Joining me today is Russ Seagert from NetApp. He's the business development lead for manufacturing. Russ, thank you for joining me today. Yeah, >> thanks for having me. >> So, it's my understanding this is the your first time here at ICC. >> Yes, it is. Yeah, the very first time in person. Um, some other colleagues have been here in previous live events, but this is my very first time personally. >> All right. Excellent. And what do you think of it so far? >> It's been a great socializing environment because it's first of all just to get everybody all back together again. you know, it'snice to be in person to have those face-to-face conversations and um yeah, it's been really beneficial. It's really good turnout. Uh very happy with all the different conversations we've been having. It's such a wide variety of different people we've been engaging with. You know, whether it's theend customers and all the various industries that they represent, the systems integrators, um technology providers, it's uh it's quite themix ofpeople. And I think you've mentioned that NetApp in terms of what they provide is something associated with our recent release of the ignition cloud. Do you want to dive into that a little bit? >> Yeah, certainly. So I mean we've been around for about 30 years. I mean we were primarily a storage provider um you know just industrial um you know systems forjust storing of information. We separated our operating system from the physical storage and we made the operating system available to public cloud providers as well as different storage providers. So over the last couple of years we've announced firstparty services with you know AWS with Microsoft Azure with Google GCP with IBM cloud. So they all have our operating system embedded in that. So when we started taking a look at you know how you know companies like you know uh inductive automation were taking on premise data repositories and making them available to cloud. We started getting interested in this kind of industrial manufacturing. In other words, if this is very large data sets going to cloud, how are they doing it? What are the use cases? What kind of volumes of data are being used? And then we started taking a look at well, how our operating system and our methodologies could be applied to public cloud on premise and connecting the two together. There's been a lot of conversations about OT it convergence the benefits of you know the industrial manufacturing all connected with the enterprise and you know bringing operational information into financial you know the uh kind of more of the corporate side of things >> sharing information with vendors and partners looking at complex supply chain optimization>> data has to leave on premise and it's got to get to cloud >> with our operating system and our capabilities I mean we have the ability to facilitate connections of that data from, you know, localized storage to cloud. And because we're available everywhere, this kind of opens up a whole new suite of use cases. And so when inductive automation, we're talking about cloud, well, it's kind of like, well, we should be part of this discussion. So that's why we've really kind of engaged, you know, more with your architects and really kind of getting more of these conversations around connecting on premise to cloud and all the new use cases associated to that.>> I think you touched upon this. So what are the benefits of actually bringing the data to the cloud? What benefit would a organization have from that? >> Yeah, I think the everybody starts off with something really simplistic like disaster recovery. I'm just going to make a copy someplace out of my on premise over to the cloud. I'm just going to put it over there as a copy in case, you know, if I ever have a problem, malware attacks or anything like that, I can just recover. That's usually the starting conversation. But I think the more digitally mature companies, the ones that have maybe more complex environments, um, you're starting to see different workflows. In other words, if I make this data on premise available to cloud and I do that across all of my manufacturing production lines and facilities, I now start to look at new types of workflows. Some of it can be as simple as comparing plant A versus plant B. Well, until the data gets amalgamated together, I can't really do an intelligent comparison between one versus another. So there's a whole new set of analytics that now start to show up around enterprise best practices. How do I identify them? But until I pull the data together, I can't really do that. The other part we get into is around problem resolution. If something is going wrong with a particular piece of equipment on premise,the efficiencies and how fast I can make that real-time operational data available to my vendors and partners looking for spare parts. Do they have the available service technicians? If I have a synchronization between my on premise, you know, my repository around my operational data and I can make that copy available to my vendors and partners and I can discuss what's actually happening in my plant right now this second. How I interact with my vendors and partners changes the whole dynamic. I can solve problems in real time. you know, I don't have to create a copy of my data, send it to them hours or days later, get a problem resolution. We're working on things collaboratively, and that's again only available if I can give them dynamic access to what's going on in my plant. Cloud enables all these new types of analytic use cases and it just helps with overall operational efficiency. So until the data escapes the plant, I don't have the option of looking at all these new types of workflows. >> Inthe past two years, we we've seen these issues. Well, we had the pandemic, right? And so it it's caused a lot of it's illuminated a lot of things in terms of like our supply chain, manufacturing, allthose things. During this time, has any of that affected the way NetApp has done business or has progressed up until now? >> Uh absolutely. Uh it's I hate to say it, but I mean the pandemic wasa was a very beneficial thing to our company because it made people aware of the challenges that they really had within their supply chain. >> You know, until things go wrong, you you're just kind of like, eh, it always works like this. You know, this is, you know, this is just reality. