Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Skynet's cogent data hub technology moves your data from the edge to anywhere securely. Skynet's software and services are used by all the top automation providers, with more than 30,000 installations worldwide in 86plus countries and in every major industrial vertical. If you didn't find Skynet CEO Gary Tillery at the CSIA conference, send him a message if you're interested in partnering. Their team was at the conference because they want to collaborate. They, they want to hear your story and they want to understand how a partnership can be formed.
Everybody wants seamless industrial data. Fewer people talk about the tension underneath it. That's channel conflict, cybersecurity, platform loyalty, and the battle over who owns the customer relationship.
On this episode of the Control Alt Manufacturing Podcast, we unpack what it really takes to move data securely and build trust between vendors and integrators and create partnerships that actually work in the field. This is Control Alt Manufacturing.
Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Don't know what that voice was. Welcome back to the CTRL Alt Manufacturing Podcast sponsored by Skynet. We are resetting and rethinking manufacturing. If you haven't been here before and why haven't you? This podcast is helping explore some of the people, technologies and strategies that are driving the digital transformation of manufacturing. This is a fun one, a special one. We are coming at you live from the CSIA conference in Baltimore, which is why the bland background. I'm in a hotel and I'm very excited to have a guest sitting in the room with me. Gary Tillery, the CEO of Skynet. Gary is the Chief Executive Officer. He brings more than three decades of operational technology experience to his role as CEO of Skynet. His career career spans the full arc of industrial connectivity from his time working for a small system integrator. Many senior leadership roles with Wonderware, Invensis, Schneider Electric and Aviva, where he worked at the intersection of scada, historian and enterprise integration to his current role leading company behind Cogent Data hub, the secure OT IT data platform deployed in more than 30,000 installations across 86 countries.
Gary joined Skynet's board as Independent Director in June of 2025 before stepping into the CEO role in December 2025. Pretty quick. A transition that reflects both his strategic conviction in a platform and his deep familiarity with what industrial software actually has to deliver in the field. Gary, come on in. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Thanks, Gary.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: There he is. All right, I want to make this clear. I'm Gary and that one is Gary.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: We got the Gary Nation.
We're gonna dominate, you know don't get confused.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: It's weird. Cause I have.
Gary is not the most popular name. And I haven't met that many Garys in my life.
And my freshman year of college, I had never been to school with a Gary before. On my dorm room floor, there were three other Garys. So somebody was having fun with like, let's just take all the Garys and put them in the same spot.
Well, again, thanks for being here. Thanks for being at the conference.
Wanted to ask you a little. We were talking last night because there's an expo here, and so Gary Taylor and I were talking.
I want to just dive in a little bit on your background. So I didn't know this until last night. Sounds like you were a NASA kid. You're a Texan and a NASA kid.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
So I was born in Houston, Texas. Right. We were stationed there. We lived there after my father left the military, joined in like 58 or something. So the very beginning, until they landed on the moon. He was kind of burned out from that as well, that experience. But they called us NASA brats. So in the military you get called some kind of name as the kids. NASA was the same.
So we were NASA brats and things. We hung out, those kind of things. So I was born into technology. That's kind of what I told people.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: When you were growing up, were you at all the launches?
Were you around that?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: No, in Houston. You know, we lived in Houston. So my father would be like in the mission control. And there was two duplicate ones.
And so he was in one or the other because he worked on the llrv, the lunar lander. Right. As part of the Apollo program. And then we would get woken up and he would call my mom and like wake the kids up. They got to see this. Every launch was historic to him.
And so we would be woken from our beds, put in front of the TV just for it to be scrubbed and back in the bed. Right. So they were not at the prime time slot on television. It's just kind of when they could. And so it was a interesting life growing up around that. Then he took other roles where he utilized that experience with NASA.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: You earlier in your career spent years at Aviva, one of the largest industrial software companies in the world.
So, you know, it was kind of an eye opener when you left suddenly, within months you were on the Skynet board as independent director. And you move fast. And six months after that you were the CEO.
That's a fairly fast and I expect deliberate sequence of moves.
What was the thinking behind that. And what did you see in Skynet that made it worth taking a bet on?
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so I, with, with Aviva, you know, one of my, my responsibilities was around strategic portfolio partners. And so I had developed a relationship, actually. I met Skynet at a CSI executive conference, I think.
