Smart Manufacturing Mindset™: Technology Providers Powering Manufacturing’s Future

Explore how today’s leading technology providers are shaping the future of Smart Manufacturing. This episode brings together leaders of some of the world’s great manufacturing technology providers, aligned around one critical goal: driving openness and interoperability to strengthen the U.S.’ manufacturing competitiveness.

🎙️ What to Expect:
We’ll hear from three distinct categories of technology leaders, all of whom are active CESMII members:

🔹 Established Market Leaders in control and information systems, with decades of experience in industrial automation.

🎙️ Cyril Perducat, SVP & Chief Technology Officer, Rockwell Automation
🎙️ Andre Marino, SVP Industrial Automation Business, Schneider Electric
🎙️ Del Costy, President, Siemens Digital Industries

🔹 Cloud Hyperscalers bringing advanced data infrastructure, AI, and scalable platforms into the manufacturing space.

🎙️ Dayan Rodriguez, CVP Global Manufacturing and Mobility, Microsoft
🎙️ Joseph Rosing, Worldwide Head of Smart Manufacturing, AWS

🔹 Born-in-Industry 4.0 Innovators – companies built from the ground up around digital transformation, smart manufacturing, and AI-ready architectures.

🎙️ John Harrington, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, HighByte
🎙️ Colby Clegg, CEO, Inductive Automation
🎙️ Doug Lawson, CEO, ThinkIQ

Whether you're a manufacturer, integrator, or technology provider, this is your chance to see how collaboration across these domains is accelerating Smart Manufacturing adoption – and how your organization can play a part.

© 2025 CESMII - The Smart Manufacturing Institute, A Program in UCLA, 520 Portola Plaza, MS 5308 – Box 95155, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1557, USA, (888) 720-8096

Transcript

Welcome back to Episode 3 of Season 2 of the Smart Manufacturing Mindset Podcast! I’m Jeff Winter, advisor to CESMII and your host for this season’s deep dive into what it really takes to thrive in today’s manufacturing landscape.

If you joined us in Episodes 1 and 2, you heard directly from the people leading transformation from within manufacturing organizations. But today, we flip the lens—this episode is all about the solution providers.

These are the companies building the tools, platforms, and ecosystems that make Smart Manufacturing possible.

You’ll hear from eight thought leaders, not just three, which means more, but shorter clips

To help you follow along, we’ve grouped these companies into three distinct types:

1. Born-in-Industry 4.0 Companies

These companies were created in the modern digital era where their whole existence is basically solving new problems that emerged as part of, and after Industry 3.0.

• Colby Clegg, CEO of Inductive Automation. Colby helped develop Ignition and leads one of the earliest disruptors in industrial software.
• John Harrington, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at HighByte. Industrial software veteran and former Kepware leader. Pioneer of Industrial DataOps.
• Doug Lawson, CEO of ThinkIQ. Doug leads the company that created the first CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platform.

2. Automation & Information Conglomerates

These are the automation and controls powerhouses that helped shape the last era of industrial innovation—and are now transforming themselves to lead Industry 4.0. These are companies around 50 to over 100 years and have had to redefine themselves many times along the way.

• Del Costy, President of Siemens Digital Industries for the Americas. Del leads both software and automation portfolios with over 3000 employees and its on the boards of SAE Industry Technologies Consortia and LIFT, one of the other manufacturing USA institutes.
• Cyril Perducat, Chief Technology Officer of Rockwell Automation where he is responsible for Rockwell’s platform architecture, AI strategy, security, and UX. Leads global transformation toward software-defined automation across the entire Rockwell portfolio.
• Andre Marino, SVP of Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric North America. 30-year veteran of industrial automation and a founding board member of UniversalAutomation.org. Leads Schneider’s shift toward open, software-defined control with a focus on standards, scale, and multi-vendor interoperability.

3. Hyperscalers Entering OT

These are the cloud-born giants bringing totally new technologies, scale, and agility into the world of manufacturing operations.

• Joeseph Rosing, Worldwide head of Smart Manufacturing, Automotive, and Manufacturing at AWS. where he leads AWS’s global manufacturing operations COE, Focused on scaling industrial data platforms, GenAI, and factory-wide intelligence.
• Dayan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President for manufacturing and mobility Globally for Microsoft. He leads the manufacturing strategy and is focused on scaling AI and cloud with a deep understanding of operational execution. 

