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Kepware Drives Automation to New Heights
May 16, 2008 – An Interview with Roy Kok, VP – Marketing, Kepware
We spoke with Roy Kok, the Vice President of marketing for
Kepware Technologies. Kok has been working in the automation industry now for
more than three decades, and has worked for a number of the major players in
the industry such as GE Fanuc. He joined Kepware in August 2007. As he
recalled, “Because I’ve been in the industry, I’ve watched
Kepware and seen the growth. It became an appropriate time for me to move
over, and become a part of the company.”
From KEP to Kepware
Kok described the company history which started back in 1995
as an offshoot of KEP products - Kesler Ellis Products. They manufactured a
variety of automation products such as panel displays that sold widely in the
automation industry. Kepware, he explained, started out as the
company’s software arm, focusing on software automation products and
developing human-machine interface software, which was required to ensure
connectivity to devices, and to the control equipment on the plant
floor.
As the company began to focus more and more on device
drivers, the OPC Foundation, a standards body formed wrapping
Microsoft’s OLE technology into the automation industry, thereby
“making it appropriate for process controls operations. That was a
standard we got involved with very early on,” and it “just
started coming out in 1996. We focused on it a great deal,” and in so
doing, “became purely a communications company from that point on.
We’ve been doing that ever since.”
The OPC Opportunity
Recalling the emergence of the OPC Foundation, Kok
explained, “What happened, if you’re familiar with computers
– early in the computer age you had to worry about connecting
peripherals, had to worry about device drivers. With DOS or early Windows
systems, I had to make sure I had the right driver for my printer, modem or
any peripheral I wanted to talk to. The same problem exists in the automation
industry,” and to “connect to a control piece hardware from
another company, I need a device driver. In the late ‘90s, companies
had to wrestle with maintaining a lot of device drivers for a lot of
devices.” The OPC Foundation, OPC.org, worked with a lot of control
companies in their business, and agreed on a standard to be the interface
between automation products – software talking to hardware, software to
talk to other software packages,” and so forth,” and it thus
“became the interoperability standard in the industry.”
Kok recalled that Kepware “got involved with the OPC
foundation early on,” and “at this point, we’re the most
widely used OPC technology in the world, and are used and deployed much more
than any other companies’ products. Kepware has really carved out its
niche – this happened primarily because of OEM agreements, partnerships
with most of the software vendors that wanted access to a lot of drivers
could get them from Kepware.”
“Even though there is an interoperability standard,
OPC, that any one can provide,” explained Kok, “one of the
advantages Kepware developed early on is its large number of protocols,
and became a one-stop shop for the automation industry.”
Toward an Automation Standard
Early on in the development of the human-machine interface,
automation companies like Allen-Bradley, Rockwell Software, and “dozens
of these companies – they wanted to supply an automation system,”
and “in order to provide an entire solution they had to have all the
connectivity to all the possible things they needed to tie to. They wrote all
the device drivers to interface with all of these devices and all of these
products. The same thing was replicated by all these different companies.
There was no standard. That was in the early days: every company had to
become an expert on how to communicate with every piece of equipment, and had
teams of people dedicated just to performing this function. When OPC became
popular in the 1990s time frame, that allowed us to step in with our device
drivers and add in an OPC layer which could now be provided to every other
product that could be applied to the industry standard. There could now be
companies to focus specifically on driver technology and serve the entire
marketplace for all of the companies to have other areas of expertise.”
And so Kepware found its niche: “Companies did not have to be experts
in device drivers any more. They could rely on others like Kepware to provide
drivers.”
As things developed, Kok explained that “tool-kits for
OPC became available, and companies would develop drivers and usually use an
OPC tool kit o solve a particular problem, Within the automation industry,
these were usually almost always configured by system integrators (SIs)
– who would develop some technology, write a communications driver, and
had something now they could potentially resell, which could be used with
other products. But what happened – none of those SIs amassed a
critical mass of communications to build a real market around it. The
marketplace consisted of lots of drivers from lots of small mom-and-pop and
some midsize communication companies that developed them to solve a
particular problem rather than to be the most excellent driver in the
industry. This became a bit of a problem for the industry, as a lot of
drivers were now available but they were not always the best and not always
tested with all the products out there. Just because you support a standard
doesn’t mean that you supported it well. So there was a time where a
lot of drivers existed, but they just weren’t the quality that people
wanted. Over time we focused very much on developing a strong core set of
drivers, put effort into making them the highest quality, attending all the
interoperability meetings.” Kok noted that the OPC Foundation
“will likely tell you that Kepware is the most reliable solution within
the OPC foundation. I kind of like to talk about us as the poster child of
the OPC Foundation! But they don’t like it when we say
that.”
