On this episode of Manufacturing Matters, Mark Messina, CEO of global robotics company Addverb joined TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Jimmy Carroll to talk about all things warehousing and logistics automation. Topics included autonomous mobile robots, ASRS systems, WMS software, supply chain, the state of warehousing automation, Addverb’s fit in the overall automation landscape, and a new partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will reportedly help improve the efficiency of Addverb’s solutions.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:07] Welcome everybody to another episode of Manufacturing Matters podcast, where we look at the technologies and the trends that are affecting the global manufacturing industry. My name is Winn Hardin, and I’m here with my co-host Jimmy Carroll. How are you doing today, Jimmy?

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:21] Doing very well, thanks, Winn. How are you?

Winn Hardin: [00:00:22] Very good, sir. Very good. I would like to thank everyone around the world for taking time. Whether you’re on the West Coast having a cup of coffee or if you’re on the East Coast during your lunch break. Thanks for dropping in for a quick chat today. And we’re lucky enough to be with Mark Messina, CEO of global robotics company Addverb. And Mark — talk about a gracious a person to join us in our podcast today — is actually over in Thailand. So it’s nearing midnight for Mark, I’m sure, after a very, very long day. How are you hanging in there, Mark?

Mark Messina: [00:00:53] Very well, thanks. And it’s nice to meet you. Thanks for having me on the show here, on the podcast.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:59] My pleasure. Go ahead, sir.

Mark Messina: [00:01:03] Thank you. Thank you.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:05] So when we were talking right before we went live today, and apologies for being a few minutes late, folks, we were having unusual technical difficulties getting online in the Restream. But Mark and his company Addverb are autonomous mobile robotics across a very wide range of industries. I was studying their company before our conversation today and the depth of their hardware and their product portfolio as well as the software components. Having your own WMS warehouse management system, control systems is extremely impressive, and I’ve always been enthralled with AMRs ever since I saw my first AutoStore Cube inside a Dick’s Sporting Goods distribution center over in upstate New York. So I love these conversations, and I’m looking forward to to hearing more about Addverb. Mark, will you kick us off and tell us a little bit about Addverb, your genesis, how long you’ve been in business, and maybe a little bit about what separates you from the other players in this space?

Mark Messina: [00:02:01] Sure. I think we’ll pepper that throughout our discussion. But just a bit about Addverb. We were founded in the Delhi area of India. We have five founders that are based in India. They started the company about seven years ago. We’ve grown in the last seven years up to about 800-plus people, a little bit more, maybe 850-ish right now. We have in the last seven years built up a full suite of software, hardware, electrical, mechanical, etc., engineering as well as manufacturing. So our group CEO is Sangeet Kumar, who does a fantastic job and is a visionary and a fantastic leader. We have gone multinational, but on the way to becoming multinational, we have offices throughout India for various engineering functions. Like every engineering company, we tend to exhaust engineering resources in a certain area. When you hire 800 people, you can’t hire them all in the same place. There’s too much competition. So we’ve got software engineering throughout India as well as mechanical, electrical, etc., supply chain. But we’re centrally focused in the Delhi area, where we have also initially 150,000 square feet of manufacturing, where we do everything from bringing in raw sheet metal. We laser cut it, we CNC machine it, we CNC press brake it, powder paint it, and all of our assembly is there. We also have surface mount lines. So we do electronics, we bring in ships, resistors, etc., and we surface mount all this onto PC boards of our own design, so we can handle design changes very quickly, which is great when you’re dealing with a pandemic supply chain issue and you need a component change because something is out of stock throughout the world.

