I'm Omar Sabiki with FBRI Electric Power Research Institute. I'm now on behalf of my colleague, Liang Min from the Stand for Bits and Watts Initiative. We'd like to welcome you to this week's installment of the Digital Grid Summer Webinar Series. And today's theme is corporate research. And we've got a wonderful panel of corporate people to speak about the role of corporate research in the digital grid development arena. So just to go over a few matters of housekeeping, and for a number of you, you've been a loyal participants in these webinars, so you're familiar. But for some of you, this may be your first time. We have everyone on mute just to keep some semblance of sanity as we go through, because we like having a large number of people. The best way to engage, and we do want your engagement in this webinar, is to ask questions via the chat feature. So if you look at the bottom of your WebEx screen as indicated by the picture there, you'll see a little cloud icon. That's the chat feature, so you can click on that to engage and ask questions. There's also a related Q&A feature that you can use. And as moderators, we will be monitoring those questions, and we'll ask questions from that group, and we'll ask questions of our panel as well. You can also select yourself as an attendee to virtually raise your hand, and we can unmute you at that point. But I would really recommend the chat and typed in Q&A feature as the most efficient way to ask questions to our panelists. We are recording this webinar, so by being on, that's your consent to being part of this recording. And we will post the presentations as well as the recordings on both the Stanford and EPRI websites for later use. Again, we are delighted to co-host this, both the EPRI and Stanford, EPRI were an independent ethical profit research organization, doing R&D in all aspects of electric utility operations from generation through transmission, delivery, and use. Finally, our mission is to advance the electric service to be safe, affordable, reliable, and environmentally responsible through collaborative research. And that collaboration includes industry, utility industry, industry partners, and academic partners like Stanford. And we're so proud to be associated with Stanford in this effort. The Bits and Watts Initiative, of which Liang Direct is a major initiative focused on innovations in the electric grid for the 21st century. And they advance a number of business and policy and technological innovations to push the frontiers on the next generation of the electric grid and consumer relationship with the electric grid. Our summer webinar series is really intended to convene experts from across multiple disciplines to exchange their views on what the vision of a shared integrated digital grid looks like. And on the right, you see some examples of elements of what a shared digital grid represents. The idea is to get this diversity of perspectives and to identify the gaps towards achieving this vision. And one of the fundamental gaps that we've identified, which has been a theme throughout our webinar series, is the development of enabling data platforms that can facilitate the information exchange from consumer assets to the grid to allow the kind of coordination to provide flexibility and other kinds of benefits to the grid. And finally, our intent is to inform through this collaborative process a research roadmap and a collaborative initiative that EPRI intends to coordinate with Stanford and other industry partners to develop a research plan to specifically address the gaps that have been identified through these webinar series. And a digital grid and integrated grid has many different manifestations. The principal one we like to think of here from an EPRI perspective, and I think this is a view shared by many, is to think about the integration of customer resources to become assets to enable and help facilitate grid flexibility while fulfilling their primary objective to satisfy the end-use customer's needs and objectives of those technologies. So that balancing act to make it as seamless as possible and coordinate as possible is really one of the end goals of this. And to do this, we really recognize that this is a heavy lift that's in an all of industry effort and hence the motivation for this webinar series to exchange those ideas. I'm going to turn it over to Liang to give a bit more context and talk about today's panel. So Liang, over to you. Thank you, Omar. And welcome to this webinar again. And just quick recap what we have been doing in the last several weeks. So we started this virtual webinar workshop back to June time frame. And in June, we hosted the three virtual webinars and included the Utilities, United States, European countries, and also several information technology companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and VMware, etc. So if you are interested in listening to what we have discussed in June, you can find the recording available both at every technology innovation website and also Stanford Business Awards website. And in July, we planned four webinars. The first couple of webinars we had in July is from the startup company. We had one panel with three distinguished startup companies. And we have a university panel and with Stanford and Dartmouth University. Then we had the government panel last week with the Department of Energy and SERDA and also California Entry Commission. Today, we are very glad to have the support from three, I would call like a little bit traditional power management company, and have them to discuss not about, they will discuss for sure about their product, but more importantly is the research going on as their company related to how we can integrate customer DEA and provide the value to the electrical power grid. And next week, with the polling we had a couple of weeks ago for the interest from the audience, we are going to have the panel talk about the value of the resumes from customer DEA. We have Stephen Ward from Department of Energy and also Comments and Southern Company specifically discussed some of the pilot project for the community resumes efforts. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce today's panelists. And again, we put together a distinguished panel for today's conversation. And the first, we will have Michael Roganski from Eaton to kick it off. And Michael has, and he is a senior VP of IND responsible for intelligent power management solution. And also on the business unit side, he is the chief technology officer for Eaton's electrical sector. And here's a long career in the power management industry. And he joined Eaton in 2015. Before Eaton, he was vice president for systems and the control engineering at UTC building and industrial system. And before UTC, he was a VP for manual assistant was eventually be bought by United Technology in 2005. And upon joining UTC, he had several executive positions responsible for global security products and for power management products for UTC as well. And our second speaker is from Hitachi. It's a digital arm for Hitachi. Hitachi Ventura and have a meeting room. And she's a senior product manager for energy practice and digital solution. And she also has extensive career in enterprise software and information technology area. And she lead the Hitachi Ventura digital transformation strategy and also lead the business customer engagement with Hitachi customer to deploy this technology on the field. And before Hitachi, she spent six years and building different IoT Internet of Things application solution on the predicts platform with GE. And she work at GE Digital and also big use of GE for the smart manufacturing and oil gas industry. Our third panelist is from Siemens Corporate Research. Ulrich Moons is head of the autonomous system and the control system at Siemens Corporate Research Center in Princeton, United States. And Ulrich leads the IND work for autonomous system control. And he is also responsible for two U.S. DOE funded research project. One is from APAE. It's called Renewable 100. And sounds like a very interesting name. 100% renewable generation and how we can manage the electrical system. And another one funded by Solar Technology Office. And before move to United States, and Ulrich also worked at Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich, Germany. Without further ado, so we will have Michael to kick off today's conversation. Okay. Leang, thank you very much. And I really appreciate the invitation. Glad to be here. And really this topic of the digital grid is something that's going to be important to all of us as we go forward on stuff. So I'm really excited about today's presentation. So as we get started, there's really a few takeaways that I'd like everybody to keep in mind as we go through this, you know, the first one. And those of you that are in the electrical industry, it's probably one of the most exciting times that we could imagine. There really is a period of rapid transformation that's occurring.  I mean safety resiliency continues to be paramount in all aspects and efficiency is another part of that. But now more than ever when we start looking at natural disasters that have been occurring, that safety and resiliency continues to even become more critical as we think about the grid of the future. Modernization, digitalization, these are going to help drive the energy transition that's coming. And we'll talk about that in more detail. When we start looking at what the grid's future is and the digital grid, what we're going to see is that from the utility side and also energy consumers, things behind the meter, everything is starting to look as a grid. And this is a tagline that we're using at, you know, at Eaton and that the control technology, the amount of durars that are deployed are going to be the same just at different scales both in front of the meter on the utility side but also behind the meter. And if we're going to have a grid that's going to be able to accommodate a lot of the new technology trends, a lot of the efficiency that's going to be needed and the safety and resiliency that's going to be demanded, we're going to have to make sure that we have open platforms that can really exchange information and control to make these systems become efficient. So let's take a look at just historically what's happened.  