Mr Böhrer, when Logiccloud - a platform for controllers as a PLC-as-a-Service - entered the market, you had all the functions for programming, HMI, monitoring, SaaS and the actual virtual IEC 61131-3 controller in your sales case, so to speak. What feedback from your potential customers did you take away from the trade fair?

Bernhard Böhrer: What surprised me was that they hardly need to do any basic educational work. The interest in cloud-based automation is enormous. In particular, the holistic approach - as we are also pursuing with our product - is meeting with great interest. In other words: PLC programming in IEC 61131 in the browser, the use of Docker technology both as an edge and as a Kubernetes service, the monitoring of all PLC instances, available interfaces both for automation and up to MES, analytics and databases. Users have recognized that completely new, flexible architectures based on micro PLCs can be programmed and managed very easily on this basis.

Was there anything that you misjudged or underestimated as a customer need?

Oh yes! We are still too fixated on control systems due to our history. For many interested parties, the focus was not on the Docker-based PLC, but on the HMI. We were able to score points with our drag & drop editor based on real HTML: The HMI runs as HMI-as-a-Service in the container without the need for additional hardware - both on the edge device and in the cloud. This turns Logiccloud into a complete automation solution. A point that we need to emphasize more in the future.

What has happened since November?

We have now arrived in the actual business: The products and prices have been defined. The customer projects have started. We are currently working intensively with hardware manufacturers to integrate Logiccloud into their hardware. The first products for this will be launched in the second quarter of this year - it's all happening very quickly now.

We also have a few interesting projects underway in the field of smart manufacturing, in which Logiccloud takes on the task of turning data into information and then making this available to higher-level systems in a standardized form and via standardized interfaces such as Kafka, RabbitMQ and databases for further processing.

What does the future roadmap look like?

In terms of product technology, we are continuing to develop Logiccloud in all areas, particularly in the disciplines of HMI, interfaces and programming languages. We are also expanding debugging - our users should be able to test their programs very efficiently in future.

We also want to intensify our customer projects. In the energy industry, we are currently working on integrating decentralized generation plants into the energy grid. In production technology, we are involved in the implementation of smart factory projects and in building technology we are working on projects for intelligent real estate and space management as well as data-driven facility management.