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But it really forced a lot of companies to kind of take a step back and saying, I am having disruptions to supply. I don't really have a great awareness of, you know, what my partners are supplying or not supplying. I don't have that dynamic information because they didn't have a connected supply chain. They weren't looking at it from an enterprise connected multi-user environment perspective.>> So, they weren't really using cloud like maybe what they could have been. What happened with the pandemic is now it's like, okay, people are working from home. I can't have a hundred extra people on a production line. I've got to do more sensors. I've got to do more condition monitoring. I've got to do more things remotely. All of a sudden, now everybody's scrambling. It's like cloud,Cloud's the answer. You know, I've got to connect my supply chain. I've got to do, you know, more, you know, optimization of my production lines. Yeah. lines. Yeah. lines. Yeah. >> Everything digitalized. Everything went, you know, partnerships. Everything went global connectivity allat once. >> So, we've been trying to, you know, publish these bestase use cases. We've been doing all these first party services with all the public cloud providers.We're scrambling to try to keep up. So, it's been incredibly busy for us. And then you get companies like Inductive Automation saying, "We're going to cloud. Great. We agree. It'sthe best thing." best thing." best thing." >> Now, you have to educate people on what are those best practices. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How do you use this new environment? Because this is new for so many companies.>> Yeah. No, Ican I can see how that can be. Speaking of that, we'rehere at ICC. So, what are you looking forward here at the conference and what do you aim to do here?>> Uh, education. [laughter] So, uh, again, most people have not heard of NetApp as a company because, you know, we're always kind of that technology and behind the scenes. So, having face-toface exposure has been fantastic. People have just been walking by, they're looking at, you know, the presentations we've got, you know, going down in the lobby and they're kind of like, I've got that problem. we're trying to do, you know, global connected supply chain. How does your company help?>> So, we've been talking to targeting primarily the ISVS, um, you know, thesystems integrators, you know, who represent multiple customers. They're the ones ultimately helping the customers through business transformations. What are you trying to achieve as a business outcome? What is the architecture to get you there? They actually do a lot of the implementation. So by them coming in and saying okay inductive automation isreally embracing cloud how are we going to help our customers also embrace cloud what are those use cases what are they trying to accomplish how do we do that >> I've had so many conversations since the reception to day one and it's just been around this is what cloud can enable this is how you do it cloud is not scary it's not you know a security problem this is how we handle security issues. This is how we handle costs. This is egress costs. This is how we do private cloud versus public cloud. And we've been having just conversation after conversation because again, a company that supplies, you know, global lettuce supply versus somebody who's doing, you know, automotive manufacturing versus, you know, water management, the conversations have been so interesting, so diverse. you have to come up with very specific answers to very specific technical challenges >> and it's through an awareness um they're learning about cloud they're learning about ourcapabilities they're learning about inductive automations adoption of cloud but at the same time I'm also learning about when is it really applicable you know so I have all these different conversations okay we would use this technology in this particular circumstance or this case public cloud is great or this case maybe you should consider private cloud and until you have the face-to-face conversations we're not learning from each other so this whole ICC is really been>> it's an education both ways and just to try to say how are we going to work through this next phase of digital maturity OTIT convergence we're all in this together >> and it's been awonderful environment >> well I'mreally glad you're here and we're glad to have ICC in person. Speaking of having those conversation with customers, have you encountered any uh conversations where security has been involved where people ask about how that's handled? >> Uh yeah, very much so. I mean, in some cases, you know, when customers have been my plant is my plant, you know, um nothing leaves my plant, it's airgapped, I'm totally safe. Well, but to really benefit from these new use cases, at some point you are going to have to be connected. So a natural questions that come up is you know GDPR compliance it's going to be around you know well if I connect my plant to the internet well don't I open myself to all these security exposures um NetApp how do you handle this you know do you have any experience in this matter you know can I trust the public cloud can I trust your environment so we start getting into well okay you've never heard of us how do I tell you about my credibility so we get into the fact that well we are the storage provider and security provider for most of the uh US military departments uh for you know all the big you know aerospace companies and it's kind like I can show you their websites I can show you that we do this service for all these you know thesebig contractors I can probably handle your lettuce operation [laughter] >> you know I just you know wecan do this>> yeahthank you for joining me today Russ I really appreciate it thank you for sharing a lot about what net app does and how uh we're working with inductive automation. Um so thank you again and hope you enjoy the rest of ICC.>> Absolutely. I say more to come. I'm learning lots and this has been a great experience. Thank you.