That’s our cast—These are important people to know. These are the builders, architects, and decision makers shaping how smart manufacturing actually works and are a good representation of where the industry is heading. And on top of that - they all are part of CESMII and helping to advance our mission of democratizing smart manufacturing.

We started by asking each guest the same foundational question: “What role should companies like yours play in accelerating smart manufacturing?”

And depending on who you ask—whether it’s a born-in-Industry 4.0 startup, a long-standing automation leader, or a hyperscaler entering operations—the answers are different.

But not opposite. Just... angled from where they sit.

Lets start with the Born-in-Industry 4.0 Companies

These companies were built from the ground up with interoperability and speed in mind. Their role? Challenge legacy assumptions, move fast, and help manufacturers scale without the baggage of old architecture.

And Doug Lawson, CEO of ThinkIQ, does an exceptional job of explaining the why.

He doesn’t just define the role of companies like his—he explains the context the entire industry is navigating.

"Smart manufacturing is about manufacturing differently to how we manufacture today. And it requires a lot of changes. It requires thinking differently about how your people collaborate with each other. It requires thinking a little bit differently about what software systems you deploy and who uses them. It requires thinking differently about how you exchange data up and down your supply chain. And it requires thinking differently about how you take advantage of things like AI and expert systems. to drive intelligent decision-making. It is very difficult to change all of those things while speaking to incumbents who are part of one of those silos. So the beauty of dealing with a startup company, dealing with an innovative company, and a company that thinks smart manufacturing all the time is that we tend to break down those barriers. We recognize that it's not just about technology, but it's about changing human behavior. And we recognize that the best way to change human behavior is to give them tools, techniques, and goals that excite them. and to think differently and to get people passionate about becoming way better than they were before and becoming best in their industry."

That’s not just a vendor pitch—that’s a roadmap for real change.

Doug reminds us that transformation isn’t just technical—it’s behavioral.

And the role of new providers? Help people think differently, act boldly, and build smarter from the inside out.

But Doug doesn’t stop there.

In this second clip, he outlines the specific technical foundation that’s required to support that shift..

"As one does manufacturing, smart manufacturing, you're going to break down silos between parts of your organization. You're going to require that people collaborate more and you're going to try to reduce the complexity of your software stack. Those are kind of givens as sort of the things that you need to achieve. To do that, the software that you purchase has to support interoperability. Interoperability allows us to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of the software systems that support a smart manufacturing mindset. It allows you to choose the best of breed and have software know how to get to data and do what it does really well. This requires not only interoperability, but the interoperability itself needs to have some really fundamental things in it. The software needs to be open. So what do we mean by open? That means you've got to be able to get to all of the data on your terms quickly and easily from anywhere. And when we talk about from anywhere, whether that's in the cloud or on premise or in real time or in a batch way, you need to be able to get to the data. So openness is about clear, easy to use APIs. And it's also about well understood structures, types, profiles that make it very easy to leverage the work of other people in your domain and to easily and comfortably standardize on the way that information is defined as it flows through your organization. What CESMII has done is fundamentally important in this space and we are all in on the ideas. You have to be able to create profiles or types that give data structure, whether that's how information comes off a machine, or how you measure quality data about the products you make, or how you define the rules for how products move through your manufacturing processes. or how you exchange data up and down your supply chain, or how you do analytics in terms of being able to give data context, meaning, and discoverability, all of these things start by being driven by the power of what CESMII describes as profiles and types. And wherever possible, you want to leverage what the broader industry is doing."

Doug’s spot-on: openness isn’t a philosophy—it’s a prerequisite.

While Doug focused on the “why,” Colby brings it down to the “how.”

Colby Clegg from Inductive Automation builds on that by emphasizing the importance of cutting through the noise and delivering real-world results.

"The main role that we play is in helping customers to see what's possible bridging the gap between all this incredible technology that is talked about every day, and then the the actual reality of making it applicable, you know, throughout their organization from the plant floor up. So we see our role as going in from the bottom level that plant floor, and bridging the gap upward and moving through the layers, delivering value throughout it. I think it's very important for vendors like ours to be able to help customers navigate all of the buzz, all of the noise into the real results that manufacturing truly needs."