Don't ask me where exactly. Maybe Puerto Rico, I can't remember. But I met Xavier and the team and we started a conversation around how we could work together.
I'm kind of a natural collaborator as well.
And we did, we formed a partnership. We didn't resell it, but we did introduce them to the channel. It's a very good product to be used by companies like Aviva.
And so when I left Aviva, it was May last year.
I took some time off. And time off for me is it's more than two weeks. I'm kind of going nuts and driving everyone nuts as well around the house.
And so Xavier reached out and he asked me if I'd ever be interested in joining a board. And so I'm like, yeah, I would. And he said, well, Skydance. So the next thing I know, I sign the paperwork and we're having the conversation and I come on board.
One of my first jobs was to help kind of relieve some of the duties of one of the founders, Andrew Thomas, who was chairman of the board. We're publicly traded company, small cap, but publicly traded. He was chairman of the board, he was the CEO, he was the cto, he was the head of R and D. He did so many things, I think maybe he probably swept the floors, I don't know. I mean, but the guy was doing everything we needed to get him focused on the technology side. So I took on the job of going to find a CEO.
And I kept speaking to people that I knew from the industry I thought would be a good fit for Skynet and kind of help deliver the results we want to see and transition from a technology led company to more of a leading ourselves in marketing and growing the revenue that way.
But they all kept saying the same thing, Gary. They kept saying, well, you're already there.
Why don't you just do this? My own wife was like, you're spending way too much time with Skynet and Xavier, you know, and they want, they need a CEO. You can do this, you should, you know, do this. And so in December, I was appointed CEO and, and it's been a great run. I mean, I'm going fast. That's just kind of how, that's kind of our superpower as a small company. But Kind of fits me naturally as well anybody's worked with me. I don't mind making changes and making a decision, make a change and so we can have a new approach to something. Gary and I can fail three times and figured out on the fourth one by the time the bigger companies actually got it in front of a committee. Right. That's kind of the superpower of all of us small companies.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: It's the beauty of working in a small company is things can move a whole lot faster.
I think we should do every question like Gary. Yes, Gary, Skynet has been an industrial connectivity space for I think more than two decades now.
Now that you're in the CEO role, how and because we are at the CSIA conference here in Baltimore talking about system integrators. How do you describe the role system integrators play in Skynet's go to market strategy and has this role been evolving since you took the helm?
[00:09:01] Speaker B: The company's done a really good job with a lot of things before I joined, but the system integrators, there's no formal program.
I don't actually like the word program on partners. I like community.
People like to throw around the word ecosystem. I'm not a biologist. You know, these are not those type of things. Community is more what we're used to, working with people. We're a people first. Company and SIS are resellers or any kind of partnership that we have, we want to treat them as part of our community and so we do approach that. Sis, they're the foundation of this industry. You know, I started my career, first job I ever had, real job I ever really had was with system integrator who happened to be a construction electrical unit. They did high voltage and then they also did, you know, the system integration where we were putting in systems and all kinds of nasty smelling plants. Right. Or processes. But that was when we did system integration. Nowadays these system integrators do so much more than we did then.
They're the domain experts and things. They are very strategic to Skynet. We're a unique company with our product and so the expertise that they have, we can help offset some of that knowledge. They need to learn they don't have to become as deep an expert in say security or data transformation aggregation. We can enable a lot of that. But they still bring so much to the table.
They have the customer, they have that trust as well. So yes, very, very strategic for us. And the changes have been minor. Mainly I've been reaching out to a few system integrators around the world. So Asia Pacific, it's different than say the Americas versus emea.
And so we have to approach each one differently. But we do hold them as strategic partners and part of our go to market along with our resellers and our own salespeople.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: As you said, you've been working with SIS for a long time.
What does a great Skynet SI partner look like? If you are profiling your ideal SI partner, what qualities matter most to you?
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question.
And so the biggest thing is that you look for a system integrator that doesn't just have the technical capabilities.
You know, a lot of these guys, very talented people working system integrators. They're not just wrench turners, screwdriver turners and things, then hooking things up. They're developers, they're engineers, they're architects.
So you expect that and customers expect that capability and competency to reside there. But we also look at, from the standpoint of a perfect one to be more of a progressive living in the future, a little bit more. Not just the day to day the quarter, but looking at the whole industry as a whole being a little bit more thought leader and just driving their businesses that way. That's why CSI is so important, is to help a lot of these guys actually get that fundamental business operations in place and so then they can turn to just operating the business, closing the deals with us and others.
