The Margo Initiative, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation, aims to tackle the interoperability challenges in industrial automation at the edge. In this episode, Bart Nieuwborg, Chair of the Margo Initiative, discusses the complexities of managing and deploying applications on-premise within manufacturing plants and how the initiative addresses these challenges. He says, “We’re specifically focusing on interoperable orchestration at scale, for applications and devices at the edge.”

Margo’s origins and the interoperability challenges in industrial automation it is addressing

• Nieuwborg talks about the key drivers for the Margo Initiative that aims to address interoperability challenges in industrial automation at scale at the edge.
• The main pain point the Margo initiative is addressing is managing and deploying applications on-premise, particularly within manufacturing plants. Nieuwborg goes into the complexities of managing these systems at scale in industrial settings.
• Nieuwborg defines what edge means in these industrial settings, stating they are computing devices hosting modern, often containerized, workloads and modular applications. He explains what sets these devices apart from simple hardware.

What are the industrial automation use cases and challenges that the Margo initiative addresses?

• Nieuwborg discusses the use cases the Margo initiative targets saying that it aims to handle the variability of edge devices’ power and constraints while ensuring they remain connected and on-premises.
• Nieuwborg highlights the challenges in sourcing and integrating multiple vendors for industrial manufacturing and how Margo addresses this by enabling scalability and integration across diverse devices and suppliers.
• Margo assures users of software-defined applications so they can be reliably deployed across organizations once proven valuable in a controlled environment, therefore reducing the risk associated with scaling digitization efforts.

The benefits of open source and the goals for the initiative

• Nieuwborg discusses how open source enables collaboration, promoting broad adoption and lowering the barrier of entry for everyone, including suppliers and customers.
• Margo aims to apply the best practices of the open-source model to the operational technology (OT) space, aiming to bridge IT and OT with its open-source solutions.
• Nieuwborg shares the key industry players who have been involved with the initiative from the beginning to address common pain points in the industrial automation space and Intel recently joining as a formal steering member.
• Nieuwborg discusses the Margo initiative’s short-term goal of achieving broad adoption and increasing the number of contributors. Medium-term goals include developing a reference implementation with proposed experiments and blueprints on GitHub.
• The initiative also aims to create an open specification defining API functionality and a compliance test toolkit to provide transparency and confidence for developers and potential adopters.

Guest: Bart Nieuwborg (LinkedIn)
Project: The Margo Initiative (Twitter)

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.