Colby’s reminder? Start with the plant. Prove the value. Scale up from there.

But openness isn’t new for Colby.

"So openness and interoperability have always been part of our DNA. It's part of our reason for being here. And so, and we've always tried to push that to the industry. So our challenge now is to hold on to that key value as we continue to grow and as the industry changes around us, right? So our belief is simple. It's that less barriers means more innovation and more innovation helps everyone.

And to drive that belief into action, Inductive has invested in standards and ecosystem tools that enable scalable, interoperable industrial data.

We have a long history of supporting standards and an open technology, but we can always do more. So, for example, in twenty fifteen, we partnered with Serious Link Solutions to bring MQTT really into the industry in a way that was directly usable by our customers. So that established the industrial Internet of Things as a practical product you could buy. And that started off this concept of a single source of truth. The idea that your data model is then shareable across large distances. And so as we continue to progress that organizations like says me and the work they're doing are vital to continuing to build the richness of that model, the standardization of that model. That's important for where technology is going for the way that, you know, as you interconnect these systems right now, there's a lot of talk about UNS, the Unified Namespace and whatnot, the usability of this data comes from the standardization and understandability around it."

Colby’s story is a great example of what it means to not just advocate for openness—but build for it, ship it, and push it forward in a usable way.

And finally, we turn to John Harrington, co-founder of HighByte.

His company was created to bridge a very specific gap: the disconnect between OT and IT data structures.

And that’s where his view of the Industry 4.0 company’s role really shines.

"The role of the newer "born-in-industry 4.0"  companies is, is really to bring innovation to the market and to bring new technologies to the market, but also to bring new ways of collaborating and new ways of thinking to the market. And so one of the benefits of working with newer companies is that they don't have the legacy slowing them down and they can really take a new look at How do we get technology to work together? How do we get data to work together? How do we drive very clear business value to the customer base without having the legacy architectures and kind of slowing them down."

That distinction—not just innovation, but collaboration—is what makes these companies different. They don’t just sell tech. They reshape how teams work together.

John also highlights something critical: data without context is noise.

"We were born in an environment where people were where manufacturers were looking to leverage their ot data across both ot and it efficiently and now also leverage their it data back into ot um so we came at it and looked at that problem and recognized that in the ot world Data is very much about tags and individual data points. And people will talk about the millions of data points they have in a factory. In the IT world, data is very much about objects and data structures. And so being able to merge those two concepts together and developing technology that enables you to bring those two together to deliver to the different systems as well as add standards because companies are looking to deploy systems, not only across a single set of assets or across their lines, but across their enterprise. And in order to do that at scale, you must provide standards and you must standardize that data and add context to that data. So we've been really working on educating the market. We've been working on developing technology that allows people to do that quickly and efficiently. Lately, we've been adding AI into our system to be able to allow companies to scale that standardization. And then, of course, you know, we work with organizations like CESMII to identify the standards that companies should work with to help them build those standards and then to make it very easy for our customer base to utilize those standards so that they can leverage data. I think it does all come back to, you know, data is a key commodity and in today's world, it needs to be open and it needs to be accessible." 

So what role do born-in-Industry 4.0 companies play?

They simplify.

They accelerate.

Now... while they ultimately are software vendors. I would argue they are mindset shifters.

They don’t just help you modernize your systems—they help you unlearn your old constraints.

Industry 3.0 Giants

Now let’s shift gears—literally and figuratively.

The born-in-Industry 4.0 companies were created in a world where openness and interoperability weren’t goals…They were assumptions. These companies were architected from day one to be modular, scalable, and collaborative.

But that hasn’t always been the norm in manufacturing.

For the next group —the automation leaders who defined the last industrial era—the story is different.

These 3 companies have all been around for over 100 years, Schneider close to 200 years.

They have a huge install base.

They’ve built the systems that still run some of the best-performing factories in the world.

And they’ve earned the trust of manufacturers who don’t mess around with downtime.

The systems that were built decades ago were designed for a different era—with different constraints, different technologies, and a different understanding of what “best” looked like.

