Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Mike Bowers. Mike is the chief architect at Faircom, with over 35 years of experience in software development and architecture. His knowledge extends to the database revolution, manufacturing 4.0, the industrial internet of things, Edge computing, and data integration. So Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Bowers: Oh, I'm glad to be here, Lisa.
Lisa Ryan: Please share your background and what led you to work with Faircom.
Mike Bowers: I've been presenting at conferences on the database revolution for decades. Faircom is a database company that has been selling database software for the last 40 years. You may not have heard of Faircom because it's an embedded database, probably embedded in your phone, satellites, and networks. For example, every phone call you make on Verizon goes through the database, but they don't.
We never did. We were an engineering company, and we never advertised. I never knew much about Faircom, but they saw me at conferences discussing a new database technology that has yet to be implemented. They liked and wanted to implement the ideas, so they recruited me to build that technology into Faircom.
When I got to Faircom, we started building that in. They also realized that since we're an embedded database, the manufacturing world needs to capture data, and they need to capture it in the equipment. They need to capture it on the manufacturing floor. Unlike IT, which tries to go to the cloud and stick everything servers up in distant data centers, manufacturing must capture data on the factory floor.
Manufacturing doesn't want to do that because you can't afford the downtime if the cloud goes down if your network connection to the cloud goes down, if it becomes intermittent, you can stop your manufacturing floor, you can stop processes dead, and you can't afford that. So you need to run locally. And that's where the Faircom database is good. Before my being hired by Faircom, they started selling the product to manufacturers as a database platform. I have an extensive background in manufacturing. I worked in the silicon industry. I wore bunny suits and Intel commercials, and so I've been done all that.
I worked in the automotive industry at Freightliner, which automates vehicles. The Sprinter van is there- a computer runs the whole van. You push on the gas, but it doesn't physically cause the fuel to be injected. It tells the computer you want to inject fuel and does all the injections. So that whole computer system.
I wrote the compiler, the language, everything that programs that van. So I'm proud of that one. It was a lot of fun. I worked in the agriculture industry with extensive, huge farm equipment that picks up one-ton bales, compresses them, and you push a button, and it does all the work.
It's robotics and automation. I spent a lot of my career in manufacturing, and then I spent a lot of my career in the database industry and software development. I wrote a book on HTML and CSS that's still published out there. So I've done a lot of different things. Vericom hired me for the database, but we realized Faircom was trying to enter manufacturing. And because we have a perfect product for that, from a database perspective, I've done all this integration work in factories, and I realized factories struggle with integration costs. It's so expensive to hire people like me, which is what I did, is to go into a factory and automate the factory, and to go to the proprietary protocols on this machine, write the drivers to extract the data, to put them into your manufacturing execution system or your SCADA systems or your ERP systems. All that's a point-to-point...