So the strategic nature of being the thought leader, having a good solid business and the technical capabilities would be kind of our perfect description.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Got it.
You guys are at a. Skynet is an active vendor partner with the Control System Integrators Association. It's where we are today.
You sponsored and exhibited at the 2025 conference in San Diego. You're already on the floor again here in Baltimore in May. What do you see CSIA doing for the SI industry and why does Skynet show up for it as a vendor?
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a couple reasons. So CSI does provide a lot of the best practices that you know, as when I was with Aviva and same with Skynet, the last thing I want to be concerned about is, you know, with this small company being business that I'm going to go work with in a certain region or industry and so that best practices can help, you know, remove that and they offer different services as well, like insurance and other things.
And it's something I don't have to really worry about when I'm vetting, when I want to work with a system integrator.
The other piece of it is going to be where the SI is taking that next step on their growth and pattern and things as well.
They're not going to just trade their time for revenue. They're going to be more strategic about that and having some package services as well that gets them in the door. It could be expertise services as well, not just the integration, traditional integration as well.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: I'm sure you probably heard this last night at the Expo. One of the most common complaints SIS have about software vendors is channel conflict. So how does Skynet handle that? Tension between wanting direct customer relationships and protecting its SI partners account control?
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Yeah, we spend, that's a great question. We spend a lot of time on this because it's, we don't want the conflict because conflict then, you know, ruins the relationship. Again, it's a community, families do fight, you know, and things like that. But you're committed to each other because there's common values and vision.
So what we do is we kind of look at who leads, you know, who brought the, you know, the project or the customer in. We separate new logos, like new customers versus existing ones. You know, the existing ones, we grow and expand. With an si, we may have it direct or maybe through a reseller as well, but the combination of the three, there's coordination that happens. And again, we don't have anything really formal.
We're not looking at the program guide and over by two and oh, here's the answer.
So sometimes the customer is going to dictate who really owns them.
If they are a big, large enterprise customer, let's say they have multiple facilities around the world, they want to work with every SI or one SI that maybe can't span that. They always want to work with HQ and that would be us, but we don't, we don't not compensate. That's a terrible way to say that, right?
[00:15:48] Speaker A: I enjoy a double negative from time to time.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: I, Sean Connery taught me as a young child, right, how to say, say that like that, double negatives. But we, we don't leave them out on the revenue. They're a big important piece. Again, we see them as strategic to not just implement and get it in, but also retain the customer as well.
And so that's where we get to, we have the conversation, we're very open about it. And then we do explain to them like this is why we need to take it direct.
But we will still continue to use you. You're still going to get a percentage of this and we want to share this with you.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: We're tempted to ask you to do the rest of the podcast in a Sean Connery accent now that you've brought him up, and a nice Welsh accent, but I won't do that. Do you have a Sean Connery?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: My youngest grandson. Sounded like Sean Connery was little for some reason. Reason.
And he would say, yes,
[00:16:44] Speaker A: but no,
[00:16:45] Speaker B: I don't do a good Sean Connery. Only Sean Connery can do that. It's true.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: So, a related question to what you were just talking about.
Industrial sis often have pretty deep loyalties to a specific automation platform, whether that's Siemens or Rockwell. Schneider, how do you position Skynet in environments where the SI's primary vendor relationship is already pretty much locked in?
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
We actually partner with all those companies, you know, that you just mentioned, and maybe you're not Rockwell very well, but we're going to work on that.
Both Aviva, we have a great relationship, Siemens and, you know, GE and others, you know, so we actually are partnering with them to help solve the problem.
We can actually, you know, remove some of the burden of the OT security pieces. Or maybe it's an odd kind of transformation of modbus or something to MQTT or something. Right. So we actually position ourselves there really nicely because all these vendors already work with us or they are aware of us. We have 30,000 installations. It's. You run into these guys all the time.
And so we do. We do leverage that.
That. That relationship, I guess.
And the technology is another threat to them, those guys as well. So it's kind of an easier conversation.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Curious how you structure the commercial relationship you have with SI partners. What does the margin model look like? How do you make sure the economics actually work for both sides?