Today the challenge has changed. Manufacturers are demanding openness and  interoperability

So the question becomes: How are these big leaders transforming—and driving toward this new norm of openness and interoperability?

Lets start with Andre Marino, SVP of industrial automation at Schnieder. In this first clip, he talks about how Schneider is showing leadership not just through vision—but by investing in standards, collaboration, and transformation within their own factories.

"First, we believe that we need to contribute with the organizations that are putting that agenda forward, like SESME, like Universal Automation, that we are founding member. and World Economic Forum and others. So we participate on those forums to help the customers to develop their manufacturing and also to share ideas and to learn from others on that arena. also I think we set the stage and we lead when we use the technology in our own facilities it's good to remind that schneider operates more than two hundred factories around the globe and more than twenty two in the us alone right so we use the technology in our own factors and I can use an example uh of our factory in lexington kentucky where we got an old factory uh more than fifty years old and we apply all the technology to become a smart factory and today recognized as a lighthouse factory from World Economic Forum." 

That’s leadership with evidence.

So you are aware.. As of August 2025, Schneider has earned 10 WEF Lighthouse recognitions—seven for manufacturing, three for sustainability—including the Kentucky site André just mentioned.

And with over 200 factories globally, they’re not just influencing the industry—they’re transforming their own.

André doesn’t stop there. In this next clip, he explains that Schneider’s transformation isn’t just strategic—it’s structural. They’re not tweaking—they’re reinventing.

"We are taking the lead here because we are not only believe on that, but we are disrupting ourselves and that for a company like ours, right? It's not coming, you know, without a lot of thinking. So when we decided to move into open and software-defined automation, we are disrupting the closet system and the hardware-centric automation. to a world where the customer has the power to choose what's best And we will help our customers and they will work with us if we really continue to innovate in an open way that they can have Schneider and other vendors contributing to their journey, right? And this is a strong commitment on how we spend our money innovation that is basically a hundred percent going towards this open and software-defined world."

That line—“we’re disrupting ourselves”—says a lot. When a company that’s been around for nearly 190 years chooses to rethink its foundation, it’s not just about products—it’s about principle. That’s not a marketing pivot—that’s a business model pivot.

Cyril Perducat, CTO of Rockwell Automation, is direct about how their company earns trust in this new era: not by saying it—but by doing it.

“I think the best way is to not just talk about it but actually walk the talk and do it I think you you can have a lot of players in any industry not specifically to industries that make a lot of claims and press release and announcement about what's the intent to do I think the history of a company like Rockwell and other of our peers that are sincere about this topic of interoperability actually do what we say we are going to do is when we say those data needs to be made available with an easy mechanism like an open API, well, let's do it. So I think for me, the demonstration is what we have in our roadmap, what we can communicate with our customers, what we can show in terms of capabilities that we have, and not just describe intentions but being participant in all those different conversation and it's um it's not an easy landscape there are many many different dimensions many different type of players over here but actually doing what we say we are going to do is is a proof that we want to demonstrate to our customers"

Openness is a bold claim. Cyril’s point? Prove it with architecture, APIs, and action—not press releases.  But it’s not just about delivery—it’s about alignment with the ecosystem.

In this next clip, Cyril expands on how Rockwell participates in the global push for interoperability

"Where do we participate in interoperability? I think you have different types of organizations. You have standard-making organizations—where we are members, and sometimes on the board—like the OPC Foundation, for example. We participate with other industry members and often our customers to help establish those standards. Then you have broader engagements—like CESMII—where you have a wide set of customers contributing to a common vision. An initiative like working on open APIs isn’t just about saying we want openness—it’s about identifying what APIs matter, and what data should be exposed to what systems. Participating in CESMII helps us stay connected to the voice of the user—because in the end, that’s what defines real interoperability."

That last phrase—“voice of the user”—is key.

Because interoperability isn’t abstract. It looks different to a controls engineer, a maintenance lead, and a plant manager.

Cyril’s point? If you want to build open systems, you have to build with all of them in mind.

And as Del Costy—President of Siemens Digital Industries for the Americas—explains, this transformation wasn’t born out of strategy decks. It was born out of necessity.