Mark Messina: [00:04:09] That’s 150,000 square feet that we ran on up until this year, and we’ve exhausted that space along with the major investments of over $150 million by our parent, Reliance Industries, which is one of the biggest companies in India. They’re very diversified. So we’re very pleased that they are our parent. And now we’ve built another 450,000 square feet of manufacturing, and that manufacturing is fully automated. So it’s all of the CNC, all of the stuff that I mentioned. Plus we have collaborative robots. We’re using our own inventory management system, material movement, etc. So if you look at Addverb we’re quite a bit different on two points. Number one, we’re very vertically integrated. We own our factory, we own the engineering, we own the supply chain. And so we’re quite vertically integrated down to component sourcing. And then on the other end, we’re not just a robot manufacturer as most people would tend to think of Addverb. Especially in North America people tend to think of Addverb as a robot supplier or maybe a technology provider or software provider, but we really are sort of end to end. We provide conveyor systems, put to light, put to voice, put to augmented reality, all of our own design. Software systems, so FMS, WMS, WES, WCS, etc., as well as all the robots that you’re probably familiar with if you’ve looked at our website, so we’re quite vertically integrated and we have a very broad product and service offering. We have offices in Dubai, Singapore, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia. We have three offices in the U.S.: two in California, one in Colorado.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:09] These include both sales and support as well as engineering support for all those local domestic markets?

Mark Messina: [00:06:14] So all of our engineering support is centralized in India, with the exception of in the U.S. we have an architecture group which is forward-looking. So we have a 5G architect who’s really pioneering the future of 5G and how it affects warehouse and factory automation. We also have other projects underway in our architecture group, which streamline our current designs for better cost, better profitability, reliability, and manufacturability, all of the abilities that engineers like myself love and appreciate that make a company reliable, profitable, scalable. So he and his team are very talented, very capable with bringing up our current designs as well as working on things that enhance our current products. However, they’re also looking at things well beyond. So my background is, I came from Kiva. If you remember Kiva. Kiva Systems became Amazon Robotics, which kind of spawned a whole industry let’s say. But Kiva, the founder of which is Mick Mountz, kind of flipped the whole material movement and warehousing industry on its ear, because instead of people going to goods, goods started moving to people, which turned out to be wildly efficient and very reliable. And fortunately for the labor market today, it reduced reliance on labor and put labor into better use. And so myself and my colleagues and the entire team at Addverb are looking at what’s the next thing that’s going to flip the whole industry on its ear. Can’t say what that is, but we’ve got some pretty neat stuff, some pretty neat irons in the fire let’s say.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:14] Okay, well, part of our job will be trying to pry some of those nuggets out before we lose you today, so fantastic.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:08:21] Yeah, Mark, you covered a lot there. And I have a number of follow-up questions. But one of the ones that I wanted to ask about was, so you’ve got a lot of different offices around the globe, right? And you’re big in India. What’s your customer base like? What’s been your approach when it comes to things like maybe competing with some of your competitors in the Americas?

Mark Messina: [00:08:42] Well you know we are a young company, about seven years old. So in the Americas, you know, you cannot just become an integrator and compete with companies with 10,000 employees,  you know, 5,000 to 10,000 employees. You won’t do any great service to your clients if you try to do that. So we have partners in the U.S., our integration partners and our resellers, and we rely on them. We provide the technology, we provide the hardware, the software, and we support the integration together with them. And it’s quite similar throughout the world, except for India, where we do quite a bit of the full end-to-end integration. And in India, we have much more maturity. So we’ve been open in the U.S. for about a year and a half, really operating under full steam for about a year. COVID slowed everything down, of course, and setting up a company in the middle of COVID was interesting. Not impossible, not that challenging, but it has its own uniqueness to it. But the company has gone from India-based for most of its life to a multinational, and that brings its own challenges, right? When you go from an India-centric company serving your own home market to a market, now serving the world and dealing with all these different cultures and ways of working, the company has growing and growing and learnings to happen.

Mark Messina: [00:10:21] And in the U.S. we’ve taken an active decision to partner with partners who appreciate and understand technology, embrace technology. And to some extent don’t have necessarily a history with a particular technology or technology of their own and can adopt our technology and learn about our systems. And actually, I’ll segue a little bit on that point. I like to refer to Addverb as the Tesla of integrators, because if you remember when Tesla came on the scene, people kind of laughed and said, Who’s going to buy a Lotus with an electric motor? You know, Ford, Mercedes, Chrysler, they can flip a switch and they can start making electric cars. Well, guess what? They can’t. They had no software engineers. They didn’t understand anything but how to mass produce ICE motors, which they did fantastically well. They were very good at their business. They’re very invested in it. And they set up a supply chain around the world. There was a tremendous amount of legacy stuff they had to deal with if they wanted to change gears. If you look at the big-name integrators, those with 5,000 to 10,000 employees, they’ve made years and years of acquisitions and developed through different variations of software, starting with cobalt going to C, AS/400.