We would have energy that's generated. It goes through transmission lines and then it hits substations and then it's distributed out to a lot of different types of energy consumers. And you can see on this, I mean, Eaton plays in a number of these different areas supplying all of the electrical power and infrastructure that's needed for the distribution and utilization of electrical energy. But what's happening as we look at the future? What we can see is that there's really multiple forces that are coming into effect here that are going to be transforming the traditional electrical power value chain. And some of these are occurring through evolutionary aspects and then some of these are really occurring on a transformational aspect. If we think about evolution, there's always been regulations that continually focus on increased safety, increased resiliency and sustainability. And as we start thinking about the natural disasters that have been occurring throughout the years, this emphasis is becoming more and more important even in our traditional electrical power systems. Global competition standard harmonization continues to occur and that's really a good thing that's happening. It allows us to provide solutions. They're really a cost effective price point to consumers. And then there's a number of different technology evolutions on the power side that are occurring. If we think about the type of loads that are inside of everything from residential to data centers, they're becoming more DC in nature. So there is going to be a natural disruption to traditional AC transmission and then how it gets converted over to DC and there's power losses. And we will start seeing a world where there's going to be more and more DC power all the way from the point of generation through transmission distribution. Now on the transformational side of the equation, there's a lot of things that are going on. The grid is in a lot of places very old and has served us well but there is the ability to go and modernize it and put in new capabilities, new forms of resiliency. Distributed energy and especially green energy has become more and more important as we think about sustainability and social responsibility to reduce carbon emissions and green energy is going to become the newest form of, it is the newest form of electrical generation that's starting to transpose itself onto our current grid. And then with this, once you start getting new types of energy, you're going to have to have digital solutions to start creating the control algorithms, the robustness, the efficiencies, and just the intelligence that's needed to manage all of this complexity. So we can see when we start thinking about where energy gets distributed, you have a number of different market forces that are coming into play and then also there's something that we see in our industry and that is workforce and skillset challenges. And that as we move, especially from an analog to a digital world, it's something that we're going to have to keep in mind and make sure that we simplify the technologies that we're developing and putting forward to be able to accommodate the growing needs of energy consumers. So why is the industry transforming? And I just want to walk you through a couple of different aspects of this. When we start thinking about the demand side, you know, if we look over the last 20 years, electrical energy consumption has remained relatively flat. And while there's been an organization that's been occurring, there's also been an efficiency gain that's coming in, everything from LED lighting to different types of heating systems, so that as energy has been increasing from a consumer point of view, the efficiency side of the equation has maintained the amount of net energy needed as relatively neutral. However, when we start looking forward, when we look at some of the mega trends that are out there, we see electrical demand increasing pretty significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Some of it's on driven by building electrification. As we start thinking about moving from things like gas heating to electric heating, that's going to increase the demand and the amount of energy that's needed, electric vehicles. As electric vehicles start taking more and more hold across the globe, that's going to remot the drive, a tremendous need for new types and new sources of energy. And then the last one that I want to point out is really the growth of cloud computing and data centers. And when you just think about, you know, how efficient and reliant we are now on cloud computing as we are in a kind of mid-COVID world, that people are working from home, cloud infrastructure is making it possible for us to do webinars like we're conducting today, as well as working from home. When we start looking at the increase in telemedicine, AI, data storage, we see a 4X increase in the demand of electrical energy just from data centers alone over the next 10 years. That's going to be a significant amount of new energy that's required. Now, we're not building new single generation power stations. What's happening is renewable energies are starting to become really where the new sources of energy are coming from. And we see renewables counting for over 50% of the generation over the next 15 years. And along with that, storage is going to be needed because we want to make sure that we're harnessing the power of this renewable energy and using it onto the grid. So, as we start thinking about that, we start looking at system resiliency and optimization and of course, cybersecurity. And there's going to be a tremendous need for new types of infrastructure requirements that come in and really lay themselves on top of what were traditional electrical safety and resiliency standards. So, what does this look like? So, when we start thinking about it in the previous diagram, we had a unidirectional flow of energy and now what we can see is we have the traditional power generation coming into transmission stations. But on the grid side of the equation, we could start seeing grid-scale storage and renewables. And this becomes, manifests itself down into the distribution arena as well. So, utilities are going to have to manage where the energy comes from, where it gets sent to on a distribution basis and be able to manage this on an availability and a cost-effectiveness point of view. Now, on the same side, when we look at behind-the-meter type of applications, we're going to see the same type of infrastructure just at a smaller scale. You can see solar and other renewable energies, distributed storage, and then different types of consumers that are taking place. And the nature of the grid says we have to make sure that both sides of the meter are harmonious in the way that they produce, consume, and transact energy. So, how does that happen? How do we make sure that as we move forward and everything starts to look like a grid that we have the right set of infrastructure in place to make that happen? And this is where the notion of a digital platform and digital technologies that transcend both sides of the utility and behind-the-meter applications come into play. This is going to be needed to make sure that we have the right infrastructure for on-demand planning decision support. There's going to be new types of business models that are created. And really, I think the one that's probably going to become just as critical as functional safety in the electrical industry is cybersecurity infrastructure. We have to make sure that the same amount of standards and the same disciplines that we have are in place for cybersecurity aspects. So, we're protecting ourselves from any kind of unauthorized access, both in front or behind-the-meter, as the grid becomes more digital. So, I want to talk a little bit about what is a digital platform, and just go through a couple of different layers. This may be laid out in a different way than you may have thought about it in the past. But I want to start with two aspects, and that is open and scalable. Any type of digital interchange that's going to connect both utilities and power energy consumers is going to have to be open. We have to make sure that there's standards in place to allow for the seamless flow and integration of information. And that's what's going to allow us to grow at scale and really do it in a cost-effective manner. So, what's the role of a platform? Well, simply put, it collects aggregates and analyzes data. But there's multiple layers that are made up to it. And if we start at the bottom layer, when we think about the electrical layer at the physical grid, this is all of the controls and apparatus that are out there that allow us to go and produce, transform, and distribute energy and protect electrical systems. It could be capacitors, capacitor banks, transformers, circuit breakers. These are all the things that are out there making sure that electrical energy flows safely. The second layer is really some of the most critical. And this is where a lot of time has to be spent to make sure that we have standards and common interfaces in place to allow for the effective open communications of these devices and the data that it's going to generate so that we can go and create it, store it, aggregate it, transmit it, and make sure that this is used to make real-time and informative decision-making. And then last piece, if we do this right and create the right layers of the digital platform and all the information, now we can start building the applications that provide all the command, control, and decision-making that's needed to help go and govern the electrical system. So let's just bring that together and kind of think about it in terms of what are some of the key actions that are needed at these different layers and some of the capabilities they have to have in order to make this value creation realized. The first, if we start at the bottom with the electrical layer, you have to make sure that the apparatus that's in place, the transformers, that there's native sensing, the ability to connect and make sure that these assets are intelligent and controlled. And if you think about it, this could be very simple as what's needed to help make our grid sustainable today. If we can detect that there's different types of outages that could occur, if we can detect that there's different types of safety factors that could come in place, we could prevent a lot of wildfires, for example, that could be caused by defects or disruptions inside of the electrical system. So we have to make sure that at that base layer, all the products really are sensing the right type of information, they're connected, and they go from electromechanical assets to now becoming digitally-native intelligent assets. From there, making sure that we have the right interfaces and the right type of data dictionary, if you