"It actually started, we were really customer zero. We had a situation of plant like we see today with a lot of economic pressures coming from all different types of situations. We had a plant that was a high cost facility in Germany. And there was a lot of lower cost product coming in from Asia, and the leadership had to make a decision. So we actually had to get on the same journey that we talked to customers about today, and this was over twenty years ago. And all the issues that you mentioned, we had to attack. We had to identify interoperability opportunities to connect data because we had to increase the productive capability of this facility by at least ten X to have it remain solvent. And so that was the journey that got us on this path, the digitalization and digital transformation. And it led to us working with a lot of machine and line builders to open things up so that we could become an adaptive manufacturing facility which is the journey we've been on and we take a lot of customers to visit omberg and our other plants across the world and it did result in us having three uh lighthouse sustainable plants with the recognized by the world economic forum but had we not gotten on that journey and and embarked on this twenty five billion plus in acquisitions of technology I don't think we would be in the position we are today. It started with a catalyst and a need for change, which we're seeing across industry today. So we've applied those lessons of the past, everything we're doing right now, going forward. Now, obviously Siemens is a very large company. And if companies of all sizes are gonna take advantage of industrial AI, things need to happen. And tapping into that OT landscape, with IT capabilities is an absolute down payment for that. So that's what we're putting a lot of our energy right now into helping companies throughout the world."

That is powerful! And the results speak for themselves.  So similar to Schneider, Siemens has earned 3 lighthouse factory designations and 2 sustainability as of August 2025.  But what I like most is That experience—of being customer zero—gave Siemens the blueprint it now shares with customers worldwide.

But Del is quick to point out—internal transformation isn’t enough.

For the entire industry to move forward, global leaders like Siemens have to help drive interoperability at scale—not just inside their own walls, but across ecosystems.

"In terms of interoperability, this is an absolute must. We're never going to get to the level of efficiencies. And as we talked, I'm responsible for the Americas, and there's a ton of activity happening right here on U.S. soil and across the America zone. if companies are going to take advantage of modern technology, companies like us need to have open tools. Now, we live and breathe open across our whole portfolio from what we do with our software. As a matter of fact, we license our software kernel to our competitors. So we practice what we open standards on the shop floor. I think that's critically important. There is no homogeneous environment anywhere we go. And so it's imperative that we connect in. And in doing that, we're extremely active. If you look at American Makes, we're involved in many, many of the centers with American Makes, including CESMII and Lyft and MXD and a whole multitude of them. And I think it's imperative companies like ours have a responsibility to do that."

 They didn’t wait for market pressure—they started with internal pressure.

They didn’t stop at solving their own problems—they committed to helping solve everyone’s.

That’s what leadership looks like in the Industry 4.0 era: Action. Openness. And the courage to transform yourself first.

Hyperscalers: From IT to OT

Now let’s talk about the hyperscalers—the tech giants.

These are companies that didn’t come up in industrial automation.

They weren’t built for the factory floor.

They started in the cloud—focused on IT scale, enterprise platforms, and global digital infrastructure.

But somewhere along the way, they looked at manufacturing and said: “There’s real value here—and we can help.”

So now, they’re entering the world of OT—bringing tools, flexibility, and compute power—but doing it in a space with decades of culture, discipline, and structure.

The result? A new kind of partner.

Let’s start with Joe Rosing, Worldwide head of Smart Manufacturing from AWS.

He makes it clear that for hyperscalers to be effective in manufacturing, they first need to respect what already exists.

"One thing in particular hyperscalers should understand about manufacturing culture is some of this transformation that we we talk about, be it industry for auto or digital transformation is not necessarily new to manufacturers. They've. They've been on a transformative journey for years, be it just implementing automation to things around that culture of continuous improvement. So you think about lean manufacturing, you think about statistical process control, right? These were all transformative things within the industry that not only brought about a new set of tools and methods, but they also, if done well, fundamentally raised the bar of the culture within the plant. One example I often use is think about statistical process control. Prior to that, you would have probably rarely seen a control chart posted at a line. But after the adoption of statistical process control, it's now become part of the operating rhythm of the plant. to look at that data and make decisions off of that. And that's been in place for a lot of manufacturers for years. And so as a hyperscaler enters a manufacturing plant, I think it's really important to understand oftentimes there's already a very strong culture of continuous improvement and culture towards transformation and getting better that we can be leveraging as a way to think about, okay, how can technology help us do that faster at greater results and more sustainably." 

