Unplugged: An IIoT Podcast

This episode is brought to you by Cirrus Link Solutions and Canary Labs.
Cirrus Link: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link
Canary Labs: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Arlen Nipper — MQTT co-inventor and President & CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions — returns for his third appearance on Unplugged.

Twenty-five years after co-inventing MQTT to connect an oil pipeline over a satellite link in the Middle East, Arlen walks through the current state of the protocol: 15 million tags in a single deployment at millisecond SLAs, a UNS market that has grown to $2B+, and why data centre operators are choosing MQTT 3.1.1 over MQTT 5.

Topics covered:
- The UNS market arc: from cryptic tags to $2B+ and what changed
- 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA: report-by-exception at scale
- Nextera Energy: 524 solar, BESS and wind sites in one Remote Operations Centre
- How data centres became AI factories — and why MQTT won
- A large customer's white paper rejecting MQTT 5 entirely
- The AI + UNS framework: decouple, define the UDT, train AI on the live feed
- Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT and event pipelines
- The ProveIt! Lifetime Award and the NVIDIA acceptance speech
- ICC 2026: what to expect from the AI-first year

Guest: Arlen Nipper — President & CTO, Cirrus Link Solutions | MQTT co-inventor

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-60-mqtt-sparkplug-unified-namespace

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
05:00 Co-inventing MQTT in 1999
12:00 From cryptic tags to $2B+: the UNS market
18:00 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA
25:00 Nextera Energy: 524 sites in one ops centre
32:00 Data centres become AI factories
40:00 AI + UNS: the single source of truth
47:00 Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT
52:00 MQTT 3.1.1 vs MQTT 5
57:00 The ProveIt! Lifetime Award
61:00 ICC 2026

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Cirrus Link Solutions: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

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This episode is brought to you by Canary Labs, and Cirrus Link.

Canary Labs — The industrial historian platform that captures your plant and process data the moment it's generated and makes it instantly accessible across your entire operation.
Learn more: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with Kyle Van Eenennaam (BW Design Group) to explore what it actually looks like to work at every level of the Ignition ecosystem.

Kyle has taught Ignition at Inductive Automation, presented at ICC, and now builds systems at BW Design Group. In this conversation, he maps the four types of organisations in the Ignition world, walks through the history of industrial automation from IR1 to Industry 5.0, and gives a practical guide to learning Ignition from scratch in 2026 — including what Ignition 8.3, Git integration, and AI tools are changing for SCADA engineers.

Topics covered:
• The four Ignition ecosystem buckets: integrators, end users, consultants, IA/partners
• Kyle's journey from IA support and training to ICC presenter to BW Design Group
• The cold call that turned into a full Ignition transformation
• A brief history of industrial automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0
• How to learn Ignition in 2026 — install first, use the Design Challenge, build with the designer
• Ignition 8.3 and Git: managing the full gateway in version control
• What CI/CD really looks like for SCADA teams starting small
• AI in Ignition development: MCP servers, automated commits, and the dream of closed-loop delivery
• CSS, Perspective, and what Kyle is learning next

Guest:
• Kyle Van Eenennaam — BW Design Group

Resources:
• How to Learn Ignition From Scratch: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-QOARK7izqJnXgIr6ITT3ysxw9usIrxsKCHQhJX_dc
• ICC 2025 presentation: https://inductiveautomation.com/resources/icc/2025/history-of-industry-from-00-to-50

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-59-every-seat-ignition-table

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:00 The four buckets of the Ignition ecosystem
08:30 Kyle's career journey
10:00 The aha moment
14:00 History of Industrial Automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0
23:00 Learning Ignition from scratch in 2026
31:00 Ignition 8.3 and Git
36:00 CI/CD for SCADA
43:00 AI in Ignition
48:00 Phil's prediction
50:00 CSS and what's next

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Cirrus Link Solutions — MQTT and Sparkplug software that connects OT to IT and cloud systems. Visit: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with David Ariens (Analytics For Industry / AVEVA) and Willem van Lammeren (Syensqo) to explore why IT/OT convergence fails — and what organisations actually get right when convergence works.

They discuss the cultural and technical silos that keep IT and OT teams divided, common misconceptions on both sides, and the practical changes that make integration stick in industrial environments.