will, that allows us to seamlessly exchange information across multiple vendors, across different participants, different companies and stuff, so that we can then go and make this information actionable inside of utility and also inside of a work site. So making sure that platforms are cloud-connected, networked, there's data security, these are kind of the bare-bones minimum must-haves, and then we have to make sure that we can access this data remotely, we can monitor information and get the insights and analytics out of it that are needed to make the right solutions available for customers. And then lastly, if we do that and we build the right foundation, now we can start creating the right solutions to make sure that we have a safe, reliable, and efficient energy transition. Okay, so I want to just kind of bring this to light in terms of a couple of examples, and this is how we're thinking about corporate research, and we believe that it's not just a matter of corporate research, but it's a matter of partnering with our national labs, of partnering with organizations like EPRI, as well as universities and other companies. But if we think about this, and this is a program that we're working with the Solar Energy Technology Office at the DOE, and it's looking at how do you take all of these different types of behind-the-meter distributed resources and make sure that they're connected, make sure that they're intelligent, and that they're going to be good participants onto the digital grid of the future. So a couple of things we're trying to do is be able to make sure that we're more dynamic and we can make sure that we have the right type of decentralized bi-directional grid growth that's going to be needed. So how do we make sure that we're supplying the right delivery of services to improve grid reliability? And then lastly, how do we make sure that we're looking at improving the observability and controllability without having to go through and overhaul the entire grid infrastructure? So we've come up and we're working on some proposed solutions and architectures to go and make this happen. And it starts with just expanding traditional demand response type of applications, making sure that the smart meters are involved, support a number of different protocols, and that they have the connectivity with a number of different, you know, dirt type of technologies. You know, all of this has to happen while making sure that it's high performance and it's working with inside of the constructs and constraints that exist inside of our grid today. So in closing, I'll turn it over to some of the other, you know, participants. But really, you know, we're really excited as Eaton about where the future of the grid is going and what we see as the digital grid. We think that it's a great time to be inside of the electrical industry that we're going through that period of rapid transformation and that when we look to the future, everything will start to appear as a grid and it's just going to be a matter of scale and how these integrate and connect. And lastly, we are looking at making sure that the right research and cooperation is in place so that we can create the open digital platforms that are needed to seamlessly exchange these informations and make efficient energy systems. So Lea, thank you very much. I think now we turn it over to William. William. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Fantastic. Just quick reminder for all the audience, if you have a question, you can type your question on the Q&A or the chat features or window below. And after the three panelists to share their perspective, we're going to kick off the Q&A session. Really? The floor is yours. Thank you, Lea Yang. Firstly, thank you, Epri, for having me here and Team Bits and Watts from Stanford as well. Really great presentation, Michael. Thank you for setting the context. And to folks tuning in from anywhere today, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. My name is Millie Gurung and I am the Senior Product Manager at Hitachi Ventera driving product strategy and digital solutions for energy specifically for power and utilities companies. If I can move... Oops, sorry. Just a quick glimpse into Hitachi. As I mentioned, I come from Hitachi Ventera. Hitachi Ventera is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Limited, a multi-national Japanese conglomerate with a revenue of $85 billion annually. And as you can see, Hitachi globally invests about $3.5 billion every year on research and development. And we have about 119,000-plus global patents to date worldwide. I'm having trouble going back and forth. Sorry. All right. So I think Hitachi today is really uniquely positioned for the digital transformation to deliver real value to our customers.   So in other words, really the technology foundation for IoT. And IoT essentially is really about the integration or the conversions of both the physical and digital worlds that can result in big social and economic impact. And our deep expertise in OT and IT is really driven by our strength in innovation. And some of you may have already heard that Hitachi acquired ABB Power Grid and a new GV was formed as of July 1st this month. So ABB Power Grid brings a lot of that OT expertise that are really around energy management solutions apart from just the large, you know, high voltage transformers and so forth. So we want to be able to augment that expertise with our Hitachi's digital capabilities. And you can think, imagine the kind of a strong portfolio that we can reach out to customers, you know, with our strong competitive advantages. Let me see if I get it right this time. So this is a LUMADA edge-to-cloud strategy for IOT. And this is kind of elaborating a little bit on what Michael had said about really creating that data platform as we move forward to modernizing and digitizing our grid. LUMADA is a big brand within Hitachi. It's very inclusive of all the offerings, but it's also very comprehensive on what it can offer as capabilities to our customers. And looking at this slide from left to right, left is where you are, you have all of your, you know, assets, and this is where you have the initial generation of all the data closer to the assets, you know, whether you're taking your data out from a SCADA or a PLC or you're talking about video or a LiDAR imagery and so forth. And we have an edge capability in the middle, which is the LUMADA edge intelligence. This is sitting really close to those assets that are generating a lot of data and hence handling doing a lot of data processing and handling doing data management you are able to store and persist and forward and be able to also provide the real-time analytics at the edge. An edge, you know, can mean a lot of things to a lot of people depending where you're sitting at, what context and perspective you're applying, but in this context, edge is really a software stack which is hardware agnostic and it can run on a small footprint device like a gateway within your plant network or you can scale it to run at a hardware appliance in a data center or in the cloud. So with that, I'm going to move into the LUMADA data services. Where we bring in the data, whether you're running the data on on-prem appliance or into the cloud or any of these infrastructures or all of these infrastructures and be able to do anything from data integration to do that AI model management, doing data cataloging and speaking of cataloging, Hitachi Ventura recently acquired a company called Waterline Data primarily with the expertise on data cataloging, which is really following the data, governing the data throughout the life cycle of the data, so understanding the detail lineage, providing the overall data governance and really around the data sovereignty as well. And on the bottom here is Data Lake Services and Data Lake is primarily the capability to generically store all of your data information that you aggregate in a much more cost-effective way. And most of the data lakes today are really based on Hadoop and similar types of framework where they scale with compute and processing in a linear fashion. But with our Hitachi's LUMADA data optimizer for Hadoop you're able to intelligently share the data so you can continue to use your offline storage data in a object stores platform and be able to cost-effectively use your Hadoop clusters for much more real-time data that you need insights on. And at the very far right is really the insights area. This is where we develop solutions or applications to really help customer challenges and really help customers drive outcomes. And as part of the energy solutions, sorry as part of the energy insights this is where I'm primarily focused on today. And this is really building up from this earlier slide, you know, as you look at the customers today, you know, and depending where the customer is today in terms of their digital maturity or wherever they are in terms of their digital transformation projects, you know, we have facilities we can offer to really meet the customers in their journey today. So level 1, level 2, level 3 and level 4. Level 1 is really around that data management and integration. This is really the first step to unlocking the value in the digital power grid and moving on to level 2 where you have much more insights of your data when you talk about your assets availability, reliability utilization, really to provide a single pane of glass view across all of your assets. And here, you know, we have solutions like video analytics to be able to provide situational awareness, doing intrusion detection, perimeter security, geofencing and so forth really around not just the physical aspect, but really around the workplace safety as well. And then, of course, cybersecurity is managed services to really help the utility customers in terms of being compliant with the NERC SIP requirements. And most of the customers, at least the ones I've talked to today, really fall under that level 1 and level 2. And moving on to level 3 is really where you see much more, you know, AI driven models and data science and predictive analytics. This is where you are looking to really focus on the overall, you know, operations optimizations to help significantly reduce your overall O&M cost by using predictive capabilities. So you go from being reactive, preventive to really much more predictive and prescriptive to be able to understand what should be the next steps to really help mitigate some of the challenges you're seeing today. And from level 3 to level 4 is, you know, what we call this game changing advantage for our