Transcript

The actual challenge of extra problem we try to solve is increasing uptime. We just want to help leverage the knowledge what is wrong with the charger, what's good with the charger, what hardware component, what software components are broken, how to fix that and having a really, really close loop system and that's what we offer as Phonics Cloud. So I think we are probably now the biggest open source ecosystem in the key text space. Right now. I'm at the stall of Bionix who are open source charting solutions and they are providing firmware. For EV charger manufacturers as well as now they are exploring in the areas of Cpos. So let's find out why. Marco, nice meeting you. Thank you so much for your time and it's really great to meet you. We're here and I've known you since ICNC Berlin and I've seen you delivering expert sessions. And since then, I've been following your journey at Faronics Open Source solution. And I want to understand what is Kionex, how did it come into being and what is the core mission here so. When we started our journey, the immobility that was I think 2020, we just left the drone space, we sold the company there, Myanmar Co founders and realized and the immobility with some first consulting steps like wait a minute, this feels wrong. Everyone has to do so much coding just to get a charter already and it shouldn't be that everyone is reinventing the wheel over and over again. So we need a unified solution and with that. Experience in our mind, we thought like well how about doing the same for EV charging and that was how panics how the average project was born. Try to abstract to where all the commodity like OCP IS118220 things everyone needs to build a charter, bring that into one code base, make it open source, make it available for everyone and all this neatly details like Oh no this Tesla needs some extra timings here Volkswagen has some other. She's here getting all that right, getting all that in that's bigger than just one company and on the same side. It's just waste of time with everyone does it individually. So we thought like, yeah, let's do it together. That's pretty amazing. So thank you so much for the detail overview of Bionics, how it came into being and could you explain? You have mentioned that you were, you have tried to solve the solution for EV chargers, you have tried to create softwares, you have tried to find out how it could work. There's a common solution. Could you tell us about your products? What have you brought at Pioneers? What we started with making open source, and we're still doing that very, very much in the background. It's called the Everest project. That's open source framework where you can have all the charter luggage from simple wall boxes to entire DC fast charger sites. It's super flexible. You can do all of that from all the vehicle communication, the steering of the charging process. Payments to connecting to back end system, that's all included in Everest. But it's open source. And there's a saying in the open source community, open source is not like free beer. It's more like a free puppy. So it's like a small dog. You have to bring it to the doctor, You still have to feed it, you still have to walk it every day. So nice analogy. It's free, but it's not effortless. But if you want to get this effort covered, you can do it yourself. Totally fine. Uh, or, and it's probably still less effort than just doing everything yourself, but if you need help with that, that's where we come into place. So we created an enterprise version of this universe project called Psionics Basecamp, and that is then a classical software license option. You can also buy a service level agreement. OK, so kind of whatever you have an issue, we have a guaranteed time we have to react and get it fixed. This kind of everything we do around the firmer within the EV charger, but then we realized yeah the the actual challenge or the actual problem we try to solve is increasing uptime. So making sure all the charges always run in the field and having a proper engineering experience. You need to have an oversight of not only one charge in front of you is doing, but what all your charges is doing yes there's a lot of CPMS is out there but they only going through bottleneck into their charger they. Can't remote log in, they don't understand what the log files mean. You can't don't know do screen sharing with your charger. And that's where Phonics Cloud comes into place. So we don't want to do payment, we don't want to do authorization. We just want to help leverage the knowledge what is wrong with the charger, what's good with the charger, what hardware component, what software components are broken, how to fix that and having a really, really close loop system and that's what we offer as Phonics Cloud and then. Very new. And that's also what's next to me here on those yellow boxes, the phonics charge bridge module, that's a really, really tiny PCB with two chips. It's a modem for the car communication. It's a microcontroller. So why is Phoenix now doing hardware when we actually a software company? Anyway, we're doing this hardware also as a way of selling more software, because when you build a charter, what I said beginning with the Everest project with Phonics Basecamp, that solves 99% of the software issues in the charter. It runs on Linux system, either let's say Raspberry Pi or any industrial PC. You still need 1% of the code, which is very close to the actual mark controller level, which if everything goes wrong, switches out power immediately. Make sure we keeping all the milliseconds timing right and this what are the 10,000 lines of code? Maybe 20,000. They're very hard for specifically. We could never sell them because it's coupled to a specific chip. But if we start to sell it alongside with the chip, then we can help customers 100% of the journey. That's what we do now. Thank you so much, Marco. That was very detailed and very technical information. Thank you so much for being so honest and transparent about your product. So essentially what you're trying to solve the problems of your customer is that that it needs to have higher. So the charging should be seamless, it should be easier for the end customer and it's for your direct customers. They can have higher up times. You want to ensure that and you want to make their job easier. But what are your customer groups like? So are your customers OEMs, are your customers charge and