of advice you would have for somebody who’s thinking about jumping in to to this right now? I mean, it really depends on what hat you’re wearing, right? Like, if you’re a building owner, you know, it’s well past time to ask yourself who is responsible for the security of my buildings and my buildings networks. So starting from the actual organizational need, which is I need to manage risk, I need access to data.
You know, my C-suite is asking me how I’m using AI to manage buildings, better manage my building portfolio better. And, you know, I’m trying to figure out, does that mean I need to get Claude connected to windows XP? Because that’s actually what’s in our basement, you know, like that’s that’s not the right spot. Right?
So starting from those organizational goals, asking the hard questions, getting the right stakeholders for your organization together, that seems to be one of the, you know, one of the tragedies of our. Industry is that as this IT/OT convergence has happened historically, there’s been like the folks who have tried to keep it, keep IT out. So getting the right stakeholders together, it’s, you know, it is there to help manage risk for your organization. It’s going to help you do it better.
And they’re going to help you justify why you might need to make the investment to get to something like a modern edge environment. So that’s my kind of $0.02. Start with the the value of the organization, get the right stakeholders and then work from there. Don’t just go say, oh, I just got to have this new technology because it sounds so cool.
Let me give you two separate responses, okay. For two separate personas: building owner/building engineer, what’s installed in my building? What’s on the network? What version of software is it running?
Who has access to it if something bad happen here? It’s a good place to start. Audit what you have and then ask yourself, are there solutions that are built to manage secure these types of systems for you? Now to the system integrator.
Same question what version of software are all my customers running? Here’s the thing they don’t know either. They might have a spreadsheet where they started to track it and maybe it gets updated. Am I contractually obligated to make sure this is all up to date?
Am I actually verifying it? But what does it take to to update it and manage it? Maintain that software takes truck rolls, takes technicians thinking there’s a different way. Can I provide this value?
Can I tell my customers that all their software is up to date? Can I resell this to my customers? Can I be that provider that bridges the gap between it and but that’s you got to start with the basics. Most people don’t even know what’s in the building.
You got to be able to see your assets. You got to understand what’s there. Is it secure? Who has access to it?
If I need to turn it off, could I turn it off? And then how can I enable these really cool applications that can optimize my building, save me energy, make my tenants, my employees, have a much better experience. Yeah, there’s there’s definitely a lot you can do it. I love that.
I think we’ve sort of come to a consensus here that the piece of advice is, is start, start now, start, start today. And if you don’t know how to start, find yourself a partner. Reach out to one of these guys. Reach out to an integrator you trust.
Have them reach out to someone that they know. Find a partner. Find. Find a trusted partner.
Yeah, and you’re not. It’s not new. It’s not new. People are doing it now.
You’re not the first ones. The guinea pigs are already left. We’re crossing the chasm with all this stuff. It’s really now getting to the point of proliferation, changing your business.
Start now before it gets too late. Aaron, where can people find you and Neeve ? Neeve.ai. And I’m Aaron at neeve.ai There you go.
And Andrew. ACE IoT. ACEIoTsolutions.com. Andrew at ACE IoT solutions.
Excellent, excellent. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for for joining us. This was a this was a good talk and I’m glad it wasn’t a fight but thank you, thank you. Neeve r fight.
Neeve r a fight. That’s right. All right. Thank you so much, gentlemen.
Appreciate it. See you guys. how the handshake was created by Optigo networks. You can find us on YouTube and at Optic.
Go dot net. Tune in in two weeks for the next episode.