customers. This is where you go where utilities really want to incorporate the customer centricity as part of the value chain. Look at the overall system optimization to really drive the business insights and be financially optimized. And the solutions around this area is really around power forecasting, load forecasting, understanding the DER and energy storage and be able to provide that consumption data points back to the customers. And as I mentioned, you know, with this joint venture with ABP PowerGrid, we do have a lot of that portfolio under energy portfolio management under market intelligence that we really hope to work together to reach out to the customers who are looking to benefit from that combined portfolio today. And this is the Hitachi Ventera digital value enablement. This is really, you know, yes, we want to go through the customers in terms of identifying what are the key challenges, what outcome do we want to drive. And this is the framework that we use when we actually want to go and talk to our customers. So this is really an advisory led consultative servicing where we meet the broad stakeholder in an organization and be able to identify what are the challenges, what use cases, be able to help them prioritize these use cases and go through what we call it value engineering, which is really establishing what would be the ROI and based on some of these use cases that's been identified. So it's a vision to value in about 12 weeks where we work with the customers and the SMEs in really understanding and getting a value in about 12 weeks. And from their own words, you know, it's that sort of the MVP version from there we can assess and if the customers really sees the value then we work on further scaling the applications or solutions. And this is one of the implementations we're doing today in our one of our customers in AMIA I can't name the customer name but really it's a utility customers both with energy and water and here the challenge is really around, you know, the highly distributed assets which are very hard to monitor and manage and hence really impacting in the high O&M cost as well as the service interruption. So we are using the Lumata Edge Intelligence to really help collect data from all these different sensors to be able to predict the potential failures and recommend the next course of actions with the aspiration that, you know, we will be able to provide service quality and high customer satisfaction and be able to predict, you know, potential service interruptions and so forth. And this is right now really in the middle of the deployment. As you can see from this diagram here it's very tiny but Lumata Edge Intelligence is really used in the context of a gateway which is doing a lot of data aggregation and then it's tearing the data forwarding to the GCP Google Cloud platform and moving on to the next case study with the optimized Prime Program. This is one of the largest commercial EV innovation project based out of UK and it's funded by Ofgem and Hitachi Ventera is leading the project and there are other partners as part of this consortium. There is UK Power Networks there is Centrica and the Royal Mill which is really the delivery, mill delivery system of service and then we also have Uber in the process. So this project is really aims to develop the cost effective strategy and how to minimize the impact of the commercial EVs on the distribution network, right? How do we quantify and minimize the network impact of this commercial fleet and what infrastructure in terms of networking or charging or IT is really required to enable the EV transition at scale. So we're about 18 months into the project. It started back in January 2019 and because there's been a slight setback in terms of delay not having all of these private higher vehicles like Uber because of COVID-19 and hence the project's been extended up to February of 2023 and right now we're working with 220 EV fleets today to really help understand what are the behavior of all these EV fleets today, you know, whether they're taking the EV back in the residential area at the end of the day to charge or you're talking about the fleet in a depot like Royal Mill which we're working with 220 today and then there's scenario of mixed charging, you know, with Uber that you get to charge during the day in some of these depots but at the end of the night, at the end of the day you come home and, you know, use the residential charging to be able to do that. So, you know, how do we get all the telemetry data, trip data and to really understand the customer behavior and be able to scale this whole transition of the electrification as well. And moving on to, this is bear with me, this is I know it's 10 minutes, this is my last slide, this is a glimpse into some of our key R&D projects in Slux today, primarily in North America and these projects were built as POC with customers really around DER management to really help mitigate that duck curves and, you know, optimize energy consumption and supply to reduce overall operations cost as well. You know, maybe I can highlight one or two here. Solar EMS is really a cloud based application done with the POC with the customer in California with a fleet of PV inverters and it's basically visualizing what has been the solar production for the last seven years, what has been the consumption, what has been the cost savings and, you know, CO2 emission as well and right now Solar EMS does not have sort of a prediction capability but when you look at predict to win one of the IPs here that's the one that we've done with a, again another POC with an independent power company based in India to really be able to understand and predict a win generation as you all know, you know, if you are under committing then you need to pay penalty and if you're over generating then you end up, you know, that's a loss in revenue for you as well but there are some of the key initiatives that we're running as Hitachi on top of the, you know, IT data platform we provide to be able to scale and help customers in terms of their digital transformation. With that I thank you for having me here and handing it back to you Omar. Great, thank you Millie that was wonderful and our final presenter on this panel is Oric from Seamans and Oric you have the floor so if you can advance to the next slide you can go ahead, thank you. Good, thank you very much Omar and Giamn first of all for organizing this great panel and for inviting me to present here a little bit of our work from Seamans and corporate technology. As you have seen in the previous presentation from Michael and Millie companies like Eaton, Hitachi and Seamans are developing cloud platforms to connect different kinds of components for Seamans I can say about smart meters, buildings, PB plans, that resistance. We as a research center we are developing algorithms for these cloud platforms and one question that was popping up repeatedly during this process is how can we develop a simple environment to develop these applications and this is what I'm going to talk about today. We have developed the Seamans energy workplace for analysts how we call it in short SIVA and I will give you a short glimpse into this development. It's an ongoing process with our business unit so it's certainly not a product that you could buy off the shelf. I will start with giving a short overview of Seamans and how Seamans is driving sustainability and the integration of DRs as a company then I will talk about our research center and how we support Seamans, our company but other organizations along this way and then I will talk about SIVA and show some examples at the end. Let me start with Seamans. Seamans is investing a lot of money in innovation and if you want to drive sustainability from my perspective there are two main factors how we can do this. The first is of course innovative technology for our customers for other companies but the second one is also leading by example and this is what I want to show on this slide. We are doing both ways. Seamans has increased tremendously the R&D spending of the last years but what I want to highlight here is that Seamans is investing about half a billion US dollars per year focused on 14 core research topics and I depicted here only four of these 14 so this is not the complete field but these four are the most relevant ones for the panel here today. So there is a heavily focused research on for example distributed energy systems energy storage which is not only battery systems but also hydrogen systems power electronics and connected e-mobility. Seamans is putting a lot of effort into being innovative in those fields. On the other hand as I said leading by example is another important statement. Our CEO in 2015 five years back announced that Seamans wants to become a CO2 neutral company by 2030. This is pretty bold statement and I want to show you here how far we have gone up to today. We had the numbers on the lower left of the Seamans US CO2 footprint and it has gone down more than 50% over the last five years. And this we have achieved in different ways using energy efficiency programs, distributed energy systems looking at the emissions of our fleets and green energy. To give you a perspective Seamans in the US alone has 50,000 employees so we're not talking about some offices but we have factories with many locations in the US and to get there was of course a big task. There is still quite some way to go obviously to get to CO2 neutral as a company and as I said this is the US part similar efforts are going on across the globe. I have a good view from the Seamans perspective and I want to take you into our research center and how we support our company on this path to be more sustainable and to drive innovation in that space. You see here a map of the US projects that our research center has been or is involved we are supporting our business units in three different ways. First of all we do consulting then we support our business units with product and solution development and then we do research for example in US Department of Energy from the project. For the consulting you see here a few cities that we worked with in the past to whatever develop strategies how to become sustainable in the next 20-30 years. So we compare different technologies and provide studies to these cities to make sure that they pick the right technologies whether it's new programs for the buildings improving public transformation building wind and solar farms and so on and so forth in order to meet their targets. The second one is working closely with our business units to develop