What can IT learn from OT and vice versa? How are these two groups collaborating and where is it difficult for them to see eye-to-eye? In this episode, Bill sits down with Jeroen Mackenbach, Engineering Technologist for the Edge Portfolio at Dell Technologies, who has extensive experience on both the IT and OT side, and who has been writing and speaking about the ways the two groups can relate to one another to work together.
What can IT learn from OT and vice versa? How are these two groups collaborating and where is it difficult for them to see eye-to-eye? In this episode, Bill sits down with Jeroen Mackenbach, Engineering Technologist for the Edge Portfolio at Dell Technologies, who has extensive experience on both the IT and OT side, and who has been writing and speaking about the ways the two groups can relate to one another to work together. They dive into the various perspectives each group brings and how this will influence the edge.
Key Quotes:
“What I see is that OT and IT, they aren't getting along because there's a lot of very different areas that they're interested in. It's a tough equation.”
“OT is doing a lot of innovation to make sure that they can actually utilize all of those resources in a deterministic way. And we now need IT to actually adopt it to make sure that we have the capabilities to actually run these virtualized workloads.
“It's a lot of interaction between the OT and the IT world, which is happening. And that allows us to also do a lot of innovation, together with these partners which is a good thing because we're making a lot of progress there.”
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(01:20) How Jeroen got started in technology
(02:37) Why did he move into IT?
(04:55) IT versus OT
(06:20) How can we remove friction between IT and OT?
(10:41) Tech cycles in IT, OT and at the edge
(13:03) Why Jeroen wrote a blog about IT and OT
(15:55) Is automation at the edge bringing IT and OT closer together?
(19:12) Operating at an IT scale with OT level security
(21:40) SCADA networks and security
(28:07) Collaboration between both ways of thinking
(34:13) What IT and OT learn from each other
(40:00) What is Jeroen focused on next?
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.
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Narrator 1: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Over the Edge. This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Jeroen Makenbak, engineering technologist for the Edge portfolio at Dell Technologies. In his work, Jeroen has unique insight into the polarizing relationship between IT and OT and the different perspectives and value that each side brings.
Narrator 1: In this conversation, Bill and Jeroen lay out some of the key philosophical differences between both sides, the opportunity present if they work together, and how it will impact the Edge. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsors.
Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with Edge solutions.
Narrator 2: From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi cloud environment, we're here to help you simplify your Edge so that you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell. com slash edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
Narrator 1: And now please enjoy [00:01:00] this interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Jeroen Makenbach, Engineering Technologist for the Edge Portfolio at Dell Technologies.
Bill Pfeifer: Jeroen, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here today. Great to be here. So. A great way to start of where we are is to talk about where we've been. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in technology?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Oh, well, actually my granddad was an inventor and he had a little shed where he created all kinds of innovative things.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And that's sort of how I got, got into this. I, I sort of built a car in my upstairs room. And as a kid, when I was around seven with a TV and a bit of furniture, some. Parts of a dishwasher and that sort of was the steering wheel of the car. And so at the age of nine, I started to work really in on computers.
Jeroen Mackenbach: I got my Commodore 64 when I was nine, started with basic and then pretty, pretty fast switched over to assembly. [00:02:00] And then when I got to high school, I was pretty advanced. A lot of the teachers picked me out of the class and said, you know, I lost all this work. Can you help me get it back? It was kind of funny.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So yeah, that that's really how I started and it evolved in the years after it wasn't, wasn't a question of what kind of education I would do. It had to be technical. So I chose electronics and here we are.
Bill Pfeifer: Okay. So what took you from that into a career
Jeroen Mackenbach: in IT? That happened much later. Funnily, I started working on aggregator machines, which had some computers running them, but eventually after a lot of moving between jobs, I ended up working for one of the largest IPC companies.