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really custom because each project is very custom as well. Again, the program doesn't exist where we have a set number, and sometimes it's based off the region.
There's some price concerns as well. Or the industries. If you look at municipalities, water versus oil and gas, there's different amount of cost and things there. So we actually customize each one with our system integrator depending on their strength and area and their capabilities. If they're new with us and they're new with the industry, it'd be a little bit lower margin.
But as they grow that expertise, we increase the margins with them.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: So you mentioned a second ago about the different regions you guys are in. You guys operate in 86 countries. I think there's like 193 countries in the world. So that's a good percentage of them.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: You got more room to grow.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: So yeah, come on, get with it, man. Let's get to the other ones.
So how do you manage a global SI channel as a focused, lean company?
And as you mentioned, the differences in the regions are there regions where that partner model looks fundamentally different?
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yeah, APAC's the glaring example. You know, the way they go to market is not with individual products. They go with a solution.
You're seeing that a little bit more in the Americas and also nemea, but we do leverage, you know, direct relationships with these companies in the regions. We actually one of the changes, I guess I should have mentioned earlier is we restructured ourselves and marketing organization used to be a global organization and now it's regional based.
So we have a VP of EMEA for sales and a VP for the Americas.
And I'm hiring someone for APAC today, actually this week, hopefully.
And the idea that they would manage that relationship in the region, and that includes sis. Any kind of partnerships where they're headquartered in that region, even if they're a global, we would start there and they can overlay into the other regions, but through a coordinated way. So system integrators are being managed that way. It's kind of new, but we still leverage a lot of our relationships with resellers. These could be resellers that are Aviva resellers that are Siemens. They could be resellers that we have on our resale channel from Geo. And so they have the relationships as well with a lot of these sis. So again, being small and we want to remain as lean as possible always helps your margins. We want to increase the volume and the sales, the aur and all these good things that we like to talk about behind the, you know, the closed doors. But at the same time, we don't want to lose that high touch, you know, in collaboration with the partners, you know, and that's why I'm against the program because programs start making it too cookie cutter. You treat everyone exactly the same. That sounds fair.
Fair is where they give, you know, cows a ribbon that doesn't exist in real life. We're in business, we're actually trying to grow.
And who can help us grow that business? We want to help them with theirs as well.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: I love it when your Texan comes out.
We got a little Texan there in that last answer.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that was my father when I would complain about not being fair.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: What does the onboarding journey look like for a new SI partner? And how long does it take before A new partner is genuinely productive.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah, the onboarding is like very, very simple. There's not a lot of paperwork for them to sign, but it's mainly around the main engagement. If it's a first time, if it's, you know, more existing kind of accounts, you know, you're kind of landing. Expanding. They want to expand as well. We want to exp.
We are a natural fit for that expanding. We can actually be the reason they can have the conversation around their network and security, especially with a lot of the news in the market and the OT environment.
But it is very short. And then your second part of the question, I'm sorry, How long does it
[00:22:38] Speaker A: usually take before a new partner is genuinely productive?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Productive? With our product, it's very, very short period of time.
We, it's very easy to understand.
Once you understand it and you know, you don't have something super complicated, then it can take a matter of like a month before they can utilize it. And we know this because sometimes there's. We get brought into the deal where they tried something else and now they're under the gun, you know, to finish it before the penalties start coming in. And so we work with them really quickly and they can get that in and be successful.
We have quite a few of those examples. So we do understand that they can pick it up really fast. These are very capable people and it's not overly configuration heavy and things like that.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: Are you able to pinpoint a difference or differences between the SI onboarding projects that succeed and the ones that tend to stall?
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Yeah, the differences would really be on their side. So a lot of times larger companies think stall in general, they don't move too quickly. We do work with some of the larger sis and so that can cause. Just on their side could cause an issue. It's typically around the business arrangements, if anything.
And again, we're never going to negotiate with a partner of any kind where we would cause harm. Right. A weak partner is never going to help us.
So we find a way to negotiate that. It is very custom right now.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: I always like to ask about cybersecurity. I have a bit of a cybersecurity background. I mean from like a content standpoint. Don't ask me to try to protect your systems. I mean you can, but good luck.
But cybersecurity I think has moved from in recent years what was kind of an it only concern, it only concern to a board level conversation now in industrial operations, which is great.