new products and solutions and I want to highlight here Galapagos Island Siemens has built their hybrid power plant with diesel generators battery system and the PV plant and the system is able to operate the islands to supply power to the customer there without any CO2 emissions if you turn on the diesel generators. The particular challenge there was of course how to make sure that the system actually runs 24-7 without interruption if you turn off the diesel generator and I guess most of you are familiar running a system even though relatively small system with zero inertia is quite a challenge. It's running now since almost two years, very reliable no issues and it was a close collaboration as I said between our research center and the business unit. And the third category is DOE sponsored resource project. Michael was mentioning some of those projects that Ethan is working on. We have also multiple of these projects. I just want to highlight here our project with Hawaii. The young mentioned it briefly at the beginning. I'm leading an RPE sponsored project which is looking into the operation of Hawaii big island with 100% generation from wind and solar. So how can we actually demonstrate an operation of this island if you turn off all synchronous machine? I also want to highlight here again I mentioned before the two components innovation and lead by example. If you look at the right hand side of the slide you see Princeton and this is our office and we are also trying to lead here by example, not only for our company but also for other office buildings by converting our own office into microgrid. What you can see here on the next slide is a brief overview of the structure of this microgrid. So we installed a PV system on the parking lot with a battery system there. We installed a new building management system. We have EV chargers, microcontroller and the cloud connection. And again this is for us a two sides approach. On the one hand we want to do innovative research and demonstrate it on our building. As an example I usually use the term that we are the guinea pigs of our own research if our algorithms do not provide the right results then lights go off. And there are different fields as you can see on the slide in and out of things and performance monitoring and analytics of course two very important fields. On the other hand as I said leading by example we don't see it too neutral as our office. We are not producing during the day in particular now with a lot of sun during the day more electricity over the day than what we consume. And this is of course also a blueprint then for other office buildings for Siemens but also for other companies for our customers. With this I want to take you into the cloud space not going into the details Siemens is offering as I mentioned at the beginning but Siemens is offering many different cloud applications I will talk here only about Siemens Energy Workplace for Analysts and this is using our MindSphere environment which is used by Siemens to collect all the data from different devices and then provide more insights for our customers. So what is Siemens Energy Workplace for Analysts? On the left hand side you see again a picture from our office in Princeton so of course what we want to achieve there if we are operating the system is we want to have an understanding what is going on in the system and how we can increase the plant performance. This is what we care about as a plant manager. On the other side we are also the data scientists and the researchers who want to develop interesting algorithms. Combining these two is a quite challenging task. As was mentioned earlier today the communication interface between the real assets and the smart algorithms. This is actually a heavy workload and this is what Siemens is providing. It gives you access to raw data from real plants in our case from our Princeton office and an easy coding environment where data scientists can use Python-like language in order to program algorithms to create insights into what is going on in your plant monitoring how to increase performance or just visualization of the results maybe the CO2 reduction thanks to the installation of our system. Next I want to show you two examples of applications that have already been developed in this platform. One of them is the PV Soiling app so what you can see here on the left-hand side is the soiling of PV panels and obviously many of these PV panels are standing in very dry areas so soiling is definitely an issue for many of these plants. And then the question is when is it worth sending in a team to clean the panels which costs money and is how much can I increase the revenue by cleaning the panels. So with the redevelopment app which you can see on the right-hand side a little bit of the data which is estimating the daily losses that you create by the soiling. And then of course you can decide, the operator can decide when to send in his team for cleaning the panels. The second app I want to show you is actually used for our system on Galapagos Island that I mentioned earlier. It's used for battery monitoring. As you're for sure familiar batteries have challenges it's important to know the state of health of your batteries in order to predict how many more years the batteries can be used and when they may need to be replaced or maybe also decide about different operation modes. And this application is gathering the data from Galapagos and creating an estimate and you see a different estimate some of them coming from the state of health estimation from the battery management system itself. Some of them coming from different algorithms that we implemented and as I mentioned one of the nice feature of CIWI is that we can easily implement new algorithms, test them and of course eventually then bring them to our customers. I want to highlight here also that CIWI is a joint development as I mentioned with our business units but more importantly we are now opening this up for external partners. We have a third collaboration with a university where the university brings in their data they have one campus distributed energy system and then they open it to their students to actually use this platform and create their own algorithms to improve the performance of the university's plan. And we are looking for more partners so if you are a university maybe a research lab and looking for something like this please just send me an email after this panel and then we can get in touch in a separate meeting and discuss if this is possible. But at least thank you very much for your attention and then I guess Omar or Liang is going over to the panel. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Alright, so Aurelie can you bring the slides back to with all the three panelists? Well first I'd like to kind of help the panel warm up a little bit here. We do receive some question from the Q&A but the first kind of little bit general question is for Eaton Siemens to touch each of you have several business units and have the energy sector, power sector also has in the industrial sector and even healthcare sectors and some of the things we talk about here like the data the communication that gets also very important across sectors and some of the things we touch a little bit maybe more important in other sectors like the privacy the data privacy, the healthcare sector is more important than private than the power sectors and so the question is what experience or lessons learned from other business units in your company can help or inform you think about the data platform in our sector in power sectors. I don't know what to order but maybe we started with Michael and then go to Millie and then go to Oric. Thank you. You know what maybe let me take a step back when I think about this and just give you the perspective that we have looked at it from Eaton when we start thinking about the nature of digital technologies and we fundamentally as a company said we're going to make we're going to invest very heavily in cybersecurity it really has to start there unless you become best in class at cybersecurity standards proliferate that throughout your whole organization and then make sure that you have we believe independent third parties that come in and verify your robustness and cybersecurity and stuff it's really difficult to establish trust with companies on a digital domain and we believe that that is critically important especially in industrial segments like we like we are today you know if you think about it from a if you think about it most of the effort that's been spent around cybersecurity happens on the IP side and we always hear about data breaches that occur when customer lists or profiles have been hacked or intellectual property has been stolen but if you think about if you think about the immediacy of the impact you generally hear about it but nothing necessarily happens for maybe several months several days several years if you have a compromised industrial system let's just say it's a SCADA system and oil and gas at a refinery or you have breaches that have occurred inside of utilities that have been well publicized the effects are immediate it can be catastrophic and cause harm of life it can you know the benefits or the effects inside of a community are felt you know instantaneously in its very widespread so while all the emphasis on cybersecurity has been dealt with you know in the IT space it's even more critical where there is you know an emerging set of standards but not a consistent set of global standards that everyone's united around when it comes to industrial markets and how cybersecurity is going to you know play into effect there so we believe that that is kind of first and foremost has to be a core a core competency of any organization and we've partnered with a lot of third parties outside third parties to come in and verify that our practices are robust that their state of the art and get independent audits that are occurring because we think that you have to have independent audits to kind of come in and assess it and right along with cybersecurity is also the aspects around data privacy it's becoming increasingly important and you know from some of the other markets that we play in and benefits we've learned on the IT side you have to make sure that the right amount of restrictions are placed on the data how it's used if you want music for additional research how do you anonymize it so that you're only getting the pieces of information that you need to go and develop you know insights and predictive capabilities for the future so I would say we've learned