Mark Messina: [00:11:53] I mean, they were all over the map. So when they try to integrate something, it’s quite painful for them to integrate even their own product, because their own product is a mishmash of home brew, home built, and acquisitions, and they acquire things and killed it, and they acquire things and change it to their own. Good or bad I have no comment, but it makes them less efficient. So they dedicate a huge amount of manpower, time, and your money as their client to making their stuff work for you. Addverb is like the Tesla, I say, because we don’t have that legacy. We’re very lean. Our code base is on the latest tools. It’s all microservices, all Kubernetes-based. It’s self-healing. It’s quite predictable for us. It’s our baby. We know what works. We know what doesn’t. We know what it can do. We know what it can’t. We know what we can make it do if we need to. And we know pretty well how long it takes. So we’re nimble, we’re quick, we’re efficient, and I guess we’re just lean that way. So that’s why I like to liken us to Tesla that way. And I happen to be a fan of Tesla and their vision.

Winn Hardin: [00:13:01] But you are also an OEM as well as an integrator. You guys have integrator services, obviously, primarily focused in India. And then I think you’re saying you have a network, right, of integration service partners located around the world, which it’s my understanding, that’s absolutely critical to have that local engineering, design, even from the initial design through full implementation and support, locally, for an autonomous warehouse application. Is that a correct statement?

Mark Messina: [00:13:28] 100%. You have to know, there’s so many local aspects you need to be aware of when you come into a market that you couldn’t just jump into as a foreigner and you couldn’t hire a team and put it together and make it function. We rely on our partners. They are our partners. We’re transparent with them in every which way. We value them tremendously. And we have no intention of building up our organization and then leaving them hanging. They’ll come and stay with us for the ride. We pick partners for a variety of reasons, a few of which are their market understanding, their willingness to embrace technology. But first and foremost is their integrity, and Addverb is a company with very high integrity. It’s one of the reasons I joined the company. I personally place a high value on it, and we as a company place that value on the partners that we select as well. But those partners that we select, you know, when we look at our regions, whether it’s U.S. or Europe or Australia, wherever it may be, they have to know the customer base, they have to know the supply base, they have to know the labor. They have to know the coding, the zoning. They have to know the customer needs and their customer market to understand how their own market may go up and down because they really are a very large part of the forward-facing sales arm, never mind just integration. They’re selling and integrating. They’re integrating because they’re making money, and they’re selling for that reason. So we support them 100%, and we will sit together with them while we’re visiting clients together, theirs or ours, if they’re in their region. And we work very closely together and value them personally and professionally.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:15:25] Mark, if somebody in manufacturing or in warehousing and logistics is generally interested and they want someone from your company or one of your partners to come offer some consulting or do a feasibility, how do you work with them to see if anything within your product portfolio fits their needs? I mean, you kind of offer a one-stop shop in some ways for these automation solutions and warehousing and logistics. So how do you go about working with them or how do your integrators go about working with them?

