Hello everyone. Hi Blake, great to see you.
Great, welcome to Digital Factory. It's awesome. How about this venue? It's pretty great. So the title of this event is Chaos to Convergence, so we're going to try and practice what we preach. We are some chaos, some convergence, right? The first thing we want to do is see how people feel here. Show of hands real quick: how well do you believe your shop floor technology on the factory floor is connected to your corporate stack where all the data runs to make all the business decisions and run your HR, finance, and so on? By show of hand, what do people feel? What is the convergence? We got work to do. We got like one hand. Wow, this is almost the best survey because usually you look at the survey and you want to go, oh, it's about a third of the people, but this is like, look at the signal. Not a single person, except one person raised. We should talk later. Okay, so now question number two. How many people out there in the audience are surprised to see the two of us sitting here together today? That's also interesting. I see one crew over there, a few more, but not a lot. So that's actually great. I'll start with a quick introduction. I don't think Rockwell Automation, a seminal brand in automation that changed the industry with the introduction of the PLC automation and many things over the years, requires any introduction. But Blake, you've been there for 38 years. How did you start your journey there?
Well, actually I'd been an intern with Rockwell's missile systems division doing engineering work, and then in the words of my professors at Georgia Tech, I forsook my education and went into sales. The rest is kind of history, as Allen Bradley, which remains the hardware brand of Rockwell, was being acquired by Rockwell International back in the mid-80s.
So from engineering to selling, that's interesting. If you think about the eras and the change, what do you look at broadly throughout this journey? Take us through some key points with this perspective. How did things change over the years?
Well, I think it's the same concepts. The integrated architecture that Rockwell talked about, being able to connect up the last mile of devices, the variable frequency drives, the motion control, servo amplifiers, to a programmable controller using standard unmodified Ethernet. That was the first big step towards openness, and that really powered several decades of growth by making it easy to understand how to connect these devices. We're moving much more with the convergence. People understand how to connect those devices up today. It's more about the software side. It's OPC UA, it's open APIs, being able to exchange data between software applications. The hardware is still terribly important, but it's about exchanging that data between different applications and doing it in an open way, because every installation on Earth is heterogeneous. Even if they love a vendor like Rockwell as much as they can, there's going to be different vintages of equipment, and there's probably some Siemens or Schneider that snuck in around the sides. Certainly the software is even more diverse, so that openness is absolutely what an end customer needs.
But you call it sneaking. I think it's actually that way of thinking about it, instead of vendors sneaking, they're actually collaborating to solve a customer problem. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's an inevitable thing.
It absolutely is. The market is still somewhat fragmented. With all the players and with all the new innovation, not just the established players, if you're a user or a machine builder, you're considering all the ways to get from point A to B. You're not just looking at the traditional suppliers of automation equipment. If one of the hyperscale providers or an IT startup has a clever way to do something, then you should be considering that as well. We as the traditional suppliers better be comparing ourselves against all the alternatives that you have.
That brings us to the result of our survey that surprised me. I think what's amazing about this signal is that everybody's ready for an ecosystem that actually works to solve the problems they need between shop floor, top floor, and left and right. It's omnidirectional. So my question to you is, how is Rockwell thinking about the collaboration, the partnership across this ecosystem and the emerging new tech stack that actually helps build and run the existing production lines and also the new production lines? What are you seeing, and how does it relate to those big macro trends that we've been following post-COVID, like reshoring? We've heard a lot about the resurgence, the American manufacturing renaissance, and how we need to build closer to the customer. What's your take, and how is your partnership strategy looking?
Let me start very broadly. As I came into this role, I talked about our approach to bringing the connected enterprise to life. We've been talking about the connected enterprise, which isn't just Rockwell connecting the enterprise, it's the ecosystem as well. First, understanding our customers' problems and being able to articulate a solution in their language. There's a certain amount of industry specificity that's important, and that domain expertise still counts. The pieces don't just come together without understanding the problem that needs to be solved. Next, it's the combined technology and expertise working together. Finally, and I think this is going to sort out the winners and the losers, is simplification. Automation is complex. It's too complex today. When my board asks me why isn't automation growing faster, it's that complexity. It's hard to do. Bespoke technologies and lack of open standards certainly make it more difficult. You ask about our approach. We built up go-to-market partners as well as technology partners to address these questions. We try not to add partners just because. We have to be able to clearly and succinctly answer the question: why did we partner with this company? It can't be just a neat technology in search of a problem. There better be something that we have seen multiple times to cause us to go through the effort to put a proper partnership in place. Otherwise, it's very easy. While I love comparing our universe of industrial operations software to what's happened in the internet over the past 20 years, and being completely unsatisfied with the speed and magnitude of changes in our industry compared to what the internet looked like 10 years ago, I don't think anybody here can remember what the internet looked like 10 years ago. It's moving so fast. While our operations side is moving fast, it's not as fast.
I totally agree about the complexity, but also about the simplicity and getting solutions at the hand of people. So let's practice what we preach number two here today. We met this morning and I said, Blake, when was the last time you were on a production line? I want to invite everyone here. At the back, there's a pop-up factory that Formlabs, Autodesk, and Tulip have put together to build a wireless Bluetooth mouse. You all can go back there and put yourself in whatever persona you want, but think about the operators, the people actually doing the work. How did you do as an operator, Blake? Tell the audience.
It was a pretty simple product, the mouse that we were putting together, and it taught me very quickly I shouldn't quit my day job. But the other thing it illustrated is that the vast majority of factories today are a combination of real-time control, the type of place that Rockwell lives, and keystroke entry data, manual operations. There's been a huge gulf between the two, and the opportunity to flexibly bring that together is still a really unmet need. To be able to have all the data you need to make the right decisions, to route workflows in the right way, it's going to be a combination of manual work as well as the fixed automation that we've lived on. It's very important, but human-centered approaches to solving that problem are really important. That's one of the things I learned.