Jeroen Mackenbach: New World, Taiwanese based, and that's really where I started going into, and that is really OT based. So after about 20 years in, in that OT space, I went into 2018, [00:03:00] and I was part of the initial IoT initiative within Dell, supporting the gateways, and now I'm part of the Edge business units and helping the architects and, and the TME team to do what they do.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Cool. And you introduced
Bill Pfeifer: two things there that not all of our listeners might know. IPC and OT. Can you explain a little bit about what IPCs are, what they do, why we care about them, and then what OT is?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Yeah. If you take a look at a, at a traditional computer, it has a very short lifecycle. We try to come up with a new model for every iteration of, for instance, an Optiplex every year.
Jeroen Mackenbach: It's got the latest and greatest technology in there. If you look at traditional operational technology, it's important that you have stability over time. So Dell has, for instance, their Optiplex XE versions, which have a much longer lifespan to assure that the product that I buy today, [00:04:00] I can still get within the next couple of years.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And that's a very important feature to have specifically for these OT workloads, because changing a product in a manufacturing environment can have a large effect on re qualifying. And that's why we do that. So IPC is literally an industrial PC. OT is the operational technology, and that's different than what you see in the IT industry.
Jeroen Mackenbach: In IT, it's all about the information that we're working with. In OT, it's really the operations that are happening, for instance, inside our factories. It could drive energy plants, traffic lights, that's really the operational technology as I refer to.
Bill Pfeifer: Good overview, thank you. So, IT, information technology, pretty much everybody knows who they are, what they do, right?
Bill Pfeifer: They handle the information, they handle the computers, the data centers, things like that. Their [00:05:00] job tends to be more... modernize the business, get the latest technology, get the latest features. OT, the operational technologists, I've often heard referred to in industrial factories, especially as the business because that's where you're actually manufacturing the stuff or, you know, retail selling the stuff, transport moving the stuff.
Bill Pfeifer: So they operate the heavy machinery and the core of the business. That generates some interesting challenges with the edge because with edge computing we're primarily focused on putting IT type technologies and features into OT type spaces. And IT has more change the business and OT has run the business and there's often been friction between those two things.
Bill Pfeifer: So you've been on both sides of this conversation, which I don't think, we haven't had a guest on the show in at least a long time, if at all, that can really talk about both sides of that I T O T split. I know there's a lot of friction between them, and when you talk to different people, I've heard, they're [00:06:00] merging, they're converging, they're becoming the same.
Bill Pfeifer: Uh, okay. I've heard they have such different mandates, they hate each other, they will never get along, they will never merge, and it becomes, you know, this very polarizing conversation. What are your thoughts on those differences between IT and OT and how we can help remove some of the friction between them?
Jeroen Mackenbach: It's an interesting thing and the IT and OT equation is definitely what you see traditionally is that OT has utilized a lot of the IT best practices, but what you see now is due to the fact that we've been all at home for quite some time during the last couple of years and all of these factories, they couldn't be reached.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Which was a big problem for the OT vendors. I mean, they could still work from behind their laptop, they could do email, but actually getting onto the production line was a big issue. So what we see now is that there's an increased interest of being able to get to these [00:07:00] factories remotely. But also the assets that, that are out there because being out there is not a common thing anymore.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And we've been sort of really good at this in the OT is actually adopting those best practices. What I see is that OT and IT, they aren't getting along because there's a lot of very different areas that they're interested in. It's a tough equation. If you take a look at me, when I joined Dell in 2018, I didn't know what the container looked like.
Jeroen Mackenbach: I hadn't touched the container for, uh, for the 20 years that I previously worked in this industry. So I had to pick up the pace there. And it's interesting that also in the lingo, there's a lot of different things that change in those conversations that IT and OT are having. It's all about 5G, but the way that, for instance, OT [00:08:00] people talk about 5G is very different than the IT people are talking about.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Hmm. You see that connected factories are something which will likely happen in the future. But in many scenarios, you see that IT. Has really a user behind it. So if I want to make a security posture for a persona, which is using an IT environment, you have to manage that user. If you like, take a look at an OT environment that in many cases is a machine to machine communication and the machine to machine communication is something which is unattended.