New Partner Programs
On April 7th, Kepware announced its creation of two new
partner programs, the Vendor Managed Protocol (VMP) program and the Vendor
Endorsed Protocol (VEP) program. These two new programs enable hardware
vendors to leverage Kepware’s OPC and device communications
architecture to deliver the very best device connectivity for their
customers. With Vendor Managed Protocols, the hardware vendor will develop
the plug-in driver to KEPServerEX, under the training, support and QA of
Kepware. In the case of the Vendor Endorsed Protocols, the hardware vendor
shares their unique protocol information and feature requirements with
Kepware to ensure that Kepware’s engineering team develops the best
solution for the vendor's needs. With both programs Kepware’s internal
engineering and quality control teams will make sure the resulting vendor
protocols have successfully completed its rigorous testing procedures before
being included in the KEPServerEX server offering. After release, vendor
protocols will be available to all OEMs and resellers of Kepware technology
and will be made available to Kepware’s global customer base. Hardware
vendors will also resell KEPServerEX with their plug-in, in an
OEM-relationship with Kepware.
Referring to these newly announced partner programs, Kok
recalled “a couple of things that happened, Again, companies have
decided they want to specialize, so automation software companies want to
focus on what they do best. Drivers are something nobody really wants to
tackle. Since most of these software companies would have to develop drivers
for competing hardware products, which is difficult to do, as it requires a
relationship with a competitor – most of the software companies
focusing on higher level software products have been looking for partnerships
to solve their connectivity problem. Kepware’s model is to license
drivers to companies in such a way they can make a decent profit on it,
selling through their channels. A lot of software companies are eager to
resell, and that has made Kepware very successful with all of the software
companies. At this point we are the most widely OEMed driver product of any
driver company. That success with the software companies has presented a
really interesting opportunity for Kepware, which is what the press
announcement was all about: so many software relationships are in place now,
I can go to hardware companies and enable Kepware to be their path to
software companies. A hardware company might entertain writing an OPC driver
to their own hardware, but today they would rather rely on Kepware to write
the driver, and would rather partner with Kepware since Kepware will deliver
their driver to all the other software companies in the industry.
We’re a powerful marketing arm for the hardware companies to gain
visibility in the software market.
Kok explained the two programs. The first is the VMP or the
Vendor Managed Protocol program, whereby hardware companies can develop the
piece of protocol we put into our software; they can develop it for us, and
give it to Kepware and we will quality test it and learn to support it, and
give it to all of our partnerships.” He added that the “second
one is for hardware companies that don’t want to do driver development
but who still want to leverage the Kepware relationships, and will still work
very closely with Kepware, sharing its latest designs with us, to make sure
we are up to date with their latest protocols, and we will build the
driver.” This is the VED or the Vendor Endorsed Program.
As Kok explained, “Both cases leverage all of our
software relationships and partner relationships in the industry.” He
added that “we’ve become the de facto standard in the industry
– no other software product as widely OEMed as is our product in the
automation industry.”
Noting the long list of partners on Kepware’s website,
Kok added, “What’s interesting too is they fall into many
categories now – HMI (human machine interface/operator control
equipment from a computer screen) all the way to plant-wide analytics
products to allow managers to ensure the production line meets production
quality.” He added this ranges from “Oracle at the high-end to
folks like Rockwell down at the control level.”