Topics covered:
• Why convergence projects stall or fail
• Breaking silos without burning bridges
• What good IT/OT integration looks like in the field
• Making OT data usable for IT and business intelligence
• Real lessons from practitioners on both sides of the wall

Guests:
• David Ariens — Analytics For Industry / AVEVA
• Willem van Lammeren — Syensqo

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-58-breaking-the-silos-itot-convergence

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
03:00 The unlikely path into the IT/OT gap
13:00 Why convergence keeps failing: it’s not the technology
25:00 Seven patterns that actually work
37:00 Stories from the plant floor: BASF lessons
45:00 Building the IT/OT Academy + where IT/OT is heading
48:30 Outro

This episode is brought to you by Canary Labs and Cirrus Link.

Canary Labs — Canary Labs builds the industrial historian platform that captures your plant and process data the moment it's generated and makes it instantly accessible across your entire operation.
Learn more: https://unpluggediiot.com/partners/canary-labs
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Cirrus Link Solutions — MQTT and Sparkplug software that connects OT to IT and cloud systems.

Visit: https://cirrus-link.com/unplugged

What changes when the assets you operate stop being centralised and predictable, and start being distributed, intermittent and weather-dependent? The old operations playbook breaks — and most digital programmes are still designed for the old one.
Dr Hema Wadhwa, Associate, Data & Analytics | Asset Management and Performance at Aurecon, joins Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes to talk about building digital asset intelligence for the energy transition. Hema's career is a live map of that transition: she started as a Floating Systems Engineer in global oil and gas, moved through subsea engineering and power generation operations, and now leads digital strategy and analytics for mixed energy asset fleets.
Key topics in this episode:
- The unplanned career arc — floating production systems and subsea engineering into renewable operations
- "Are you here to take my job?" — what digital transformation actually feels like from inside the control room
- Why the solution providers have to evolve, not the operators
- One gas turbine versus a hundred wind turbines: why renewable fleets break the old operations model
- No standard across vendor SCADA screens and UIs, and what that inconsistency costs
- Why there is no AI magic without the data groundwork first — and why selling it that way isn't ethical
- Cognitive load: lean frontline teams, PDF report fatigue, and tools that land as a burden
- OT/IT convergence and the cybersecurity questions that come with opening it up
- OEM warranties and whether asset owners really have access to their own asset data
- Recording data when it changes, not on a fixed scan rate
- One source of truth, different views per role — data presented so it guides a decision
- Predicting failures months ahead: cranes, spares, and turning downtime into planned work
- BESS as a trading platform, not just another renewable asset
- Why the real cost driver is people, and why it only stacks up if it scales across assets

Made possible by FlowFuse.
Connect with Hema on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drhemawadhwa
Connect with Phil on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/phil-seboa
Connect with Ed on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ed-fuentes
Sign up for the Unplugged newsletter: unpluggediiot.com/newsletter
Learn more about Aurecon: aurecongroup.com

Every IIoT project starts the same way: you need data out of a PLC. The standard answer is OPC-UA — but what if that protocol is overloading your PLCs, eating bandwidth, and costing you thousands in upsized hardware?
In this episode, Christofer Dutz — creator of Apache PLC4X and CEO of ToddySoft GmbH — joins Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes to explain why speaking the native tongue of your PLCs is faster, cheaper, and more efficient than wrapping everything in OPC-UA. Chris shares how PLC4X pulled 2,600 data points every 200 milliseconds at just 2–3% CPU overhead — compared to OPC-UA choking at 200 data points every two seconds on the same hardware.
The conversation covers the origin of PLC4X (a "JDBC for industrial automation"), the not-invented-here syndrome that created today's protocol mess, why open-source adoption in OT is still painfully slow, the role of Apache IoTDB as a time-series storage engine handling 1.5 billion insertions per second, and Chris's new commercial venture ToddySoft — bringing production-grade Rust-based drivers to platforms like Inductive Automation's Ignition.
Whether you're an automation engineer drowning in protocol adapters or an IT architect trying to bridge the OT gap, this episode is packed with practical insight from someone who has spent a decade making PLCs talk.
Connect with Christofer on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christoferdutz
Connect with Phil on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/phil-seboa
Connect with Ed on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ed-fuentes
Sign up for the Unplugged newsletter: unpluggediiot.com/newsletter
Learn more about ToddySoft: toddysoft.com
Learn more about Apache PLC4X: plc4x.apache.org