Jeroen Mackenbach: There's no one there. And that brings a whole lot of complexities because that user might be not really a user, but it's more of a consumer of services of those IT environments or OT environments, so to say. If you take a look at a [00:09:00] point of sale, that probably has some users using that from an administrative point of view.
Jeroen Mackenbach: But the users that are actually looking at, for instance, a point of interest, there's not really a user. It could be anyone to pick up that content. So it's in many ways, there's very different personas that are sort of behind the steering wheel in this. And the way to solve that is very different. And you mentioned
Bill Pfeifer: Industrial PCs having a longer lifespan.
Bill Pfeifer: So is that speaking to the pace of technology adoption or what's driving that necessarily?
Jeroen Mackenbach: The key differentiator for industrial PCs is that they're using proven technology. You cannot have a glitch in your network when you're communicating, for instance, with a robotic arm. If that robotic arm is not communicating sufficiently or [00:10:00] constantly, then there might be interference of humans that are getting in the way.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So if there's a new technology adopted, the, I mean, if I can send an email, that's one. But if I want to drive a robot with this, there's a whole lot more of validation and certification that's required in order to have that specific PC to do that job. And that's making the industry PC compared to a regular IT PC very different.
Bill Pfeifer: I guess the operational technology is much more about deterministic. Rather than the best performance where an IT life cycle tends to be like three to five years ish. What do you typically see or expect from an OT life cycle? And as we get toward more IT in OT spaces, what do you think that's going to do to the typical life cycle of edge computing devices?
Jeroen Mackenbach: There's two things. While we see [00:11:00] that the IT and OT folks are getting closer together, there's also the concept of virtualization, which essentially could allow you to abstract the hardware. And that sort of removes the burden of a lot of that validation that has been done in the past. If it runs in this VM here, it can run in that VM somewhere else.
Jeroen Mackenbach: It's the same with a container, right? A container is very portable in its way, where the majority of the problems lie in, in this adoption is that the legacy interfaces, a lot of these OT environments have very bespoke protocols to solve certain problems. You have a serial port that is attached to just one device.
Jeroen Mackenbach: If you have RS 485, you could have multiple devices, but. There's an injection point towards the industrial PC that is that serial port that's [00:12:00] located on that device. Now, in a containerized environment or a virtualized environment, it doesn't matter where that workload runs. That serial port is sort of dictating that it has to run on that device.
Jeroen Mackenbach: If you see now a lot of these industrial protocols moving over an IP based or a network based protocol, you'll see that there's a shift happening in this space where it doesn't really matter where these workloads are running, because if there's a network, they can communicate with each other. And that could be a physical network, that could be Wi Fi, but it could also be 5G.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So that's taking a big leap in what we're seeing in the, in the OT space.
Bill Pfeifer: Now, you wrote a blog not too long ago about port isolation. And it was with the idea of kind of highlighting some of the differences between IT and OT. Would you give us a quick highlight of that and what prompted that blog?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Yeah.
Jeroen Mackenbach: It's one of [00:13:00] these things that you're in a conversation with the architects and we were native edge uses virtualization. And that is a form of micro segmentation to secure workloads. And the way that you isolate these workloads is in an IT environment is port isolation, because the applications that are running inside these VMs, they expose ports, they expose services.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And looking at that, and also looking at our gateways, which have also a concept of port isolation, which is completely different. Port isolation in an OT environment is literally making sure that they are built with the capabilities of allowing the legacy serial port, for instance, to be resilient for exterior.
Jeroen Mackenbach: The port isolation on, for instance, our gateways is very different because these [00:14:00] devices, when put into the field, could be exposed to, for instance, lightning strike. They could be exposed to electrostatic discharges. So in OPTI, port isolation is typically focusing around making sure that these devices are resilient against these sort of exterior
Bill Pfeifer: forces.
Bill Pfeifer: I think that actually is a really good, I like the blog and I like that it kind of sums up. That IT OT conversation in a microcosm, right? IT port isolation is mostly about segmenting off typically bad users or something like that for logical security. OT port isolation is about physically protecting the gear from that machine to machine connection so that things keep running.