That’s the tone right there: respect the culture first.

The role of a hyperscaler isn’t to introduce transformation—it’s to amplify what manufacturers have been doing for decades.

Dayan Rodriguez, who leads manufacturing strategy for Microsoft in the Americas, adds to that.

For him, it's about understanding the discipline that defines the factory—and making sure tech adapts to that culture, not the other way around.

"When you look at manufacturing, it's an industry that runs highly on discipline, precision, and operational excellence, and it's a culture that has been built over decades. From the operational side, all the way to the support, and implementation. So because of that, hyperscaler most respect and understand this culture before trying to innovate. Obviously, our role is to bring disruptive technologies that is going to be focusing mostly on outcomes, redefining outcomes for these companies, but we need to understand very deeply what the real needs are for these customers. Execution most of the time is the main reason why uh and particular initiative or effort fails it's not necessarily the technology so bringing the right domain expertise and staying with the customer end-to-end providing acting more of not only as a technology provider but also as an orchestrator is key."

That word—orchestrator—is powerful.

Because manufacturing isn’t short on tools.

What it needs are partners who can stitch it all together in a way that drives outcomes, not overwhelm.

Back to Joe—he explains how a concept born in Amazon’s own IT culture is now helping manufacturers get to the core of Industry 4.0: interoperability.

"One thing that comes to mind, especially just being at AWS, is Bezos had an email back in about two thousand two called the API mandate, and it really set the tone for interoperability within Amazon. in terms of how teams are gonna communicate with each other and develop different tools or solutions that work together. And the reason for that was because it was, again, just setting a tone for how we could be innovating faster. And so that's been a concept that maybe to your point has been more of a traditionally kind of enterprise IT concept, but now is super valuable to manufacturers when we move into the OT space. you know, really the to make industry 4.0 work effectively, that interoperability becomes a key requirement. And what I consistently hear from manufacturers is, you know, what I want is best of breed application or even breaking it down to best of breed capabilities. Right. I have a specific capability I need, but because that's what works best for me, I want to go pursue that, but make sure it works and communicates with everything else. And at AWS, we're constantly in this discussion with customers because core to what we're driving in the industry is a concept of choice and flexibility. So when we talk about things like industrial data fabric, or even especially now as we get into generative AI type of use cases, that choice and flexibility is key. It's really putting the manufacturer's needs front and center and about what is the most cost efficient way to get the outcome that we want. And what that oftentimes requires is us being able to contextualize data very quickly from a variety of different sources, but then have repeatability further up in that stack in terms of how we can take advantage of that data and surface it in a way that is most helpful to the end user, most helpful to the operator, most helpful to the team on the shop floor."

That’s the hyperscaler mindset at work: open by design, scalable by nature.

But it only works if it’s rooted in real-world manufacturing needs—and connected back to outcomes.

Dayan expands on that with a clear view of why open standards are the key to unlocking manufacturing at scale.

"At Microsoft, we're investing in open standards, which is key, federated data, and secure platforms. Because to be real, that's the only way that scalable infrastructure is going to be unlocked. One of the key things about manufacturing is that when it comes down to industrial automation, a lot of the providers have created equipment and software that is built to last multiple decades. So we are always going to be in a situation as we fight We find multiple systems that are legacy, and they're running a particular system protocol that needs to be retrofitted, that we need to communicate to. And the more standards that we have, the easier it is for us to get that data, the faster it's going to be for us to unlock the value as manufacturers and end users." 

For manufacturers juggling 20-year-old PLCs and new AI platforms, interoperability is the only bridge between stability and innovation. And that’s where Dayan ties it all together:

"Interoperability isn’t just a good practice—it’s what made the cloud work in the first place.

Interoperability is what has actually made the cloud work. And at the enterprise level, what we have seen is that the interoperability has changed the magnitude of the encodes from identifying a return on investment for a particular pilot that it was probably X value over a period of time to magnifying that value once you enable the interoperability with other systems and allow you to get insights from those systems through the same goal, which at the end brings a lot of high impact to customers. It's not only about creating a product, it's also about how do I stay in that product through the journey in order to either provide better value to my clients or identify key insights from those clients as the product goes to the lifecycle in order to either make the product better or to create new sources of revenue."

