Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 2)

Tony Paine: This was the beginning of our introduction to, what I would call today, Internet of Things. We were network-enabling a wide variety of data sources and making them available to other parties. Over the next couple of years, the industry got together and decided that vendors shouldn’t go and create their own inter-operability interfaces into their products. They should work together to come up with a standard. One of the standards that came out of that was a standard called OPC. It was a way to exchange information primarily running on Microsoft Windows PCs.

Kepware decided to go and incorporate that into a communications offering. It opened up the door for even more partnerships and for the ability of customers to go and buy products from different companies without the companies, necessarily, having to work together to create one-all solutions. We tie them together in a very integrated fashion. Kepware moved out from the HMI space, which was competitive to some of these partners and focused on building out connectivity to any data source that the customer may come in contact with in their facility. Today, we have over 150 communications drivers talking to a wide range of devices, systems, and software applications that can pull in the information and make it available.

The thing that’s interesting is the solutions that we had created in the early days, even until about five years ago, were running on a very private network, which was basically an island of automation. A lot of that was by design. People did not want to worry about security requirements. They didn’t want to develop a solution where someone from the outside world could poke their heads in and influence production. As such, a lot of the interfaces, standards, and protocols that allowed us to go and tie things together like software applications or devices, were very insecure protocols. They were very fast and efficient, but they were very insecure.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware
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