The questions surrounding the event were:
What is Plex?
What will attendance look like now that Plex is co-managing the event?
What is the general tone of this “new look” ROKlive event, in what has typically been, a very technical, well-attended event?
Attendance compared to pre-COVID was at around half capacity, at around 6,000 attendants, confirmed by Rockwell event organizers. Of those, only 100 were Plex users (called Plexians). Purchased by Rockwell this year, Plex Systems is an Operations Management software suite for large end users. Their suite includes MES, ERP, QMS suites, among others. Still, more importantly, they offer an Asset Performance Management (APM) solution which realizes Machine health, Predictive Maintenance, and contextualization of OT data.
We met with several Plex/Rockwell salespeople during the event, and the drive for data pipelines was evident during each meeting. They need more Northbound connectors with OT data, as they are currently reliant on Kepware and PLC data for aggregation methods. Concurrently, we also met with several Plex users, and most are interested in these new enterprise solutions, such as APM.
We are seeing a general trend within Rockwell to focus on two driving factors, Security and Sustainability. We saw this at the various keynotes, the general booth space and makeup of Rockwell employees were required to go to the show. Let's dive into these two driving factors further:
Power monitoring is a BIG deal in Europe (10x cost of energy in US, currently at 20x) if they can shut down in peak hours or lower energy costs in some other ways by monitoring, significant savings can be achieved. Currently, to monitor energy, current sensors are deployed en masse. This is an incomplete solution as this scenario removes all Automation from the process. Can this change with CIP Energy?
Frank Schirra, Portfolio Manager of the FT Energy Manager software, coming out in Q1 2023, thinks so. He believes the main pains are getting key datasets out of the PLC and from non-PLC entities, essentially meters, in a harmonized way, such as the CIP Energy profile or, concurrently, OPC UA’s yet completed Energy Companion Specification. Rockwell’s intelligent devices portfolio, along with their EtherNet/IP partners does not use this CIP Energy profile very often. As well, Machine builders do not know what their end-user wants regarding Energy datasets. This may change in the future, due to VDMA leading a chair in the OPC UA Energy Companion Specification group and looking to define what dataset end users need, and how it is determined and defined. As a measurement of customer interest, his sessions were fully booked on both days. This should be noted as the FT Energy Manager software is not coming out for another 3 Quarters.
Jack Visoky, Principal Engineer, and co-father of CIP Security was at the event, had booth time, and had a sold-out tech session on CIP Security. This is unprecedented as an embedded communications profile has not had that effect at tech session events in the past. We had conversations with End Users looking to implement CIP Security in the Food & Bev, Pharma, and Water-Wastewater industries. This is a drastic change from years past. In addition, each keynote speaker from Rockwell brought up CIP Security and factory security and brought up these solutions as Rockwell’s unique value in the industry. Rockwell assigned a significant footprint on CIP Security, Claroty, and Rockwell’s Security Services division at the event. As well, two products, the 5580 and 5380 controllers are now CIP Security conformant.