Interview with Georg Stöger, Director Training and Consulting
TTTech Industrial Automation AG has been operating as an independent company since 2019 under the umbrella of TTTech, which was founded in 1998 as a spin-off of the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). As a manufacturer and provider of the open edge computing platform NERVE, TTTech Industrial is represented in the Smart Automation market overview and has an exclusive provider page online there.
Georg Stöger, who has been with TTTech since it was founded in 1998 and has worked as a technology consultant for customer projects and the development of NERVE since the launch of TTTech Industrial, gave Industrie-Digitalisierung some very interesting insights into the world of open edge platforms.
Ulrich Sendler: Mr Stöger, how did the development of NERVE and the founding of TTTech Industrial come about?
Georg Stöger, Director Training and Consulting, TTTech Industrial (Photo Robert Fritz)
Georg Stöger: TTTech originally manufactured highly reliable real-time controllers for products in the automotive and aerospace sectors. Then, in the mid-2010s, we began a collaboration with an American start-up from Silicon Valley that had a great deal of know-how about the cloud and an interesting portfolio in edge computing. Together with our expertise in real-time and reliability, we saw a great opportunity. The collaboration led to the development of NERVE, which we launched on the market in 2016. In 2019, TTTech Industrial was then spun off as an independent company with a focus on digitalisation in production and secure IIoT solutions for industry. Our customers now include many companies, particularly in the DACH region.
Ulrich Sendler: What was the motivation behind the development of the new platform?
Georg Stöger: We wanted to offer a comprehensive IIoT solution to the industry. In fact, we have opened up a whole new market and a new customer base. For example, machine builders, manufacturers of small power plants or gas compressors. Companies that require networking and cloud connectivity to provide IoT capability to their machines in the course of their diditalisation process.
NERVE provides a secure basis for this – it is designed as an open Linux-based platform with a centralised management system and enables secure remote access and the secure integration of (legacy) applications and devices from various manufacturers. Cyber security features are also integrated and offline operation is supported. Thanks to TTTech Industrial’s IEC 62443-4-1 certification, customers can rest assured that the company’s product development and processes comply with industrial cyber security requirements. The product certification of NERVE in accordance with IEC 62443-4-2 is currently underway due to be completed by the end of 2024.
Ulrich Sendler: Why do you use Linux as the basis?
“Because Linux is particularly open”
Georg Stöger: Real-time Linux was the basic requirement for the industry. It is not the only solution and not necessarily always the best. But it is an important piece of the Industrial Edge puzzle because Linux is particularly open, has many interfaces to other systems and is well maintained by the community.
It was above all the openness of Linux that encouraged us to develop NERVE, even though the big automation companies were already pursuing similar ideas. Something has changed in recent years. The general thinking in the industry no longer advocates that it’s best to have everything from a single source. The thinking has changed not only due to price, but also because of technology. Speed and flexibility are not known as the greatest strengths of really big suppliers.
Ulrich Sendler: What does openness mean in practice?
Georg Stöger: Everything is based on open source, open interfaces and open operating systems. We are completely hardware-independent so that customers know they can change the industrial PC at any time, they can replace individual parts, they can connect additional products or devices. We want to win them over through the quality of our solution and this openness, not bind them to us with our proprietary solutions.
Ulrich Sendler: What proportion of TTTech Industrial’s business does NERVE account for?
Georg Stöger: It has been our main product since the company was founded. It accounts for the majority of our turnover and we also focus most of our investment on NERVE. Of course, we can also offer complete solutions if that is what the customer wants. For this purpose, we have the MFN 100 and MFN 200 edge industrial PCs.
But that only concerns a small proportion of our customers. Many have their devices from other manufacturers in-house and want software with which they can integrate them.
Nerve securely connects industrial assets, offering data visualization and software and application management via a centralized management system (Graphic TTTech Industrial)
Supporting new business models with apps
Ulrich Sendler: NERVE is a platform for apps based on Docker containers. Do you also offer this to your customers as software as a service?
Georg Stöger: No. But a customer can create their own app store, which in turn allows them to offer apps to their customers, i.e. the users of their machine. For machine monitoring, software upgrades and more. Using WIBU’s built-in code meter, you can licence your range of apps and thus ensure that only those features that have been paid for are running. In robotics, this could mean that manufacturers no longer sell the robots, but – via apps – the performance of the robot. These are business models that we want to support with NERVE. We don’t have an app business ourselves, but we enable customers to set one up with NERVE, including the monetisation of the apps.
In my opinion, the possibility of offering such new business models is not a technical issue. The level of digitalisation in the industry, the use of the cloud, data for predictive maintenance – these are the problems at the moment. The industry is now working on topics such as the cloud and apps, which IT has been working on for 20 years. And only when this has become natural and familiar, the industry will move on to new business models with customers. Today there is a whole spectrum: Very, very progressive companies and those that are just beginning to discover the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for themselves.
Ulrich Sendler: Ecosystems are playing a growing role in the open platform environment. What does the NERVE ecosystem look like?
Georg Stöger: We have partnerships and work together with a number of companies. We were already using the Microsoft IoT Edge Connector before we had NERVE because it was used by many of our customers. Companies often try things out, play with software and see how it can solve their problems. If that works reasonably well, they look for a platform to manage the corresponding applications. That’s why we became a Microsoft partner early on. Of course, we integrate certain Siemens control systems and protocols because customers work with their products. We work with a number of smaller companies when it comes to certain specialised topics such as AI.
We do not currently have an institutionalised partner programme. We believe that the topic of open interfaces is more important for customers. Support for OPC UA, Docker, Kubernetes, multi-cloud capability – customers benefit most from this kind of openness.
Georg Stöger (Photo Robert Fritz)
Ulrich Sendler: To what extent does TTTech Industrial come into contact with the other providers in the Smart Automation market overview?
Georg Stöger: We know the other providers, of course, but not all of them are integrated into NERVE – although that would be relatively easy. It always depends on what the customer needs. They often already have an application that they want to manage in a system. As long as none of the providers rely on a proprietary system, collaboration and integration in one platform is not a problem.
Three main areas of NERVE development
Ulrich Sendler: Last question: What can we expect from TTTech Industrial in the near future? What does your roadmap look like?
Georg Stöger: NERVE has already been in productive use for several years and our roadmap is strongly driven by our customers. We mainly develop things that we hear our customers want next. There are three main areas.
Firstly, cyber security features: If you want a secure platform and offer secure products on it, you have to first ensure your development is secure. That didn’t exist in the past. Today, standards such as IEC 62443 require development processes to be secure. We are currently investing a lot in this area. Only a few suppliers can offer this.
Secondly, virtualisation: the industry is going both ways: ARM processors for the low-cost and low-power devices, and Intel processors for the integrated devices with many cores. We have found that right down at the sensor level for a specific function, ARM is better, more cost-efficient and more reliable. But with many functions in an edge computer, with databases, firewalls, management, hypervisor, potentially increasingly also with AI, it needs a multi-core processor, and Intel is the leader there.
Supporting this dichotomy with different operating systems, on the one hand a lean, efficient variant of NERVE for ARM processors, and on the other a high-performance, virtualised, real-time capable solution on Intel processors, is another element of our roadmap.
And finally, ongoing developments: For example, web-based visualisations with an integrated web browser for tablet-based applications – we currently have around 60 or 70 feature requests from customers that our development team is working on. This has little to do with the basic platform. These are customised extensions that we then also integrate into our platform.