That’s the key shift: hyperscalers don’t just help deploy—they help you evolve.

From product to insight. From install to iteration.

And finally, Joe closes this section with a reflection on why industry collaboration is so essential

"We kind of had this, uh, explosion over the last number of decades of different proprietary, uh, you know, protocols and ways of doing things. Uh, and that's really, uh, then called for this need to have organizations like says me, uh, to bring all the players together and say, uh, you know, let's, let's be innovating on behalf of the customers and look at the needs of the industry. Uh, you know, not in, not particularly having, um, you know, having preference for one protocol versus another, for example, but instead saying as an industry, how do we help, you know, rising tide lift all boats and help everyone progress forward with being able to take advantage of the technology. And so certainly our partnership with Sesme is a key part of that, of making sure that we're putting the right tooling in place, but also supporting being a member of that consortium and bringing some of that subject matter expertise to bear."

It’s not about replacing protocols.

It’s about replacing silos and the architectures that propagate them—so manufacturers, vendors, integrators, and tech providers can actually build together.

With so many vendors, platforms, integrators, and tools on the market, manufacturers are flooded with options—and promises. It can be overwhelming. So instead of asking companies how to stand out, we asked the people behind them a different question: From your vantage point, what should manufacturers actually do to get the most value from the ecosystem around them?

What follows isn’t official positioning. Not product pitches. These are personal reflections—candid insights from top leaders in the field making the biggest impacts.

Each of these voices shares a simple idea: that the value manufacturers get from technology has just as much to do with how they engage as who they choose.  Starting with Dayan…

"When working with a hyperscaler, though, like I said, we bring the key disruptors when it comes down to technology. If applied properly, they are very transformational and they can provide a lot of ROI fast if applied properly. So the key is, number one, do I have the right governance in place? After I have the right governance, do I have the right use cases? Because multiple use cases are going to come up, especially now with AI. So do I have the right classification of the use cases prioritization? Which ones are the two, three, four, or five use cases that are going to give me the best value when I'm talking about enterprise? Number three, what are the goals? And are those use cases big enough uh for me to justify not only the initial investment but also a scale should the uh should the pilot be successful."

That clarity—around governance, prioritization, and scale—sets the foundation for everything else. But knowing what matters isn’t enough. The real challenge is managing complexity once things are in motion.

"I see a lot of manufacturers running into is just struggling with the complexity of digital transformation, the complexity of, I might have success in one plant, but my other forty nine plants look slightly differently. And so now I need to work with different partners or different requirements in each of those plants. And so my advice would be go to the hyperscalers and say, I need your help in simplifying digital transformation. I look at part of my role at AWS is it's incumbent on me to figure out how I can simplify the implementation of an industrial data fabric, the implementation of machine learning, the implementation of agentic AI for our customers by innovating and putting the right tools in place that make it easy to use and easy to adopt." 

Simplicity isn’t just about clean architecture. It’s about making room for ideas to move quickly—especially when the answers don’t come from a roadmap, but from collaboration.

"It's important when working with a small, innovative, agile company that's bringing new technologies to an organization that your teams come with the same intent. If it's going to work effectively to work with a small company, we're going to collaborate with you, brainstorm with you, and innovate and potentially create things that your business didn't know it needed and potentially create things that we didn't know that your business needed.

But collaboration requires structure. It takes a dedicated team—one that isn’t just experimenting, but translating those experiments into something the organization can rally behind."

"What's crucial right now with all the technology going on is for every company to adopt a more innovative early adopter mindset. And it's easy to say it can be hard to do. The practical advice I have for a company trying to trying to bridge that gap is to form a concrete team, a small team that's that's tasked with with innovation. Right. A team that can be independent, create, you know, play with technology, work on solutions, deliver not just proof of concepts. But I really like the term proof of value. Right. Show the how the value applies to that company's business. needs and then act as an ambassador or translator between the companies like ours, the more agile and innovative companies, and then perhaps the more conservative companies that they're working in."