Bill Pfeifer: Which, again, that's pretty well, like, the conversation about OT's primary job, IT's primary job. And that is using the same term, they can be talking about very different things. So if you get two of them talking to each other about [00:15:00] port isolation, they're not talking about even vaguely the same thing, and that's going to create some conflict.
Bill Pfeifer: Absolutely. Yep. I love it. Yep. So kind of jumping forward a topic, a chunk of the edge computing out there is so that you can automate, you can generate intelligence and you can do. something that makes it worth installing all of this stuff. The IT side of that tooling is getting pretty sophisticated with DevOps and some really good tools available and some really good understanding of the automated actions that we want to take.
Bill Pfeifer: But does that help OT? Is that including OT type workloads? So, putting that a different way, is automation at the edge helping bring IT, OT closer together? Or is it just another space where we've split the two apart and we're looking for different
Jeroen Mackenbach: things? No, I, I think that if you take a look at my experience with talking to customers, what they typically do is [00:16:00] if they wanted to deploy a Windows, Windows workload somewhere, what they typically do, and I think the majority of this is, is about skill and IT knows how to handle that skill.
Jeroen Mackenbach: If you look at OT, they're creating a snowflake in many cases. And what you typically see is that if you take a look at that Windows environment, what they're trying to build, they're sort of prepping that workload to do what it needs to do. And then they are making a copy of that and they multiply that.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Across the world to all of their sites, which for a security posture is the absolute worst that you can do because all of these entities that you're putting out there are the same, which means there's no uniqueness at all in these devices. So if one of these devices gets exposed. All of them are exposed and are at jeopardy.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So we've seen this happening with large [00:17:00] deployments that we've been doing where customers use that sort of wrong practice. And I think if you take a look at how attestation works and things that you typically do in a data center in a very methodical way and making sure that there's enough randomness in these devices, that there's attestation, that there's faulting into a system where it can onboard to, where it has a control plane that gives you access to a manage, manageability, that is something which we can.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Give to the OT environment and making sure that at least those best practices for deploying these workloads can be done in an unmanned way because what we've seen is that there's a lot of manual work by implementing these workloads into the field. You need skilled staff that goes into these factories and deploys these workloads.
Jeroen Mackenbach: If you take a look at what we're doing with Native Edge, the only thing that someone needs [00:18:00] to do to attest a device is essentially put in a power and a network cable. And I think that's a very valuable thing that we're giving to, to our customers, specifically in the OT environment. It's, one, a very secure way, and it's also reducing a lot of labor intensive workloads where we allow customers to bring these workloads to these edge locations without skilled staff.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Now, you
Bill Pfeifer: mentioned that OT installations have typically been kind of snowflakes. Which makes sense, right? If you're running a factory, you need your factory to run. It's more of a, like a craft kind of bespoke thing. And IT tends to operate more at scale. So, then you said, you were talking about the security aspect of it, right?
Bill Pfeifer: And deploying something at scale if something's vulnerable, then all of it's vulnerable because it's all the same. Where's the middle ground there that we find between IT and OT, right? We want to [00:19:00] operate at IT type scales, but at OT type. Reliability and customization. And as we look at edge computing, how do we find that middle ground of, you want to make everything the same so that it's easy to manage, but you want to make everything unique so that it's hard to attack.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Yeah, no, this, this is the challenging bits, which we are trying to solve in our edge business unit, and we have a lot of expertise on helping customers to do that. And that's why we have this three tiered approach where we sort of. Take our Dell validated designs and those are, it's not a fixed solution, but at least it lays down the tooling.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So the OT folks can actually implement their solution onto the field. Then we have the hardware where we have longevity and we have the ruggedness that's needed in these endpoints. And we have Dell Native Edge to actually orchestrate these two and make [00:20:00] sure that we can deploy these at ease. And then the OT folks that are running the factories can actually take that snowflake or take their snowflake and make sure that the automation that they require have the best ability or the best of breed tooling to actually allow them to do that.