Mark Messina: [00:15:58] In a way we do. We do offer that one-stop shop because we do have such a broad umbrella of product offerings, hardware, software, and all the accessories or not all, many accessories, like conveyors. There’s no robot companies that also manufacture conveyors except Addverb. We manufacture conveyors. Now, we don’t source conveyors in America from India. Financially, it doesn’t make sense. We pick the most cost-effective solution. But we do have the capability, and we have the experience and knowledge how to integrate all this, and everything runs on our controllers, etc. And so how do we engage with a prospective business that’s interested, whether it’s manufacturing-based or e-commerce, retail, grocer, etc. There’s no short answer, right? We have some very talented solutions people. You know, my CRO, Sriram Sridhar, and his team are fantastic out-of-the box thinkers. You know, every warehouse or every factory is different. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling or manufacturing the same thing. How you run your business reflects in how you configure your warehouse. And so we take a look at that. We try to understand it, and then we try to look at it with fresh eyes to say, okay, look, you know, I like to say if you give a kid LEGOS, they’re going to build something, and we introduce new LEGO pieces, new things to build, and our solutions engineers have the latest, biggest set of parts to build with. So they would look at your application. It starts with a discussion. We get to know your business, we get to know you. It’s informal. And then we ask important questions about the business, and we can tell pretty quickly. Is automation for you? Usually it is. I can’t think of many businesses that can’t benefit from some form of automation. Then the bigger question is, can you see an ROI on it? Is it actually going to make a difference and move the needle for you and your customers? And sometimes, some businesses, it doesn’t matter whether they see an ROI. They need to stay in business. They need to be competitive. And of course, they want an ROI. But first and foremost is stay competitive, stay in business, serve your customers, build your customer base by your service, which automation can provide. So it’s a multifaceted dialogue. It’s a long answer to a short question, Jimmy. But I hope it helps.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:18:35] Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course. You know, along that line, I wanted to ask kind of a follow-up question directly about that. Is there ever a notion that, you know, if you are this one-stop shop and you’re a jack of all trades, but are you a master of none? Do you know what I mean? Like, do you offer too many solutions? Has that come up in conversation? Yeah. Guess I’ll stop there.

Mark Messina: [00:19:02] Well, that’s a reasonable question. We’re pretty transparent. First and foremost, we’re transparent that if we have something that makes sense, we will bring it forward. And if we don’t, we’ll give you our advice on where you might find the particular solution you need. At the end of the day, we want what’s best for our customer, because the best business is repeat business or referral. So we take that very seriously. However, as far as jack of all trades and master of none, we know our domain very well. You know, we’ve built what we have. As a matter of fact, you know, I’ll wax through my memories here. How do they say, wax poetic or whatever it is.

Winn Hardin: [00:20:02] Wax poetic.

Mark Messina: [00:20:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wax poetic.

Winn Hardin: [00:20:05] But you’re setting yourself up for a high bar now.

Mark Messina: [00:20:09] When I visited Addverb, I was impressed during my hiring process. The evaluation, the dating process. I was impressed by a few things. The factory, the number of staff, the energy, just the pure energy that was in the building, in the staff, the integrity and ingenuity of the founders, the vertical integration. Sure. All of this. But also I saw that the company had built what it made. Now I knew they had built what it made because my career is as an engineer, and I’ve built these systems and gone through the pain of . . . you know, when nobody’s built it before, you make a lot of mistakes and there’s a lot of refinement. It’s an iterative process. And I could see firsthand during my tour things that didn’t work on one side of the building, and on the other side of the building, the next generation, where things were fixed and there were new sets of problems. And I was very impressed to see that it was built, not duplicated. And that was important to me. If you’re a company that’s duplicating, you can never really get your system to work. When you have a complex system — you know if you’re duplicating a toaster, yeah, okay, no problem — but if you’re duplicating something complex like a car or a warehouse automation system or integrated robotics solutions, you can duplicate the things you see, but you can’t duplicate the finer points of what really makes it work, whether it’s software or hardware, down to the little tolerances or material selection or why you chose a particular non-obvious technology. Or software, especially when it comes to software, it’s a black box. So the fact that we built it and iterated and went through the pain meant a lot to me because that meant that we could go far and we could take care of our customers and we could continue to go far because of the learning process.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:25] Having a home-grown solution like Addverb does,it brings a lot of strengths, right? Like you said. The  development of this platform, both hardware and software, has been on a relatively short period of time. We haven’t seen massive changes. We’re built on similar software codes for all of our different systems. But if you could speak a little bit about how you go about customization. You mentioned earlier that the initial consultative sale, every customer is different. You play in everywhere from groceries to hazardous chemical-type industries, right? So you’re taking a lot of contextual information into account. You know, someone else you might be trying to integrate an SAP solution with five other AMR solutions and everything else. They can expect to maybe spend a heck of a lot of money on development and integration, right? But when you’ve got one solution that you’ve grown up from scratch, can you talk to us about how your ability is to customize it to these different vertical industries?