"These teams that are in these companies that are tasked with innovation, they have to then sell that value to their company. So it's not just that they are an R&D group that's just gonna be adopted. They have to then take that and sell it to their company. And so we form kind of a partnership between us as the vendor, them as the innovators, and then them selling to their companies. And it's been incredibly successful for our customers."

That idea—of acting as a translator—is especially important when working with any outside partner. Because success isn’t just about the solution; it’s about how you frame the problem.

"The manufacturer can talk with us about what are their business challenges, and then ask us how we can support them in delivering business value and how we can support them in executing their projects quickly. and efficiently. There's a lot of new technology out there. And one of the challenges that companies have is how do we leverage that across our enterprise? And a lot of the vendors have ideas there and a lot of the vendors have technology that can enable that.

Asking for help isn’t a weakness—it’s a strategy. Especially when it’s done in the spirit of partnership, not procurement.

"I think customers have an opportunity and actually a responsibility to learn what the capabilities are that we are bringing to the table. We'll come in with our own premise. We have a ton of experience with this and we're going to be able to share those things, but setting this clear interoperability vision, I think is imperative for companies to do when you engage with a company like ours. Treat the OT vendors, in our case, for OT and IT, but treat us as a partner, kind of an information exchange opportunity. Obviously, you have to insist on the open standards. But when you look at piloting, pilot in a modular way. and also recognize what your internal capabilities are and come forward with those. We do need to understand that because we don't want to come to you with a complex solution if you're not ready to receive that. We have capabilities that would allow you to build as you go. So I think there's definitely a path forward for everybody."

It’s advice echoed again and again—start with honesty, stay flexible, and plan for a journey, not just a transaction.

"When engaging with a company like ours is to be transparent and have a good conversation about the problem you're trying to solve for. In defining properly, it makes easier for you to interact with us and we can also provide the best solution and the best technology. So by being transparent, you help not only the vendor, but also yourself to achieve good results. And I think that's probably the very important thing that this relationship will require is to understand that this is a journey and we need to be transparent and walk together until we find the solutions. And the solution that we have for today probably will be different than solution that's going to be applied in ten years from now. So selecting a vendor that will be there and has this open mindset will be super important to future proof your investments and then you have a successful journey."

And throughout that journey, keep asking questions. Especially the ones that cut through the buzzwords and get to the core of what you’re really buying. 

"My advice to customers is that when people speak about software-defined, look at precisely what it means. It's not just virtualizing the PLCs. This has not... This is not new. This has happened for many years. But look at the full lifecycle of capabilities. Is the engineering environment really a software AI-first type of environment, co-pilots, support in engineering? Is the experience associated to the hardware, discovery, commissioning, setting parameters, is it a software-first experience? And same on maintenance. I think looking at companies that understand that hardware and software amplify each other."

Every voice here came from a different perspective. But together, they form a common message: the best technology won’t save a misaligned team. Clarity matters. Mindset matters. And the way you approach your partners—how you frame your goals, structure your pilots, and build trust—is often the biggest differentiator between good intentions and real results.

So before asking what a provider can do for you, ask: What are we really ready to do with them?

Collectively, these eight leaders are redefining what smart manufacturing means—and more importantly, what’s possible. You heard their stories, their lessons learned, and their unapologetically different points of view. But underneath those differences was a shared clarity: transformation isn’t about picking one type of company over another. It’s about knowing how to leverage all of them. The startups bring speed, flexibility, and fresh thinking. The industrial veterans offer stability, scale, and the proof that change is possible from within. And the hyperscalers bring power, tools, and global reach—if you know how to align them to your reality.

As you probably noticed, openness and interoperability were the thread that weaved through the entire episode—mentioned again and again, not as ideals, but as necessities. It’s the foundation for collaboration, innovation, and sustainable progress. And while you only heard clips, I can tell you from the full interviews: these leaders believe every word they shared. They’re not just building products—they’re building a future. They’re passionate, they’re committed, and they genuinely want to help manufacturers like you succeed.

So if you take one thing away from this episode, let it be this: You don’t need to choose sides—you need to build bridges. Because the real opportunity isn’t in any single solution. It’s in how you connect them.

Thanks for joining us and look forward to seeing you next time