How has that shift changed the conversations your SI partners are having with Customers. And how does Skynet help equip them to lead on that topic?
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah, we're seeing so many more articles now where it's coming out. We've written white papers related to the articles coming out where people were connecting their PLCs directly to the Internet.
We always blame the Iranians, Russians, any kind of state sponsor, could be anybody when you do things like that.
I just didn't think it would happen this year. But it's happening and there was a CISA C I S A not, you know, csmi, csia.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: I know, I always get those confused too.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: But article that came out talking about this very thing. There's ransomware. I mean a lot of the secret. No one wants to talk about ransomware.
Where it came into the environment, where it locks down the OT side, not just the it. Maybe it came through the IT side. You don't know and you have a couple options and things. So it's an easier conversation for the system integrators and people like Skynet to have with the end customers because they're living it. It's a very big risk to the business.
I know of one company, I can't mention the name, very large company, shut down production. Instead of paying the ransomware, they shut down production for two months.
They dumped everything, they reinstalled everything like a brand new startup.
It was brutal, but they just didn't feel like they could pay.
And so it's these kind of examples where the risk is real to the business. It's not just an aggravation anymore, it's not just a nuanced thing. It's become part of the risk analysis that every company has to do. Our system integrators are there, they're the trusted advisor.
They know the people in the know that need this information. Not just the engineer, they know the plant managers and site managers and things. So they bring that. And what we do is we back them up with a lot of white papers around this subject. So there's real world examples of how Skynet can be applied and has been applied in all these installations. In any kind of industry really.
We're not really industry dependent. We're really about the OT network and your data.
So I think that's how we bring some of that with them.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: That is a difficult risk management decision. Shutting down the line. I'm sure it was a very expensive proposition either way, paying the ransomware, shutting the line down.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: But I was a bit shocked. It was, it was last year and it was really fresh on my mind
[00:27:32] Speaker A: again because we're at this CSA conference here in Baltimore. Not, not the CISA conference, the cisa, but the csia.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: It's a difficult.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: No.
Looking ahead, how do you see the role of the SI evolving over the next three to five years? And what does Skynet need to do to make sure that their partner network is, is positioned for that future?
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we heard a little bit of it here at the conference where the system integrators are doing like a lot of companies are doing. They're trying to figure out how to use hygenic AI or different AI inside their own operation first.
You know, they can do some things to optimize the business, but that's not the critical thing for them. They have custom applications for each of the customers. They need to find those common areas that they can kind of commonize their support and things like that for those customers without having to deploy, you know, two or three times more engineers.
Because the idea of going a little bit deeper into the support and having more of a knowledge base on a custom application, we got two or 300 custom applications, becomes a daunting task for an engineer and the engineering team with AI. I know that, I understand that these guys are actually looking at that and how they can use the goodness of AI, right?
Not some of the hallucinations, but the goodness of AI to find that commonalities and actually to be able to provide the support and to customize support to the person answering the phone call.
You know, the agent can tell them that. And so that's going to be a big, I think, a big part of where system integrators are going to expand and that is along the line with, you know, their retention of the customer as well. So they don't just leave the site and it was all working when they were there and then suddenly, you know, they're gone and everything's not working as well. And the SI is hard to get on the phone. Well, those days I think are pretty much numbered. Now we can support them just by our own experiences as well. Part of partnerships, not just about license revenue and subscription revenue and things.
It's also about sharing best practices around how to do that. We have experience with this as well. And we can also share a different perspective to a problem with our system integrator partners and how we approach the customers and support them with these custom apps as well. Because we get the same phone calls when we go direct. It's typically a bigger enterprise account though.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Let's close out with talking about the technology here. You've been pretty vocal about a specific architectural position, which is that the industry's rush toward a monolithic unified namespace is not always the best design.
As a thought leader, how do you see Data Hub and the fractal UNS model changing the way industrial companies move data from the edge to anywhere it needs to go securely?
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
With networks and network segmentation, DataHub is built perfectly for that.
We talk a lot about getting your data from the edge to cloud for the analytics in the cloud.
That's great, but that doesn't help the operator. The operator can't wait for the latency of the cloud and the analytics and the insights that it could get.
So you have to operate at the edge, but you also have.
These facilities are not just super clean. Right.
And the networks have expanded and grown over time.