Jeroen Mackenbach: If you look, for instance, how do you license a SCADA package, that's a very tedious job. Now, what if you can essentially. In your workflow, when you're deploying all of these OT workloads, allow them to integrate that licensing, but also the applications that are running inside these SCADA workloads, allow them to actually deploy on the devices that have certain criterias.
Jeroen Mackenbach: That's an important, very important thing to be able to do that for these OT customers, because [00:21:00] In many cases, this had to run through either an ISV that did that for them, or it had to run through a second touch facility that had to do that for them. Now we provide tooling that allow you to actually orchestrate all of that and bring these bespoke solutions in blueprints towards our end nodes.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And that's a very powerful.
Bill Pfeifer: And in there, you mentioned SCADA networks, which is another thing that not everybody is likely to know. Can you talk about what that is, what that means?
Jeroen Mackenbach: SCADA is, it's a process of... Controlling the manufacturing line. So essentially, if you, if you look at Outlook is sort of your dashboard when you do your IT work and you work on your emails, SCADA is a means of.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Interacting with your factory, that's essentially what it's doing. So SCADA is a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and [00:22:00] that's essentially what, uh, what you do here. You supervise and control the data acquisition that's happening inside your plant. And
Bill Pfeifer: traditionally SCADA networks were OT based, running a factory or something equivalent.
Bill Pfeifer: They weren't connected to anything, so you didn't have to worry about security. So they weren't necessarily built with security in mind and, you know, constant patching and all of connecting to the internet. But now, over time, people want to remote access them and connect them to other devices, and so they are connected.
Bill Pfeifer: So what does that do? How do you maintain a perfectly secure, super tight, Manufacturing network that's not super tight and perfectly secure.
Jeroen Mackenbach: I mean, all of a sudden there, the cloud came and people wanted to have access where normally these two worlds were completely isolated. You now see that a lot of these, and this is mainly due to the initial IoT.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Incentive, which has [00:23:00] been happening. It's connecting all of these assets to give greater insights into your production environment. And that is bringing a lot of complexity in your, your security posture, because essentially you're gonna, you're going to be exposed to the outside world. If you, if you have these applications connected to, for instance, a cloud instance.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Or a remote data center. And the major problem here is that a lot of these protocols, specifically the legacy protocols, like for instance, a Modbus or other protocols, they don't have really a security posture. I mean, you query the value from that sensor and the sensor is going to give the answer back.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Now, what if that answer. It's a third party that actually intercepted that first message and gives you the wrong sensor value back, then that process is obviously going to take actions on, on the wrong information that I received out of that sensor. So what you really [00:24:00] want to do is make sure that you create an environment where you trust nothing.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And that's where sort of the zero trust. Architecture come into play, which assures that everything that's inside that network, and that network is becoming more complex for a lot of our customers. You need to make sure that the data, the devices, the network, the applications, and everything else there is Sort of untrusted until they identified themselves and are constantly identified and assured that they are who they are, they say.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And that's sort of the baseline for Zero Trust, where you have these five entities that assure that everything in that environment is well understood and well known, you have automation on detection mechanisms. So if there's, for [00:25:00] instance, something happening which is unexpected, a user logs in from an unknown location, we want to be able to have analytics around that and making sure that there can be taken action in order to prevent any more damages happening there.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And those are some of the learnings that we've, as Dell has taken from our project forward, which we've done with NIST and the DoD, Department of Defense. Most of those learnings we have adopted in our native edge design to ensure that we have as a baseline a zero trust architecture. And it's a complex thing because how do you place these legacy workloads into these environments?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Anything you add there is going to be a compromise if you don't follow these same principles. So it's a pretty big challenge for a lot of our customers and we aim to help with native edge at least starting that journey for a lot of our customers.
Bill Pfeifer: So what [00:26:00] SCADA networks, which isn't a whole ton, I will admit, is they started out primarily running factories.