a lot from all of our markets and have kind of set a blanket foundation says this is going to be a very critical core competency inside of Eaton and we'll extend that out to our partners we offer cybersecurity services that could come in and help do assessments and stuff and really help put best practices in place both on the cybersecurity and the data privacy side just to make sure that our customers you know can be assured that the solutions that you're putting forth and the practices that are in place our state of the art. Thank you Michael yeah I think cyber and the privacy are great you know we heard a couple times in the previous panels last several weeks are very important so just for audience information you know in the middle of the second half of August that we're also putting another panel specifically to address the cybersecurity and the privacy issues fantastic and let's go to Milly. Yeah thank you Michael I think those are definitely on the top of my mind and you know in the industry we're in today really around that cybersecurity and privacy and if I were to try and you know answer these questions in a slightly differently you know from my experience is one of the key learnings in the industry when you compare utilities in manufacturing or healthcare is really around lack of customer centricity I think utilities today really lag behind in terms of you know articulating what the customer really wants and really articulating customer experience in the value chain right I think there was a study done back in 2018 by a company called Infosys Digital Outlook where 79% of the utilities believed that they were customer centric but the catch is there's only 7% of the customers in that really share that perspective so there's a huge gap on what utilities thinks is the version of customer centricity versus the customers you know like rate peers like you and me and the others and I also the other you know point of view is when we when we talk about and I think utilities today is really you know fearing you know they lack the customer centricity and you know they could get they could easily be commoditized today so if utilities really want to get ahead and be that you know financially optimized I think they really need to get head started on really bringing customers and really understanding putting customers in the middle of all of their value props you know it's one thing that I can think of that's very good point customer centric I think we do see a lot of utilities are changing and transforming and moving towards we can do better Ulrich and if you want to I mean obviously I agree with what Michael and Millie were saying concerning utility and standards that we need I would like to highlight the difference that I see between different domains right there are certain let me call it maybe base technologies I think Michael was calling them communication this is something that you can more or less easily transfer from one domain to another but also other challenges which are more difficult to transfer from one domain and I want to give you an example in industry automation factory when you're automating a factory usually all or most of the components come from the same vendor you usually close systems and connecting it to the globe is completely different story than connecting an energy system where you have different components from different vendors you have mentioned was mentioned before the privacy of the data so you have different owners of the different assets so they are completely different challenges compared for example the industry automation and I believe healthcare systems at least within was hospital or a group of hospitals owned by one company everything is owned by one company so they are only I would call them maybe base technologies or the underlying IT technologies they are more or less common across different domains other solutions really have to be developed domain specific great that's a great question to get this kicked off thank you Ulrich actually building on that I want to go back to the framework that Michael introduced and that was the your discussion about the layers of a digital platform the electrical communications data collection layer and the organizational software layer and I thought that was really helpful and I was just curious really question maybe starting with Michael but for all of you is where do you see the biggest challenge lies in the framework of those layers is it in that organizational we talk about this notion of data coordination particularly to the point that Ulrich just made about dealing with an environment here in the context of the utility work trying to integrate resources on the customer side where you've got a very heterogeneous environment of devices from multiple countless manufacturers not just on the grid side but on the consumer side and homes and buildings and vehicles so again maybe question to Michael first in the context of those layers where do you think the biggest challenge is and what can be done about that and then same question for the rest of the panelists let's say so there's challenges all over the place Omar let's start there okay and you know what it depends on where you are in the cycle and the deployment of solutions inside your facility and let me just rather than say where the most is answer that but I'll answer it last let's just talk about the complexity that you have across those three layers okay the first if you just start with kind of the electrical layer there's a lot when you think about assets that a utility buys and it could be a pad mount transformer or a pole mount transformer could be reclosers etc these assets are capital expenditures that are expected to live for 20, 30, 40 even longer lifespan so you think about the age and lifespan of electronics okay it's not meant to be that long so you got two challenges you have a lot of infrastructure that's in place that isn't equipped to be digital natively so you can't necessarily get information you can't detect if there's a crack in a transformer and you know the insulation material isn't holding up I mean a lot of that's physical inspection today so the first real challenge is just digitization of the assets themselves and I think the second thing is we have to realize that even if you digitalize the assets the business model is going to have to expand so that there's a constant refreshing of the electronics that goes in there because when you think about cybersecurity the electronics that you put in today as computing power advances aren't going to be able to withstand a lot of the cyber attacks of 10 years from now or 15 years from now again let alone 50 years from now so that's kind of one problem that we have the second if we start thinking now about all of the assets that are out in the field is collecting them all so you have a very heterogeneous environment you have products that come from a lot of vendors and there's really a lack of standards in terms of what the data sets look like how do they communicate and stuff and I think at least having open standards is a good starting point so every manufacturer publishes what these data streams are allow people to go and integrate and bring that information in the industry work towards what is this commonality among communications as well as data standards to give a customer a sense of ease that you know what when they buy these assets they're going to be able to go and hook it up and collect information from anyone that's out there and then the last piece is really at the solution level do you know that there's SCADA systems and stuff today that really once the data is in there it's proprietary you can't get it out paying a lot of high price fees and stuff like that even if you can get it out and then it may be a data extract but when you start getting to the solution layer and stuff just being able to open that up being able to transmit and make the protocols available so that people can come and get the information out and exchange it openly so there's challenges across all three I don't want to come back I think that that middle layer is really going to become increasingly important as assets become more digital in nature that sit on the grid and then certainly the systems that collect information today are going to have to have interfaces out there allowing for a seamless exchange of information Thank you Millie, how are you? Sure, no thanks Michael and building on to what Michael talked about on really that middle layer, the data layer looking at the utility infrastructure it's not sort of an easy replace I think that's when we see data standardization really help govern and establish a bridge for different kind of systems to be able to talk to each other from the older systems to legacy systems and the hardware to be able to talk to new modern technology and being a Californian wildfire prevention vegetation management is very true to my heart so when you look at the data when you look at the sort of a multifaceted problem like vegetation management you look at the data sources you're looking at geospatial data you're looking at temporal spatial data you're looking at the fire outage you're looking at the historical fire records you know, when you look at all these different sources of data that you're putting into your system to be then your advanced analytics and algorithm I think, you know, the point I'm trying to get to is, yes, you know, we have collected data but how do you automate that data ingestion pipeline today SMEs spend about 80% of their time doing sort of a processing massaging, doing a lot of data curation so how do you, you know, shorten this span of unproductive type by building an automated ingestion pipeline which is very much metadata driven policy based so that, you know, you can automatically do data labeling, you know, data annotation you know, tag your data and then apply, you know, apply your semantic knowledge on top so that it becomes meaningful to SMEs who can then use that sort of a data set for advanced analytics and I think when you talk about applying semantic knowledge, which is basically a cognitive ability, that is your construct of a digital twin of an asset and that's how we get into that ultimate intelligent grid, a digital, you know, twin of a grid. So I think that's worth, you know, thinking about it from that perspective. I mean data standardization is very, very important and, you know, I think familiar with DMP3 and a lot of transition works that's been happening from DMP3 to IEC 61-850 and then, you know, in California rule that governs California rule 21 on IEEEE 