Mark Messina: [00:23:25] Yeah, it’s a genesis, and I’ll clarify that. It’s a genesis as a company for Addverb. As we were young, like any startup, we need to pay the bills. So we would customize anything, and we would make it. And India happens to be, one of the core strengths is software. We’ve got some brilliant minds in many ways, but when it comes to software, we’re extra special, let’s say. And so when you look at customization, our history, we have it in our six-year, seven-year history that we would customize anything, whether it was the hardware. And because we have our own manufacturing, we could spin it. You know, we could go modify the CAD and roll out new prints and send it out for fab in our own building. And it would happen very quickly. So on the mechanical side, the customization is possible. And on the software side, because it’s our baby, we can make changes, and because it’s microservices based, the componentry that makes the system work from a software perspective are quite self-contained. So we can go in and turn the levers or write an entirely new service and deploy that through Kubernetes and microservices and roll that out and in a way that’s controlled. And as we scale, that microservices base becomes more and more important to our ability to compete and our ability to be reliable and predictable for our customers. So the learnings that we’ve had going as a startup that had to struggle like every other startup to pay the bills and the pain that you go through and the self-inflicted wounds that you’ll endure and the learnings that come from that . . .

Winn Hardin: [00:25:19] School of hard knocks.

Mark Messina: [00:25:21] Have taught us, yeah, have taught us some lessons. First off is try to customize as little as possible. We have a wide variety of solutions, right? So whether it’s AMR or AGV, pick your navigation technology. And then within that we’ve got different form factors. Within each form factor, we’ll call it a platform, we’ve got different varieties, whether it’s a weight capacity or a size or there’s some physical dimensioning. But all of these are quite common, each of them are common platforms. And then from the software side we can make these modifications. So on the hardware side we really avoid making customization, because that makes sustaining and service and reliability quite a bit more challenging. And as we are growing, maturing, our goal is reproducibility, reliability, predictability, again, back to the engineering-ilities that we love as engineers. And so on the hardware side, unless we absolutely have to based on a customer’s got a uniquely large order that would justify customization, we tend to avoid customization. It’s not that we can’t do it, but it behooves everybody to keep things into the forms that we’ve picked, for good reason, because we’ve looked at the market, and these are the things that address the biggest part of the market. On the software side, we’re still quite flexible, because software is easier to contain. When you set mechanical systems out in the field, if you have a warehouse with a thousand robots and there’s four different variations of the same robot, sustaining that becomes a nightmare for you and for your customer.

Winn Hardin: [00:27:20] And your partners. I’m thinking of training and the whole consistency of service delivery.

Mark Messina: [00:27:25] Exactly. If we’re using external service partners, or in-house our own, or in-house our clients, or our partner has a service organization, it’s spaghetti. It’s difficult. But on the software side, it’s much easier because every robot will be, you know, you can scan a QR code. We know its pedigree. We’ll know it’s mechanical. But if you have to ship parts from somewhere far, because it’s an oddball, it’s no good. So we don’t like that. But on the software side, it’s quite easy to say, okay, it’s this version. We can we can pull that build up and we can go through, and every version should be backwards-compatible let’s say. So it’s more easy, and typically the beauty of intelligent automation that we provide is the flexibility. You basically got a warehouse or a factory full of AMRs or AGVs, and they’re not fixed on a rail. They operate based on what the software tells them to do. So you can take these assets, these hard assets, and repurpose them via software quite easily or wholesale change their function for your changing business by giving us a call and discussing what’s changing. And we’ll sort it out.

Winn Hardin: [00:28:49] Right, right. Although you do offer some great rails solutions, especially, which will be particularly helpful for manufacturing applications. We’ve talked a little bit about, a fair amount about your supply chain, you know, about your vertical integration and how your global footprint responds to that. I’m curious about your comments on the larger supply chain for autonomous mobile robotics. Recent reports from Allied Market puts CAGR and logistics for AMR solutions at 16% for the next 10 years. The global market across all industries, about 21%. You launched during, or actually you came of age during COVID. And you are serving a diverse number of vertical industries. So if you can, peer into what you’re seeing in terms of the marketplace, whether it’s regional discussions or vertical market, logistics has been the darling that has kept many of these automation companies alive. Can we expect that to continue or shift?