Bill Pfeifer: But then it moved out to things like... controlling electric generation facilities and water pumps that pump into neighborhoods and cities, major, major big water pumps, not little ones, not like the sump pump in my house or something. And so now we start to get into dynamically controlling them. Like as we get renewable power, this is where we tie into the energy industry.
Bill Pfeifer: We used to The power company would estimate how much power they needed to produce, they'd spin their generators to produce it, there you go, you push it out. But now you have dynamic power coming in from, is the sun shining, is the wind blowing? There's more power, you can't just orbit it around in your power network, it has to be like up to the moment accurate.
Bill Pfeifer: So, you're dynamically changing these generators and how much they're spinning. But if they get hacked, then you can overspin them and tear them apart. Major [00:27:00] problems, because they're not at the corner store to replace them. So, how do we integrate that with intelligence, but with full security? Because you can't have, you can't have bad things happening there.
Bill Pfeifer: It's really bad. So, what's the integration between IT and OT there? I mean, again, you know, OT was, was all about. It has to be secure, it has to run all the time properly, no unexpected outages, no... You know, no, oops, it's rebooting. We'll be back in 10 minutes. And right. Like, yeah, the 911 system. Yeah. Call back in 10 minutes.
Bill Pfeifer: We're rebooting. No, that doesn't work. So how do we actually execute this? Right. We have the IT technology moving into the Are the OT practitioners becoming more IT like, or do we have them working together and collaborating in this space? Like, how do, how do we actually execute this to keep the OT type [00:28:00] stuff working and secure, but operating at scale and automatically?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Yeah, and I think the same thing happens, like, with that IPC in the past. Once that's proven technology. The OT folks, once they've fully tested that, will actually start to adopt that. If you take a look at a framework like EdgeX Foundry, which is completely based on containers, we see that customers are gonna, gonna adopt that.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Same with Litmus Edge, that's fully containerized workloads. That has proven itself now in such a manner that the OT folks will actually start to adopt that. But I mean, we're, what is it, seven years down the line when we started our IoT initiative. So there are very late followers and this is typically for that industry.
Jeroen Mackenbach: They start to adopt technologies once, once they're fully proven. If you ask to someone, uh, now, do you want to adopt Kubernetes [00:29:00] inside your OT environment? They're probably going to say, not today. I mean, it's great for the data center, but I mean, I just have two workloads that do my edge compute and that's sufficient.
Jeroen Mackenbach: On the other side, we see now that also, and this has got to do with generations, right? I mean. When I wrote my first program that was in basic and assembly, now the people that have been after me have learned higher abstraction languages like Java, C sharp, and these types of programming languages, and they started using that, and that's how they started to build their sort of environments, and what we see now is that practices like CI CD pipelines and things like that We're actually going to see those practices also with our OT customers.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Specifically, if they have very young staff working in these teams, because there are [00:30:00] customs with DevOps and these types of environments. If you take a look at a typical OT guy like myself, I mean, I tend to, to sort of get it back to where it all started, right? And it's a matter of generations that this will take for them to adopt this.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And I think at the moment it's prime time for a lot of, at least what we see larger customers that has definitely adopted a cloud native environment inside their production environments. Things like virtual PLCs are not something which are sort of in the future. They are happening today. It's not something which, which is mass deployed, but we definitely see that there's a share amount of customers that start to adopt these types of technologies.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Which is exciting. I mean, it's where we do this.
Bill Pfeifer: Okay. And PLC, another OT
Jeroen Mackenbach: term. Programmable Logic Controller. So, [00:31:00] if you have a discrete task that you want to do in an environment, measure a sensor and take action on that. You cannot send that information, you need to first measure that information and you need to take direct action.
Jeroen Mackenbach: There's a sort of a time criticality in there. The only devices that can actually do that are PLCs because they have the capabilities of taking those actions within the time criticality that's allowed to, to act at. That's where you use a PLC.
Bill Pfeifer: Right. And correct me if I'm off, please, but PLCs were typically installed one to one with the machinery that they were watching.