2030.5, you know, I think those are all good but when you talk about the real world challenges such as vegetation management, you know, how do you bring in the data, massage the data so you are able to provide the real time insights for somebody in the control room operations to be able to make that key decision handing it off to Ulrich. Yes, thanks, Millie. So my comment actually would go exactly in the same direction as Millie. When you talk about digitalization, you always talk about scalable applications that apply to many, many plants, right? So if you compare to mobile phones or tablets, these devices are more or less similar. There's a large number of similar plants. If you think about microgrids, if you think about just PV plants, if you think about maybe hybrid plants, maybe battery storage plus PV, maybe with an EV charging, they are all different, right? It's much more, I would say, the plurality of combination of components than even having them from different manufacturers is just making the problem significantly harder to come up with applications that are really scalable. And then getting back to what Millie said, I mean creating a digital twin for this to reduce engineering efforts, I think this is one of the biggest challenges. Perfect. I want to pick up one question from the Q&A and it's kind of a follow-on question on this one. So Michael, you talk about on this slide, on a specific slide that Omar touched on. You mentioned Open and Scalable Data Platform. As a research organization, both APRA and Stanford, we really love it. And the question is what is the business model for a company and look into this open data platform? It's a good question and I think that we have to learn a lesson from the IT side of the equation when we start thinking about industrial systems and stuff and the world doesn't want proprietary systems. What the world is looking for is to have open systems and that really manifested itself as we think about the solutions that have come about in the IT space. Everyone wants to feel that they have a sense of choice and that they have a sense of being able to go and being able to go and choose best-of-breed solutions to kind of come together and to think really that's where the industrial markets are heading. They're just less mature in their thinking. So if you think about it, those business models have translated into the IT space. You can have a best-of-breed solution that comes out and still become relevant in the market and then also just because things are open you still can have access to data and charge for access to data if it's providing relevant value. I mean ultimately the customer determines if there's value that's being generated from this information and stuff, but the more that we can create these open standards and reduce a lot of the complex engineering that only slows down the pace of innovation and allows for the exchange of insight, the faster we're going to be able to grow and we look at that and saying that growth is what's going to ultimately drive us and if things that you want to charge for you still can go and do that and the market will ultimately tell us whether it's going to be successful or not. There's plenty of examples out there in the IT world and other industries that say that this is a viable path. Terrific. Oric, I'm not sure if you two want to add any comments here. No, I think Michael covered everything that was in my mind and giving my two cents from IT perspective definitely as you see all the innovation around open source software having a community contribute over proprietary, there's definitely a huge use advantage in terms of how rapidly you can accelerate and move forward to actually being... You have a larger base to be able to use it and provide feedback. Oric, you are muted. Yeah, thanks. So that's what I just wanted to add so the FIVA platform I was presenting is actually looking in that direction. You could easily imagine opening up this platform to let developers around the world develop these applications and then the plant hours can actually buy these applications. You could have a rating system. Obviously at this point there is no final decision from the company whether or not we do this but it at least goes in the same line to have an open access platform like I said the funding model behind this would be then using the applications, the data scientists that develop the application would get some funding from this and FIVA is a platform operator as well. Terrific. There was a question that came in and this is I think directed to Oric. You had mentioned more storage being needed. What are the most promising storage solutions? Do you see any need for new energy carriers to complement the electric grid? I think this is referring to hydrogen as an example of an energy carrier as more renewables come online. Maybe Oric, you and if Milly or Michael would like to comment on that as well, please weigh in. I can take this as a first response. So from my perspective battery storage as we know it today applies to certain applications cars maybe for residential homes to some extent but if you think more than say 5 or 10 years ahead you need really long term storage. You need maybe even something like seasonal storage and for this I think battery is not the right chemical battery as we know it today. There is not really a revolution in technology is not the right solution. Hydrogen right now is a very promising candidate and probably you all are aware there is a huge program run in Europe in order to boost hydrogen also in the US there is a huge program to run this just I think a few weeks ago they announced a new national lab program with 60, 70 or even more million US dollars in this direction. So for increasing renewables beyond the degrees what we see today in certain countries and states we definitely need an alternative to battery storage. Would Michael or Millie like to comment on that question as well? Can't you speaking I'm not as familiar I haven't worked very close to the battery so I'm looking forward to Michael and Rich and you know learning that's going to be my take away key take away from our session today. I think you know a lot of it's depending on the applications and stuff I mean we're seeing seeing a lot of advances when we think about lithium ion batteries when they start becoming for EVs and ranges are increasing and stuff they are starting to become more cost effective for grid scale solutions but again they're going to run out and not have the power density needed for other applications when we start thinking about you know long haul trucks as an example. So it really depends on the application I think that the battery world and energy storage in general is probably going to be one of the fastest growing areas of development that's going to occur over the next you know couple of decades and you know one of the big things that I think we have to pay attention to when we think about it is the controls and are we optimizing the controls for the right type of energy storage whether it's charging discharging cycles effectively managing it to get the optimum efficiency out of it. That's going to be a key role that we're going to have to play and that we're investing in is to make sure that as these technologies come out we're staying agnostic to it and able to deploy heterogeneous type of battery technologies across our DIRS solutions. Thank you. We have about four minutes left. I'd like to have last question to all the panelists and we typically ask this question in the end is the role of the COP research in this ecosystem. We asked this question last week to the government agencies. We'd like to we'd like to ask this question to you guys because there's different type of organization for the research. I saw ORIX for number which is $500 million in the clean energy sector. Wow, that's more than office electricity funding from Department of Energy. So we have a university research, government-funded research at the industry, funded research like APRI. I'd like to have one minute at last each of you to share your perspective of the role of COP research in this ecosystem. Yeah, maybe I can go ahead for the $500 million was not only for renewables that was for all 14 topics. I work for Research Center. For me, this is the place where innovation is brought from, let's say, academic and research center research into real business. As I mentioned earlier, we work closely with the business units where we directly work with end customers and see the problems they face. And on the other hand, we work closely with national labs, universities to see the most advanced technologies that is going far beyond what we do in our research center. And just reaching this gap for me is really the key task for research center like Siemens Corporate Knowledge. Yeah. And just to add to that for Hitachi, I think I mentioned earlier, Hitachi invests about 4% of their total revenue to R&D worldwide. And when you touching on Michael's original slide really around the safety and resiliency and sustainability, if you want to tie in all that, we at Hitachi understand that we just by Hitachi itself cannot solve all the problems. We understand the value of research organizations like EPRI working with the government to understand organization to help us guide in terms of data standardization and so forth. And I think, and for us what I do on a day-to-day is tap me into the research area and see how we can test the market penetration and really test the commercial viability of some of this IP. Can we actually scale this IP? Can we actually make it that scale for some of our customers? Does it really make sense? I think that gives us that safe heaven for us to be able to venture out in a very limited and structured setting. And I think that is you know, that's really what Orit mentioned. This R&D is really the forward-looking vehicle to be able to continue more innovation and more technology. And you know, I'm so lucky that every organization that's been working in the past 10 years work very, very closely with the R&D team to help kind of, you know, guide the innovation. And what corporate technology and corporate research plays an extremely vital role in eating, I think, in all corporations and stuff. And it's really the strategic link between what the businesses and the markets are seeing with the new technology introductions and what are going to be the revolutionary changes in the technology advances that occur in the future. And really, they look at how do you create the right level of partnerships, public and private type of partnerships to help advance that research and look at the early stage technology, the TRL levels, advance it to a point where we can now start solving real customer problems that our business units face and really accelerate innovation so that we are staying current, we are staying contemporary and creating that open innovation system with the world to help advance our customers journey forward. Great. Terrific. Oma? Well, we are perfect timing.  We are right at our conclusion. So I want to thank all of you, Michael, Millie, Ulrich, fantastic discussion. I wish we had more time. Thank you for all of you attending remotely. Again, we will be posting the webcast recording and presentations on the Epri and Stanford sites. And if there's any questions, you can reach out to Liang or myself on that. So with that, I want to thank you all for a wonderful panel. So again, Michael, Millie and Ulrich, thank you very much. Have a great rest of the day or evening. Take care. You too. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye-bye.


Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Mission Bay Conference Center in downtown San Francisco at Node Summit 2017. theCUBE's been coming here for a number of years. In fact, Ryan Dolls, one of our most popular interviews in the history of the show, talking about Node and the community's growing, the performance is going up and there's a lot of good energy here. So we're excited to be here and there's a lot of big companies that maybe you would or wouldn't expect to be involved. And we're excited to have Gerov Seth. He is the project manager for several things JavaScript. I think that's the first time we've ever had that title on. He's from Microsoft. Thanks for stopping by. Yeah, hey Jeff, nice to be here. Thanks for having me over. Absolutely. So let's just jump right into it. What is Microsoft doing here? In such a big way. So one of the things that Microsoft is like, I think we really are now committed and we have the mantra that we're trying to follow which is any app, any developer, any platform. Node actually is a great growing community and we've been getting soaked more and more and trying to help the community and build the community and play along and contribute. And that's the reason that brings us here. Like it's great to see the energy, the passion when people around here. It's great to get those connections going, have those conversations, hear from the customers as to what they really need, hear from developers about their needs and then having a close set of collaboration with the core community members to see how we can even evolve the project further. Right, right. And specifically on Azure, which is interesting, it's been interesting to watch Microsoft really go full bore into cloud via Azure. I just talked to somebody the other day. I was talking about 365 being such a game changer in terms of cloud implementations at big company. There was a report that came out about the path of 20 billion. So clearly Microsoft is not only all in but really successfully executing on that strategy.  Yes, I mean I think one of the big, big pieces really is as the developer paradigms are changing, as the app paradigms are changing, how do you really help make developers this transition to a cloud native world, right? How do you make sure that the app platforms, the underlying infrastructure, the cloud, the tools that developer use, how do you combine all of them and make sure that you're making it a much easier experience for developers to move on from their existing paradigms to these new cloud native paradigms? You know, one of the things we've been doing on the Azure side of the house, and especially when we look at Node.js as a platform, you know, we've been working on making sure that Node.js has a great story across all the different compute models that we support on Azure, starting from like, hey, if you want to do serverless functions, if you want to do pass, if you want to go the container way, if you want to just use VMs. And in fact, you know, we just announced the Azure container instances today. So it's, you know, one of the work, some of the work we are doing is really focused on making sure that the developer experiences, as you migrate your workloads from old traditional monolithic apps are also kind of getting ready to move to this new cloud native era. Right, so it's an interesting point of view for Microsoft, because some people, again, people in the know already know, but a lot of people maybe don't know, you know, kind of Microsoft's heritage and open source, we think, you know, it used to buy my office CD and my, you know, it's different, especially as you guys go more heavily into cloud, you need to be more open to the various tools of the developer community. That's absolutely true. And one of the focus areas for us really has been, you know, as we think through the cloud native transition, you know, what are the big pieces, the main open source tools, the frameworks that are available, and how do we provide great experiences for those on Azure, right? Because, you know, at times, people come with the notion that, hey, Azure probably might just be good for .NET or might just be good for Windows, but, you know, the actual fact today is really that, you know, Azure has great support story for Linux, Azure has great story for a lot of these open source tools, and we are continuing to grow our story in that perspective. So we really want to, you know, make sure that open source developers who come and work on our platform are successful. And then specifically for Node, and you're actually on the board, so you've got a leadership position. When you look at Node.js within the ecosystem of open source projects and the growth that we keep hearing about in the sessions, you know, how are you, and you specifically in Microsoft generally kind of helping to guide the growth of this community and the development of this community as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Right, I think that's a great question.  So I'll kind of list down three or four things that we are doing. I think the first and foremost is, you know, we are a participant in the Node.js Foundation. Right. You know, that's where, like, hey, we kind of look at the administrative stuff. We are a sponsor, you know, at the needed levels, et cetera. So that's just the initial monetary support. But then it gets to really, you know, being a part of the Node core committee, like, you know, as we work on some of the core pieces, as we evolve Node, you know, how can we actually bring more perspectives, more value into the actual project? So that's, you know, we have, you know, many set of engineers who are right now working across different working groups with Node and helping evolve Node. You know, you might have heard about the NAPI effort. You know, we're working with the diagnostics working group. We're working with the benchmarking working group and, you know, bringing the thing. The third thing that we did a while back was, you know, we also did this integration of bringing Chakra, which is the JavaScript runtime from Microsoft that powers Microsoft Edge. We made Node work with Chakra because, you know, we wanted to bring the power of Node to this new platform called Windows IoT. And, you know, the existing Node could not get there because of some of the platform limitations. So those are like some of the few examples that we've, you know, and how we've been actually communicating and contributing. And then I think the biggest and the foremost for me really are the two pillars. Like when I think about Microsoft's contribution, it's really like, you know, the big story or the big pivot for us is, you know, we kind of go create developer tools and help make developer lives easier by giving them the right set of tools to achieve what they want to achieve in less time, be more productive, right? The second thing is really like the cloud platforms as things are moving. I think across both of those areas, our focus really has been to make sure that Node as a language, Node as a platform, you know, has great, you know, first-class experiences that we can help define. Well, you guys are so fortunate. You have such a huge install base of developers. But again, traditionally, it wasn't necessarily cloud application developers and that's been changing over time. And there's such a fierce competition for that guy or gal who wakes up in the morning or not maybe the morning at 10, has a cup of coffee and has to figure out what they're going to develop today. And there's so many options and it's a fierce competition. So you need to have an easy solution. You need to have a nice environment. You need to have everything that they want so they're coding on your stuff and not on somebody else's. That's true. I mean, somehow I kind of, instead of calling it competition, I have started using this term cooperation because between a lot of the companies and vendors that we talk about, right? It's more about for all of us, it's working together to grow the community. It's working together to grow the pie. You know, with open source, it's not really one over the other. It's like the more players you have and the more players who engage with great ideas, I think better things come out of that. So it's all about that cooperation rather than competition. Well, certainly around an open source project here, and we see a lot of big names, but I can tell you I've been to a lot of big shows where they are desperately trying to attract the developer ecosystem. Come develop on our platform. So you're in a fortunate spot. You started, it's not from zero, but open source is different. It's an important ethos because it is much more community and people look at the name, they don't necessarily look at the title or even the company that people work for. Exactly. And I think having more players involved also means like it's going to be great for the developer ecosystem, right? Because everybody is going to keep pushing for making it better and better. So as we grow from a smaller stage to like, hey, there's actually a lot of enterprise adoption of these use case scenarios that people are coming up with, et cetera, it's always great to have more parties involved and more people involved. Gaurav, thank you very much. And again, congratulations on your work here in Node. Keep this community strong. Looks like you guys are well on your way. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for your time. Gaurav Seth, he's a project lead at Microsoft. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Node Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.