Mark Messina: [00:29:48] So let me understand your question, if you don’t mind. Are you looking at the client end, the end-user end, or the supply chain and manufacturing end of the chain?

Winn Hardin: [00:30:03] On the client side. I’m curious, so you serve logistics, you serve chemical, you serve many different industries. Logistics has been super strong for your types of solutions in warehousing and logistics. Do you expect that to continue to be a major driving force? And do you see others, like grocery or pharma or chemical also being large growth-potential markets for you?

Mark Messina: [00:30:27] So we can kind of divide pharma up into retail and manufacturing. I think pharma manufacturing continues to be quite specific in its procedures and its oversight from the FDA, etc. So I don’t see much happening in pharma manufacturing. In pharma e-com, or retail, e-com’s becoming a big driver in pharma. The efficiency of home delivery, same day and next day, is making pharma sales move online or to mail order as they say. The e-com industry has been blowing up with automation. The prime players there, we know who they are. There’s a few names that really stand out. But there are smaller players now whose business model has supported a large number of warehouses. They’ve got a big warehouse footprint or a big logistics footprint. And now they’re looking at that footprint and saying, wow, we’ve got a lot of real estate tied up in non-automated operations. And how much real estate do we actually need? What could we save if we were to automate? Because automation increases density, right? The density of your storage, meaning you need less real estate. If you’ve got a network of five or 50 buildings for your warehouse, if you can take that down 10%, whether it’s five or 50, it’s meaningful, right? And the velocity with which you can serve your e-com customers, the predictability, and the change in service that you can provide your end customer makes a lot of sense in e-com.

Mark Messina: [00:32:24] So the e-com market is no longer just the domain of the big names that you see, you know, the Targets, the Walmarts, the Amazons, etc. It’s now much smaller players that you wouldn’t suspect, but they see their business demanding the reliability and accuracy of order delivery, the ability to guarantee deliveries based on not just depending on a human but depending on automation, the cost savings through faster movement, the better sales, and the better utilization of real estate assets, as well as the fact that the labor market is just really, really challenging for these players to deal with. And it’s not something that they want to really focus on. So e-com will continue to grow and spread. Grocery is another area that is due for a paradigm shift to automation. It’s typically not very automated. Grocery is very hard to automate. Food is by its nature non-uniform, especially if you’re dealing with fresh, not prepackaged or processed foods. Preprepackaged, processed foods, they fall into e-com in my opinion. Now, they have to be chilled or frozen or ambient, whatever. There’s temperature zoning and there’s complexities in software, like expiration dates and rotations. And these are complexities that we handle, we happen to handle very well.

Winn Hardin: [00:34:07] Nothing compared to organic product and produce with really high turnovers.

Mark Messina: [00:34:14] Like if you think about bananas, what if I want a green banana? What if I want a yellow banana? What if I want a brown banana? What if I want a brown banana with a few spots? There’s a huge advantage to automating, but there’s still a human component, which we see the human component, I look forward in time and I see the human component becoming less and less as we develop capabilities in commodities, in sensing, for example, cameras and lidar and color sensors and these sorts of things. Sensors as a market, there’s a lot of commoditization and consolidation happening right now. Improvement in battery technology, improvement in commodities like batteries, like motor power density. All of this is going to really vastly improve the reach that robots have into automation. It has to be coupled with 5G, which enables a robot to communicate with the cloud. So you don’t need a lot of processing on a robot. You can put most of the robot or most of the processing off board, which means you’re open now to machine learning and AI on scale that propagates across your robot base instead of just being local to a robot, because you’re learning in the cloud and you’re communicating in the cloud very efficiently with very low power by 5G.