Bill Pfeifer: They're usually running a real time OS, so it's not an interrupt driven OS that does multitasking and things like that, so that they're just focused on. Watching that machine and doing the thing that they do, digitizing the output, providing automated, limited automated responses, things like that. And so abstracting that and putting it onto a VM or something [00:32:00] like that, taking a real time OS and putting it on an interrupt driven OS becomes, again, that ITOD conversation of, well, if the processor's busy, you may be delayed a couple seconds.
Bill Pfeifer: And that can be a problem.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Exactly. And that's something which in non Time critical environments, you can do that in a virtualized environment, but I mean, if you have another workload, which is consuming too many resources, um, and the other VM is doing its preemptive task, I mean, obviously there's going to be an effect on that real time OS that's running there.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So that's something which is for non critical task at the moment, something which is possible. In the future, we probably see that time criticality and that virtualized environment will actually be much more capable of running these OT workloads. When that's going to happen, I'm not sure. We see a lot of evolvements in that.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Also when, when [00:33:00] networks mature, because when imagine all of these different workloads, you're going to have video running, you're going to have. Your PLC is running, you're going to have motion running, you're going to have all of these different systems running on the same network. Some of these communication needs to be deterministic.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So, there cannot be, I mean, if I'm sending an email, it cannot be that all of a sudden this A robot is stalling because I just was downloading this ISO or watching this, this video or recording some sort of a camera footage.
Bill Pfeifer: You shared a large YouTube video and now the robot is waiting.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Exactly. Exactly.
Jeroen Mackenbach: You don't, you don't want to have that happening, right? And there's a lot of new technologies coming at us that allow us to cope with the time sensitivity also in these networks.
Bill Pfeifer: So it sounds like OT is adopting a lot of, much of. The IT type technology, they're just waiting for IT to [00:34:00] fully test it until it's understood and it becomes more deterministic, as you said before, right, IT is more about maximizing performance and lower latency, but OT is much more about deterministic.
Bill Pfeifer: So once that tech becomes solid and fairly well automatable and deterministic, then they're pulling that into their
Jeroen Mackenbach: operation. Yeah, but it's also working the other way, right? What we see is that OT is doing a lot of innovation to make sure that they can actually utilize all of those resources in a, in a deterministic way.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And we now need IT to actually adopt it to, to make sure that IT worlds, we have the capabilities to actually work, run these virtualized workloads. So it's a lot of interaction between the OT and that allows us to also do a lot of innovation together with these partners. Which is a good thing because we're making, making a lot of progress
Bill Pfeifer: there.
Bill Pfeifer: I think that's an angle that. Is often [00:35:00] missed. And I don't think I've heard it said that way before, but it, I would think, you know, we talk a lot about OT, learning from it, how to operate at scale and newer technologies and things like that. But we have a lot of business benefits that could be had if it can learn from ot, how to build the technology so that it's usable by OT, so that it's reliable enough, deterministic enough fits the needs.
Bill Pfeifer: That makes a lot of sense. So as we look forward a little bit, what comes next for IT and OT at the end? Do you think we're going to get more friction before we get less? Do you think they can start to merge their charters and learn from one another to find that balance? Where do we go and how do we help them get there?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Well, I think that's what we see is that we're going to have a lot of commonality and a lot of common things where both the OT and the IT people have things to solve for. If [00:36:00] you look at AI, if you look at 5G, these are challenges that will without a doubt have Effect on both, both of these worlds, your car is going to be equipped with 5G and AIML.