And then sometimes you will find architectures where there's multiple OT networks.
They don't want to share data for varying reasons, but they do need to share some.
Or if you need to share between OT and it, and there's always the IT OT battle let's call it, and we can actually augment that and actually facilitate where there's no concerns around sharing data between through Data Hub and the secure, no inbound port being opened from an attack surface on the other side. So each side feels protected from the other.
And so with the monolithic uns, and that's kind of why we frame that as.
It's the big bloated monolithic central repository of the UNS architecture. Which is.
We're not against that.
What we're saying is that a lot of instances that we have found when you have these segmented networks, or if you have the issue of sites that are not in a plant, they're spread out over a SCADA system and there's complexities that that brings that we would do a smaller. Have a smaller architecture around UNS that fits that network. And then you don't have to share everything, all the data back and forth over the band, you know, consume the bandwidth. And also, you know, why send data that you don't need to in general?
And you can create more of issues for yourself that way. But the fractal uns, and maybe we can come up with a better name that sounds better in marketing. It's a math term of course as well. I don't know, federated, separated, whatever. But isolated to a specific area or a network.
DataHub is built perfectly for this and you still have the unified namespace because you just add the domain name.
Actually Just part of the structure or the hierarchy of that name.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: All right, I said I was done asking you questions, but I have one more thing to bring up. At the expo last night at the conference, you guys were doing what I would call some unique marketing.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty unique.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: So there was. It was kind of the talk of the Expo. There was a superhero in a blue suit who was walking around.
I cannot confirm or deny his identity or her identity. It could be anywhere. But, yeah. Tell me a little bit about Blue Sky.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: I'm sworn to secrecy on the identity, the secret identity of our superhero, Blue Sky. We have a. We have a video as well of the goodness of Blue Sky.
And I mean, Blue sky is very popular.
If you ever see him around, you can't miss him, right?
I mean, so it's Gary. We'll do anything, literally anything to get people to come talk to us.
And so. Oh, wait, I heard something.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: But don't worry about it. Nothing's happening behind you.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I hear things sometimes, you know,
[00:34:29] Speaker A: but, yeah, this was a character you guys came up with, and it's been good for you guys in marketing.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The video, it's an AI generated video, but it shows our superhero after an evil hacker has attacked the facility. The plant, it explodes and things. You'll be able to see this on our YouTube channel and other places.
And then Blue sky comes in and literally kicks the evil hacker in the chest, out of the frame. And we put Cogen Data Hub into the network and then solves all the problems. And Blue skies are back again.
I saw so many people, some of the founding members.
That's actually the group. I was kind of worried about how they're going to view this, but we definitely had a lot of traffic because of it.
There was no boring configuration screens that we see at every conference. Everybody knows what a configuration screen looks like.
But that video actually really helped us. We actually showed it in Hanover a few weeks ago, and it made people stop to watch the video. And that's when we were able to talk to them. So we literally are having fun. We're a work hard, play hard kind of company. So we're having a little fun, too.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: The weirdest part of that for me is I know who Clark Kent is under the Superman costume. And so I was having a conversation with him, her, whoever it was. And it was very strange to sit there and talk and look into that suit and be like, I have to pretend like you're not dressed like this.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: That's right.
It takes a brave person to wear that suit.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Very confident, secure person. Very Gary Tillery. Great conversation. We loved having you on. Thanks so much for being here.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: And if you want more great information like this, obviously you've probably found us on Control Engineering site. You can look at any of WTWH Media's suite of engineering brands. Thank you again for joining the Ctrl Alt Manufacturing podcast sponsored by Skynet. I have been Gary Cohen. That has been Gary Tillery again. Gary Gary Symbiotic. It's good, we like it. Also I have to say because contractual I have to say it. Please, if you like the podcast, give it a like and subscribe. It helps us out a lot.
Thanks so much for being with us. Gary Cohen signing off from Baltimore, Maryland at the CSIA conference.
Skynet's cogent Data Hub technology moves your data from the edge to anywhere securely. Skynet software and services are used by all the top automation providers with more than 30,000 installations worldwide in 86plus countries and in every major industrial vertical. If you didn't find Skynet CEO Gary Tillery at the CSIA conference, send him a message if you're interested in partnering. Their team was at the conference because they want to collaborate, they want to hear your story, and they want to understand how a partnership can be formed.
