From pipeline SCADA to 15 million tags — how MQTT, Sparkplug, and the Unified Namespace became the industrial backbone

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

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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.

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

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