From Automation to Communications
Among Kepware’s partners is Hewlett Packard, which is
in lots of businesses. Noted Kok, “One of the businesses they have is a
solution for dynamic, smart cooling for datacenters” that uses
“very sophisticated algorithms to control the cooling within large
datacenters,” which “can save a great deal of money and
operations costs.” And, “in order to do that, they need to
monitor temperature and airflow and power use throughout the
datacenter,” and to “dynamically reallocate resources” so
if it “gets too warm, its sends more cooling,” and can
“change that dynamically, which allows them to control it very
accurately, instead of overcooling.” One result is this “makes
significant savings in energy. We’re the communications that allows
them to tie between the software that does the analysis and the physical
equipment that does the actual control.”
And speaking of dynamic cooling, Kok noted that software
automation is inherently eco-friendly, by improving efficiency and
contributing in numerous ways to energy reductions. Kok observed, “Go
back to the history of automation, and it kind of gets linked to the
introduction of the PC. In the early days, the PC was put in to allow folks
better monitoring of their systems, but they didn’t actually trust it.
PCs were really human machine interfaces performing more monitoring functions
that control functions. But over the years the technology became more
reliable, was deployed further, and it got to the point where it became an
integral part of control systems.”
For example, he noted that the “dynamic smart cooling
process from HP is a PC running some analytics software that now has to talk
to the real physical control equipment that is built into cabinets –
which is where our communications software comes into play. In the past,
people put in just enough communication to see and feel what is going
on,” but are “now putting in archiving information for the
long-term, information not needed for control today but for analysis
tomorrow, or next year. To put in changes, monitor what’s going on now
– so next year, you can the make next level of change implementation,
an incremental and reiterative process. And at the foundation of this
process, is just the need to be able to communicate with as much of the
equipment that’s out there as possible. If you’re not monitoring
it, there is no way you can control it.”
From Communications to Innovation
Looking at trends in the industry, Kok observed that from
his perspective, he sees “the need for more and more communications,
and to make it as easy as possible. Kepware doesn’t solve all the
problems, it only solves the communications piece of the problem. HP does the
analytics to do smart cooling that is really solving the energy
problem.” But what brings it all together is the communications:
“Communications with field equipment is what makes it possible –
you can have all the analytics in the world, but if it is based on faulty
data, you are going to have faulty results. You can’t make it up
– it has to be based on real data!”
And speaking of real data, and how when combined with
effective communications, it can have a huge impact, Kok told us about one
driver from Kepware “that’s kind of interesting, and that allows
you to monitor the weather from the weather service.” Kepware partnered
with Weatherbug, and partnered with Weatherbug, which “has largest
network of weather stations in North America. What’s interesting is
they update in real-time every few seconds, as opposed to NOAA that typically
has hourly updates, and report data back to Weatherbug headquarters,”
where they have “lots of servers with all of the aggregated weather
information as well as forecast information. We have written the
communications over the Internet, to pull out the information you might want
for some interesting decision-making capability. For instance, you could be
controlling a large building – with heating, air-conditioning –
and allocating based on real-time information such as temperatures rising or
falling, and those could potentially allow you to make decisions in
an automation environment.”
Kok added that this was “an interesting example of
Kepware’s success in the industry. We, because of our predominance in
the industry, were able to negotiate an exclusive agreement with Weatherbug
– and are the only company that licenses their weather information for
automation. We call that Weatherbug for Automation,” and it has a
“lot of uses” -- such as for waste water treatment plants.
“If you have lots of rain, you have lots of water coming in for
treatment and you have to plan ahead.” As well, consider “power
allocation. You have rainy days, hot days, cold days,” which thus
“affect electric power use,” and the public utilities “have
to gear up for weather demands, and can use our data to allow them to do
that. So that’s a kind of a way that we introduced something new that
is based on technology that was never available before, enabling things to
happen in the industry that virtually could not be done before the Internet
came and before a repository of data like Weatherbug’s was
available/”
‘The IBM of the Driver
Business’
Kok appreciates that Kepware is in “an area where
we’re quite lucky right now . Within the automation industry,
we’re actually quite new, and when someone says they are using Kepware
drivers,” because of the fact that there are a “lot of mom and
pop drivers out there, we certainly do have a reputation that makes us the
most reliable choice. We’re kind of the IBM of the driver basis. You
know the old saying, you never got shot for buying IBM!”
And while Kok said he didn’t know if that old
expression “resonates now a days,” its underlying sentiment, the
Kepware as a de facto standard when it comes to software automation,
certainly does.
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