Mark Messina: [00:35:45] So your batteries and your motors, which are now much more efficient, no longer share much power with onboard compute, because it’s all off board via this super-efficient 5G and whatever the next generation is. So our parent is Reliance, which also is geo and is huge into 5G. We see a huge future in robotics coupled with 5G coupled with cloud compute. And this is a big market, and I don’t mean just a big market for the addressable market. But in terms of technology providers, these technologies like 5G, like more power-efficient motors, batteries, etc., cloud compute and advanced algorithms – these open up entire new businesses for companies that either exist today or some student’s thought that they’re having and going to turn into their startup. It’s an amazing time to be in robotics.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:36:56] Mark, can I can appreciate that you’re probably getting tired, but there is one question I wanted to be sure to ask. So, you know, previously you were at Kiva Systems, and now I’ve seen a recent announcement that Addverb has a partnership with Amazon AWS. What’s that mean? Well, first of all, can you provide a few details? But what does that mean for customers? So you mentioned the cloud. So I thought it would be a good time to ask.

Mark Messina: [00:37:22] Well, cloud computing has not been very well leveraged by most clients, especially the larger clients, with the exception of Amazon. Everything Amazon runs that’s their own operations, they run on their cloud, and they’ve got some pretty amazing software that runs their whole suite. They have for years, and the AI and the machine learning and what they can know about customers is far beyond most other retailers because they’ve got such a closed loop on that base. But the cloud has been largely avoided by most other e-coms and most other retailers because they’re concerned about security, especially when you provide a service like, let’s say, warehouse automation. They worry that one of their competitors will somehow look into how busy are their robots or how busy is their automation and be able to know the truth because actions and words are not always the same thing, right? And so a company may say, hey, we’re seeing tremendous growth, but look under the hood at what’s going on with their warehouses behind the scenes, which is normally an on-prem server, they can keep that secure. But if you put it on the cloud, they worry about it. AWS, Microsoft Azure, there are now trusted platforms that warehouse, e-coms, competitors, people who live in a very competitive space now trust. They’re certified platforms. So that opens up another whole new market. And just like I mentioned, it’s a great time to be in the business because there’s so many doors opening up for ways to make these technologies work. Security just happens to be one of them, right? Without security, you wouldn’t want to adopt the technology that other people can peek on and say, Oh, I see you’re not so busy because I can see your robots are running at 30% duty cycle, something like this. So, you know, the relationship with AWS is meaningful because we have a partnership with Amazon, in India, to make their warehouses run. And now we’ve expanded that with our relationship with AWS and putting some of our robot operations on the AWS platform so that we can offer a trusted platform to our partners and clients.

Winn Hardin: [00:39:59] Fantastic. I know cybersecurity has been a concern, especially in the manufacturing sector, for a lot of time, and a kind of a challenge or a hurdle to why folks haven’t really adopted 5G or cloud computing. You know, it’s easier to just build your own, make your own dinner, they feel, and then stay safe with liability, protection. But when you go to these trusted partners who have really gone to the nth degree on the cybersecurity side, then I think there’s going to be a lot more willingness to try new things.

Mark Messina: [00:40:29] And it’s the Wild West, right? The typical model has always been build an IT department, buy all your own hardware, have your own servers, make all that stuff run, control it all. But it takes one guy with a USB stick to walk in your door. One employee, guy or girl, walk in. And you can have a terabyte memory stick for 30 bucks these days, and you can download a tremendous amount of data very quickly, and it goes unseen. So there’s a new level of data security. We as a company lock out USB drives. So you can’t just go in and stick a USB into a computer and download stuff, and you can’t get on what we operate on the cloud. We take security very seriously. It’s our bread and butter. It enables sales. We can’t sell if you can’t trust our product to not leak, let’s say.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:41:27] Mark, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks specifically for taking your time out of your night. I know it’s late, and I really appreciate it. We both really appreciate it. For anyone who’s watching or will watch this later, Addverb.com to learn more. This has been a pleasure, again, and if anyone has questions, comments, would like to reach out: manufacturing-matters.com. Thanks very much.

Mark Messina: [00:41:52] Yeah, and Jimmy and Winn, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, and Winn thanks for stepping in and pinch hitting. Great to chat, guys. Thank you so much.

Winn Hardin: [00:42:04] I’m just glad to be invited to the party. Thanks again, Mark.

Mark Messina: [00:42:07] Cheers. Good evening.