Jon Bruner and I got together last week in Cambridge, MA to have a cup of coffee and talk about the industrial internet. During this conversation we mused on the inevitable collision of cultures when Silicon Valley meets industrial heartland, or, when software people meet hardware people.
Of course there have always been relationships between hardware and software, we aren’t discovering anything completely new here. But there are differences now, and they are turning up in interesting places. I attended Distributech recently, the biggest electric utility conference for power distribution, and was surprised to see that how big a push traditional IT vendors were making into the space. This is an event that five years ago would have only had electrical component vendors as sponsors but this time around Oracle was the most visible sponsor there with Cisco not far behind. The world’s first massive electrical network is now absorbing (and increasingly being controlled by) its second.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the conversation and we’re looking forward to your comments. And given that on the Radar team we like to talk at least as much as we like to write, if this goes well we’ll probably do a lot more of them. You can listen to it here in the embedded player or you can also subscribe to them at iTunes.