Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Good morning and good afternoon to everybody wherever you are on the earth. And welcome to this new session of the UAE Goes Live. Today we have a very special session. So until now we have seen a bit how and what is universalautomation.org. We have seen a few use cases with some companies like Patinum, like Emerim. and some others. And we have been discussing about the use of Universal Automation and let's say what are the advantages of using such kind of open platform in terms of total cost of ownership. And today we want to spend a bit more time with the vendors because as you know Universal Automation Autoric is a non-profit association made with users, vendors and universities. And we wanted to give today a bit the floor to the vendors. So I'm happy to welcome on stage with me today, André Fritsch from the company Stahl. Hi, André.

• Speaker #1

  Yes. Hello, Greg. Hello, everybody out there.

• Speaker #0

  I'm happy to have you with us today, André, and the company Stahl. Just saying a few words about that. Universal Automation Network was created. made official, let's say, in November 2021. And maybe not a lot of you know, but the company Stahl is one of the founding members of this non-profit association. So that's why it's a great pleasure to have André representing Stahl on the stage with me today. André, let's cut it short and let's see what you have to tell us. Maybe for the viewers which are with us today, it's not yet clear who is the company Stahl. Could you tell us a bit, a few words about it, maybe?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, sure. Sure, I can. Yeah, company Stahl was founded by a guy called Raphael Stahl. And that's also the secret behind our name, R.Stahl from Raphael. And that happened in... 1876, so quite some time ago. And it looks like we will celebrate our 150 years anniversary very soon. So, hey, we're exciting. And besides some other activities. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I think they should start organizing it right now. We need a lot of drinks. Besides some other activities, Stahl became one of the pioneers for explosion protection. And also that happened. That's also around birthday. So it's about 100 years ago when we entered the business of explosion protection. And to make a long story short, a 100-year story short, we are now represented in approximately 80 countries all over the world, 1,700 employees. And the last year was a very good one, very successful one that made our CEO also very happy. After these poor years, maybe you remember these things like COVID and so on. supply chain issues and so on. Looks like we are over it. And so we ended up at about 330.6 million euros. So that's not too bad. Yeah, today our company is 100% dealing with safety and explosion protection. So reliability, quality and all these things. That is one of the most important topics for all of us.

• Speaker #0

  And for your company, which is basically... looking at safety in general for the industry business. What were the drivers to decide to become one of the founding members of Universal Automation Network?

• Speaker #2

  Okay, that's of course a question I got a lot. So, style, explosion protection and all this. Why do we do that? Our product range, there is, of course, a lot of products that are not that much related to these open automation topics. So we have a range of electrical products, installation material and these things. We do have lighting equipment. But our third pillar, and that's the interesting one right now, that's the hazardous area products for process automation industries. And this product segment, the automation segment, we call it, we do have these interface solution. with intrinsic safety type of protection and all these and these interfaces they are installed between the automation level and the field level so we are we are always sitting between two chairs or in other words an open and let's say interoperable solution is is that something very essential for us and of course also our business so but like many other companies in our size we We cannot. implement these standards on our own. So we need organizations, strong organizations behind us. And that's finally one of the reasons why we are a member of, in fact, several of these kind of standardization organizations. And I think the UAO is certainly one of the most interesting ones of them. So we see a very big potential here.

• Speaker #0

  So yes, very big. I mean, very big potential and clear. I mean, openness is at the core of what universalautomation.org is doing. But it led me to think a bit. What are the, for Stahl, what are some specific, I mean, when you look at UAO's mission, UAO's initiative, where we want to go, what are some specific values which are? let's say resonating with Wichtal and your company values and goals?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, that is also related to our products segment of automation products and solutions. That started also a long time ago with simple products like safety barriers and these things. But nowadays we mainly talk about more complex products and that is something like remote diode technology or We now introduce the Ethernet APL field switches into the market, also a very important new technology. And such systems, remote IO, APL, and so on, they totally rely on the connectivity to host systems. So today, and the classic solution is to use a kind of real-time protocol. What is standardized? Let's say more or less standardized. That is already pretty good. but our experience over the years is that these standard protocols, the integration into host systems sometimes leave, let's say, some room for interpretation, to be polite. So finally, nearly every standard connection to a system is somehow different, depends on the system, depends on protocol, depends on the release versions, and, and, and. And that finally results into a pretty high complexity. and less easy interoperability. And in other words, the customers and our own, we do have a lot of work to make a standard connection running. And that's where now things like from the UAO, the common runtime system, that could be a very good solution. So this was one of our first ideas when we heard about it, that that can help. So if everything what is connected together is communicating together and is connected and everything works on the basis of the same runtime, then it should work by definition. So that is one very important argument for us. Interoperability, connectivity. And another point is, of course, that customers, they ask for more functionality, but on the other hand side, they expect to reduce complexity. And that's also something we always try. That's also part of our development strategy. Higher functionality, less complexity. And the reason behind it is pretty simple. So there are less and less senior experts out there that are trained on the technology and all the different technologies out there. And so mainly in a hazardous area, for example. that is a real challenge. You cannot just change something, modify something in a hazardous area. So by this UAO runtime that we use now, we are able to offer more functionality on the one hand side and in a hazardous area of course, but simplifying the work of our customers. And this package that was pretty, let's say convincing to us and to our management.