Jeroen Mackenbach: So the OT people that are working on the autonomous driving systems inside these systems. We'll need to interact with the folks that are actually doing the backbone infrastructure in these data centers that actually provide the insights for the drivers behind the wheel or no drivers at all. I mean, that's just the passenger at that point.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And this is the thing. There's a lot of people that are scared to adopt new technology. But at the moment we see that there's such big advancements that we're making in this, these areas. We have to meet in the middle. So we need to keep talking to each other. And that's what I'm doing in a lot of sessions and seminars, which I'm going to.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And, but also I have a lot of [00:37:00] discussions with peers, CTOs in other industries, in the OT industry, in the IT industry, and making sure that we get a better understanding about what's making people tick in these, these environments. And if the leaders there can help advance this. I think that we can do beautiful things.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Yeah, it's a matter of being open for adoption of these new technologies and making sure that they're finding a place. If we have challenges that we need to solve, we need to talk to one another and making sure that we can, we can make it work. That makes
Bill Pfeifer: sense. Yeah. I, I can say for sure. I mean, I think back on my career and the surprise reboots and the applications that locked up and the data that got accidentally deleted and things like that.
Bill Pfeifer: I don't want to be in an autonomous vehicle that was designed by someone who thought like me. I want something more deterministic and reliable than my career has been. Sorry folks. Yeah. . So, yeah, I, I hope [00:38:00] there's, there's a good balance to be struck between those two groups and we can really get it learning from OT about how to put technology into the OT space better, and OT continuing to learn from it about what to adopt and how to keep everything as reliable as they've done.
Bill Pfeifer: That's not an easy job I would imagine. Cause you want all the shiny new things, but then you can't have anything
Jeroen Mackenbach: great. No, it's funny because what I saw is that for the PC99 specification was dictating that we got rid of floppy disks. And actually we were working with, with a large silicon vendor and, and an equipment builder to assure that they could go and move to new technology.
Jeroen Mackenbach: Funnily enough, the Silicon Vendor in 2012 still wanted to have that floppy disk inside their systems, which Funnily Makes sense because they had to do updates and stuff like that, which were, yeah, [00:39:00] difficult to do with other media, but it's these things, right? Um, which make it complex because someone designed something in at some points.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And this is typical for what's happening in the IT industry is we cannot let go of a lot of ancient technologies. And sometimes you just have to do that in order to advance. Mm hmm. We
Bill Pfeifer: do like our legacy stuff. It just keeps working and we
Jeroen Mackenbach: leave it alone. Exactly. Exactly.
Bill Pfeifer: So what comes next for you? What do you think you might focus on next?
Jeroen Mackenbach: Well, I think that I'm becoming sort of part of the old generation. I was born in 71. I got my first PC when I was nine. That was sort of the initialization of where it all started. And PCs became sort of available to the masses. Since I've been sort of going through all of these phases and have seen both worlds for [00:40:00] me, I think there's.
Jeroen Mackenbach: A task that I help educate my peers, mainly the younger people, I have two daughters and I always said, well, you have to have at least one programming language a year, old. She's 20. She has no programming languages skills at all. She speaks other languages. But so for me in my peers, there's a lot of people that are working in these types of environments.
Jeroen Mackenbach: And I'm. Absolutely looking forward to work with these people because they have a lot of other insights, which I don't have and can bring beautiful things. So yeah, it's a learning journey. That
Bill Pfeifer: is definitely, definitely true. And I appreciate the opportunity to learn from you today. I have not gone that deep into the OT perspective.
Bill Pfeifer: There's a whole lot of conversation about IT OT, and it's usually held by either IT or by OT. And go figure, we're not coming to that middle [00:41:00] ground because we're having them in isolation. We're all about our silos. We love our silos. My goodness, they're delicious. So this was a fun conversation. I really appreciate having kind of both sides of that.
Bill Pfeifer: Perspective and following your journey through technology. How can people find you online and learn more about your work? Keep up on all the good stuff you're doing.
Jeroen Mackenbach: I have regular blogs that I put out. They can be found on the info app and I share a lot of this information on LinkedIn.
Bill Pfeifer: Fantastic. Thank you so much for the time today.
Bill Pfeifer: And for the perspective, love the ITOT conversation. I've been looking forward to having one of these. Somewhere along the way. So, I'm glad we connected. Yeah, thanks so much for the time. Been a pleasure. Thanks for
Jeroen Mackenbach: your time, Bill.
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