manufacturers, what is your customer base? So at the moment we made it focusing on the charger manufacturers. Down their journey, we are already working with down the road with bigger charge for operators who realize phonics power charges are just better because our goal is to increase up time to make compatibility better, to make debugging easier. And this is kind of our expertise having the best possible software ecosystem around the charger assets. And there's already big Cpos we see like, OK, if I want to have an excellent operation, I need that software. And that's really, really nice point if I think of because first when I heard about bionics, I was always thinking about charter manufacturers, yes, and charge 90% true. But the point where I want to come is that whenever it's to charge and manufacture, the charger is not just one component, it is so many components inside a charter. There is a different display, there's a different software, there is a different power modules, it could be so many different components. And to make it interoperable and to make it the charging quite easy with an EV. It's a very difficult task and I think that you're doing a really great job over here by solving that. And to my surprise, if you're going to a CPU business and you're telling them, hey, the charter does not working and you can debug that for them, that's a very valuable task that you're doing. You have explained everything about your current products. What is your future scenario? But I want to understand from the point of view, from your point, what do you see there immobility future in terms of how do you see? Standardization happening? How do you see the protocols developing and? How do you see the uptime increasing and the changing customer requirements? So if I look on the EV charging industry, there's always this numbers floating around 10 to 25% downtime of charges. It's a bit hard to define because you can easily fake those numbers in one way or the other way. But let's say if you're looking on server landscapes, they have 99.99 something percent uptime. Getting there is like would say 10100 a 1000 times more than we are currently in. You charging yeah in terms of reduced failure rate and this is not like someone is doing here a bit or someone else is doing their hero move on spending a lot of money on software really have to flip the industry. So we see that our open source system, our ecosystem is adopted by more and more vendors. I think we are probably now the biggest open source ecosystem in the key text space on the numbers So what we can see there's 400 engineers already touched the code base that's. Alex, we always make sure that there's no ******** coming into the code base. We're reviewing everything automatically and by humans. But the the growth is tremendous. There's so many vendors now retrofitting products in the field, bring new solutions into the markets. So we're really, really see the scale. That's a really nice development. So if a customer is already willing to retrofit their products, that speaks for yourself. That's how good chronic solution might be. And we're also seeing that initially. Ohh, I have so much software done. Should I really retrofit? Is it worth it? So we then typically said like, oh, let's wait for the next product generation and then we start together. But meanwhile we see people having so much pain on the software side like, oh, I don't know, I have 20 product lines in the market with four different code bases. This is hell of maintaining. Maybe just retrofit everything over. So this is something new we solved the last months to happen. So it's always a new part of the journey here. It's open source strategy is actually. Flipping the industry in a way that, for example, when we're currently in discussions on different committee meetings, what are the changes to standards? How should the standard evolve? They often ask us like, what is Everest doing? So how have you solved that? Because you have so many users, the easiest way is just to do it the same way as you do. Then most of the people don't have to flip behavior. And we also work with COW or OMS. And then like, oh, we have this weird problem with the car or we need some. Features, can you bring it into the open source ecosystem? Because then immediately everyone has it or when we recently did our first OCP 2.1 tests, which is very, very new version just come out to the market indeed went to the first plug fest, everything worked immediately out-of-the-box. We have been stunned like how could it be? Why haven't we done any mistake? Why is it working with everyone? Normally you always have different interpretation like what does this mean? What are that mean? And then you settle somewhere in the middle, but everything worked then. You realize, ohh, so you have been testing all the time against our prototype versions because they've been public, they've been open source. So we became over the years the default counter test site. So basically when we go our testing, typically everything works because everyone is testing against us all the time. So and this is something everyone can derive from adopting open source from working with the product. And I think this is a fundamental shift. So we call it like the code first that had second approach, so being the playground. When you standards being the the default playground for someone during the implementation of a car site of a CPMS site, I think this flips a lot of the dynamics. And then of the day, there are so many students out there and I don't want to judge which standard is winning or strategy is like, yeah. Let implement all of that into one code base and then let's figure the market out what is actually needed. But in a way we are universal adapter. It plugs in everything, everywhere. And yeah, then there's so much on the road map from MW charging on the one end to bidirectional ACDC towards home energy management integration from EBAS, Openadr metab protocol coming from the home automation world. So your your solution, we are kind of everywhere active somewhere along the the ecosystem and all around the ecosystem, your products will be your solution will be able to support. Yes, that's amazing. And that's the journey. Thank you so much, Marco for your detailed insights and congratulations for the tremendous rate that is experiencing nowadays. And I wish you a lot of success in the future. Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye bye.