• Speaker #0

  So simplifying the work of your customers, basically, and the fact that we are using a common runtime, so not really working on the standards, which then leads to sometimes different interpretation from different people who are implementing a standard, but directly having, let's say, a plug and play or ready to use products, which you can directly implement into your system.

• Speaker #2

  Exactly. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  that's yeah yeah and i mean this is what uh what we were explaining um at the introduction uh for maybe for for some of the viewers who could not watch the the first uh release of the ua ghost life uh i mean We share a common technology, but it's not like we share a standard so that people or, let's say, companies have to go back to their R&D. And then here is the standard and they have some papers and then they have to implement a solution to meet that standard. But here it's really a solution, a ready to use package, which is available on GitHub, by the way. So you become a member, you get access to the source code. of this runtime which is hosted on GitHub. And you can directly copy and paste and port that runtime execution engine to your own platform. So that's really a massive gain in terms of R&D and easiness, for sure. And so in what ways do you see that the membership to to to uao contributes to the industry innovation because you said yes uh you you've been uh involved in many uh in many initiatives but you see that uh ua is very promising as a as an initiative and and why

• Speaker #2

  do you see that can you tell us a bit more about that part yeah i think one of the reason is uao is a really a team of companies and based on our experience with the other standardization organizations over the last decades this is a much more powerful method and much faster than doing it on your own and even if you're a big company even here it is much more difficult and sometimes you start to run into the wrong direction and what i think also what is very uh very helpful in this scenario they are also end users member of the group So if there are some ideas, concept questions, whatever, we can directly address our ideas and visions to the user and discuss it. And then, of course, on the other hand side, the users, they also do have a chance to get their wishes, their requirements into our group. So it's a very good dialogue and not just only running into one direction because this crazy product manager had some strange ideas. And in my opinion, that's much more effective. way to develop innovations and innovations that are really useful that's what i mean with this otherwise and everybody i think knows that you develop a great solution yeah and afterwards you start to search for the problem and that's something we don't want to do so all the discussions and and information exchange in the uao with all the members together and the member meetings and the the brainstorming i would not call it brainstorming maybe it's already a brain hurricane or something like that so that's a very effective way and so i think as a conclusion out of this so uao is a kind of let's say accelerator for innovations and that's finally of course good for for all our industries out there yeah

• Speaker #0

  i can only agree with you i see it from the uo side for sure we see us as as helping to to advance the the industry And for sure, you mentioned the vendors and the users. I mean, we need all this ecosystem. One we have not mentioned enough, and we will mention a bit more in the following live, are the universities as well, because they have a big role to play in all of that. Let's say the first obvious role is like training the next wave of technicians, engineers on the market who will handle the technology so that they know this technology. learned in school and everything. But as well, in terms of innovation, because we see a lot of PhD studies done, lots of research done around 6499 and around Industry of the Future or Industry 4.0, which could be, let's say, easily integrated into the automation thanks to the technology that we are sharing. So that's a massive... a massive look toward the the future for sure and um but uh for sure now we look at at the products which are on the market and um yeah we've said stahl um andre you've been uh one of the funding members so nine funding members within the universal automation network here you're representing one of them and uh you have been one of the first to release a product on the market I think it's called the RemoteIU.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Am I correct? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I was hoping that you ask for it. I prepared one more slide about it. Yeah, our remote I.O., that is something I think we call a kind of flagship product. So that's a product. And we started in this technology already many years ago. So 1987 was our first generation. And of course, far away from open standards and all this stuff. But today, The product that we offer, it's a remote I.O. system for hazardous area. As I mentioned before, that's our core competence, of course. And the product we see for installation in a zone one. And basically all over the years, we had exactly all the problems I was talking about. Connectivity, interoperability. So every new connection, new real-time protocol was a kind of challenge. And on top of this one, and that's a specialty also on the hazardous area products, we need to certify the product for the hazardous area. And there are several certification authorities. So you know ATEX, IACX, but there are more. There's FM in the US, there is in Metro in Brazil, and, and, and. And for this reason, you cannot just change the hardware. So that means if you have developed something, you have to stay with it for the next, let's say, 10 or maybe even 15 years. There's limited possibility or very costly to change something by, I don't know, adding some more memory into the system or something like that. All that is not that easy. And so we need a hardware platform, and that's what we develop with the system, that should be able to fulfill the requirements over the next 10, 15, maybe 20 years. So it's more or less oversized for standard remote IO. But because of this, we came to the idea that we are maybe able to integrate runtime systems into the product. And with this, we started to, let's say, to play around something like this with different open automation concepts. As we know, there are different concepts out there. There is from the NAMU or the NAMU open architecture that can be handled. the modular automation with MTP, the OPAV, and everybody is now working on some open solutions. So that's what we finally did. We were looking for runtime systems like the UAO runtime integrated into our unit and then we can offer, I would say, a very unique combination, hazardous area, so one installation, intrinsically safe I.O., and a runtime system like the uao runtime inside and all this together that is something where i made a new name for it because that's much more than just remote io now we call it the extended io now the extended io now is something that extends our functionality but on the other hand side extends the possibilities on the end user side and there's also the the home page here on the slide on the top. So there's some more information what all is possible. And you see also on the slide here, all the different logos, all these digitalization trends, open technologies. That is basically we now make use of our remote IOS system.

• Speaker #0

  So basically here we see that we have a product which is not the typical PLC system or DCS system or even

• Speaker #2

  let's say industrial pc here we speak about a remote io but having capabilities of yeah automation capabilities basically control or or data handling or whatever you wanted to do basically right you you will never be able and we are not interested in to control a whole refinery with hundred thousand io with it that's not our scope but for some local control applications And that's exactly what we are talking about. Local control. additional functionalities, simple logic combinations in the field, all this stuff, that's a perfect solution.

• Speaker #0

  So perfect for distributed tasks, local control, and local data handling. Yeah, for sure. And this is what we see as well with universal automation is that we are not yet only focused on the traditional automation system as what we were used to. to use in automation right now. But we see that thanks to the technology, we are kind of creating a new category of automation product basically, which are doing, which were not specifically doing automation before, but which could handle part of the task, what they are. they are what they are doing but um for me what's interesting as well and maybe that's a question for some of the the vendors out there who are interested in in in joining the association and in um let's say implementing uh the technology uh for me the question is how how was the process how was the process to implement and turn this remote io into a universal automation offer yeah

• Speaker #2

  Surprisingly easy. So we did similar projects in the past and when we started with universal automation, I expected a year of development or something like that minimum. But it turned out to be much simpler. And I talked to our software developer who was mainly involved in it. And he said, so the basic procedure is very straightforward. So you get, of course, you need the UAO runtime. that can be downloaded from the github for example then with such a repository link you download the source code to your machine install the development tools that are required of course and then you develop a build script with uh you can use the examples that are already there for example you can use it for soft plc raspberry pi and these stuff that's also possibility and with a build script you automatically download all the necessary sources from the compilation and then again it depends a little bit running on windows your visual studio or if you run it on a linux system like we're doing there's the gcc compiler and make tools available yeah as i said it depends a little bit what kind of platform do you use so for our system we use an arm processor on the lunix system unix linux system So here it's a very easy, straightforward way. There's an instruction available. And after doing the compilation, you got these binary files that are simply copied to the device or to our remote IO communication processor. And the only thing what you need then is to download and run the runtime on the device. And with this runtime on the device, you connect it to your development environment and then you can start to do programming. So I'm not a software specialist, but I understood this explanation and I understood it's not difficult. It's not rocket science. And finally, how long did it take with all the testing and so on? What, of course, is required? Maybe three, four months, something around that to get the system running.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  it's it's a pretty, pretty easy task.

• Speaker #0

  You started with the assumption, yeah, it will take a year and then three, four months that you get your product ready already. We've tested and ready to go to the market.

• Speaker #2

  I have to say we got a very good support by the teams, by the UAO team and the developers also support. But I think that is not exclusively for us. Everybody who will join the team can get this kind of support as well.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, sure, sure. but uh at least that gives a an idea from the from the field um i mean you've been implementing it and i'm sure uh in next uh sessions we get maybe some other vendors who could testimony about yeah how how difficult or how easy it was to to to implement the runtime onto their own product because that's that's uh uh for sure when we speak about standard or implementing standards Yeah, we speak. we speak more about yeah one year two years because you have the time to understand everything to to develop something for your own product to test it validate it and everything and here you get already answered basically you just need to to to to implement it onto your own on platform and um yeah uh i just uh maybe um one one one last question let's say uh looking at uh the market and the fact that the organization is growing. So we have today 87 members within Universal Automation Network. But since we are creating this new category of, let's say, software-defined automation products, where the remote IO is part of it, what would you say to other technology vendors which are still hesitating whether or not to join Universal Automation Network?

• Speaker #2

  yeah um at first i asked my competitors to just switch off at the moment no i'm i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure there's a lot of vendors now sitting there listening and and i know you're thinking now yeah yeah let's let them talk they will promote their solution and and tell us how good and easy everything is and so on and so on so that's the job of sales and marketing people of course. My message here is I think I don't want to persecute you, but we have to convince you. So just have a closer look at the technology. Maybe attend one of the seminars. So the UAO is doing a regular seminar. I think next week is another one coming up. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  in Vienna.

• Speaker #2

  In Vienna, exactly. Very nice. And, yeah, have a look at it. Talk with the experts. And let, yeah, or in other words, very easy. Seeing is believing. go there and have a look. So sooner or later, I think you will have to answer the question. So there will be, and that's our experience, and maybe you made the same one. More of my end users now ask for these open systems, open automation, open system solutions, and so on. And you have to find an answer. And one possibility, you can do it on your own. And you have maybe one, two, three years, I don't know. But on the other hand side, as we did it, we team up with the experts. And now our time to market is definitely much, much broader. So your decision.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah, sure. And I mean, here you said, yeah, you spoke about your competitors, but I mean, here we really speak about technology vendors in like general. So it could be more industrial PC manufacturer, standard PLC manufacturer, but doing as well company doing Raspberry Pi. Today we have come companies doing more gateways or we speak about as well switches could be intelligent switches because we see that they are getting more and more more and more power embedded so basically any product which has a CPU embedded could be potentially interesting for for that porting so yeah that's a very wide let's say range of products which could be used. And thank you for mentioning, by the way, the seminar that we have, that we are hosting next week in Vienna. So I've heard, by the way, that Vienna is the most livable city in the world. So I have to check my source, but we'll see that next week. And yeah, I mean, we are coming close to the end of this session. I don't see any... questions right now in the chat or on LinkedIn. So if you have any questions, you still have a few minutes to ask them and get the answer from André, from the experts. Yes, and I mean, yeah, as an organization, we are always looking to grow in terms of membership because this technology is quite good, but people need to know about it. And this is what we are actually doing, expanding that knowledge, knowledge towards users, knowledge towards technology vendors, knowledge towards universities. So, yeah, that's a way to do it, let's say. But before we come to the end of this session, André, do you have any last words that you want to share with our viewers?

• Speaker #2

  oh famous last words no i would say our ua runtime solution with the with the is1 plus uh especially now in the combination with zone one hazardous area uh we have started to promote it now a while and yes i've said we have a home page and everything and it has been extremely well received by end users and that shows me that we are on the on the right track and of course there is still a long way to go before there is all open systems everywhere and so on. But in general, for the moment at least, I would like to thank the UAO and the team behind it for this excellent cooperation. And I'm looking forward to a very promising future. So yeah, thanks to everybody.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, thank you. I just put one of the messages we see from James, which is thanking us. James, you have the possibility anyway this. This session is being recorded, so you have the possibility to watch it afterwards and come back to us if you have any questions. We'll be happy to... to help you with that. And so before I close this session, André, I really want to thank you for making this live, the first live with one of the vendors of Universal Automation. And especially, it's a great honor to receive one of the founding members of UniversalAutomation.org here on the stage with us, especially knowing that Stahl has a really great... successful history, so that's even more a pleasure to have you. And to the viewer, thank you for making it with us today, this afternoon or this morning, wherever you sit on the world. And we'll come back to a next session, which should be around the mid of July, where we discuss more projects, but this time with universities. So we get a bit to see all the categories of members of Universal Automation at all and speak more about use cases. So thank you all and I wish you a very nice day and a nice weekend. Bye bye!