About Margo

Margo’s vision is to enable interoperable orchestration at scale across industrial automation ecosystems.
Margo’s mission emphasizes unlocking innovation barriers in industrial automation through edge interoperability. This is achieved through creation of a reference implementation, open standard, and compliance testing toolkit to facilitate the interoperable orchestration of edge applications and devices. The Margo initiative aims to accelerate digital transformation by simplifying the deployment, scalability, and operation of industrial solutions, thereby enabling organizations to innovate and grow more efficiently.
Margo addresses the interoperability pain points experienced by users in the industrial automation space when deploying edge applications and devices at scale. Industrial environments have specific use cases, requirements, and technologies that can introduce friction when applying modern IT solutions to scale digital operations. IT solutions operate in a centrally managed, cloud-based, and open architecture, while OT must address decentralized, edge-based, and often closed architectures. Margo’s interoperability promise looks to establish rapid and agile development cycles for industrial edge solutions without compromising critical controls that ensure secure and robust maintenance cycles.
Margo’s vision is to enable interoperable orchestration at scale across industrial automation ecosystems.
By ensuring that applications, devices, and fleet managers can work together seamlessly, in a multi-vendor environment, Margo empowers vendors and end users to deploy, manage, and observe edge environments across their lifecycle with greater agility and less complexity.
Industrial manufacturers anticipate workforce scarcity challenges in the coming years. Solutions are emerging to compensate for the lack of skilled labor. These solutions are typically based on using more software applications in manufacturing plants, close to the manufacturing process, often enhanced with AI and/or cloud connected.
The consequence is a new task for industrial manufacturers: lifecycle management of the massive increase of compute devices and apps from a multitude of suppliers deployed in their plants. Margo intends to reduce the complexity of maintaining and operating such an infrastructure at scale in a multi-vendor environment. This will enable industrial manufacturers to respond to their workforce scarcity challenge by moving with minimal risk from proof-of-concepts to deployments at scale of best in class solutions.
Proposed solution stacks will take into account typical OT requirements, like supporting disconnected state, tight control on lifecycle update cycles & frequency, uptime and high-availability needs.
Industrial manufacturers need to scale their OT processes faster to stay competitive. Margo’s envisioned path is to leverage the best of both IT and OT worlds to optimize the performance and efficiency of their factories.
While Margo intends to address innovation barriers, this cannot be done without widespread collaboration and interaction with peer communities.
Margo will actively collaborate with other communities to advocate for industrial edge use cases in cloud-native technologies. Margo will accelerate by adopting existing standards and technologies where possible. This will require ongoing engagement to represent Margo to other technical communities.
Margo will work jointly with other initiatives in the industrial space to address common objectives and align on interoperability requirements. There are many standardization projects targeting industrial use cases that have ties with Margo’s interoperability focus. Regular interaction will enable Margo to complement these initiatives and help maximize adoption.
Margo will make upstream contributions to other relevant projects (e.g. Kubernetes) to resolve the issues we encounter, so that the issue is not just solved for Margo but also adds value to the other use-cases of these upstream projects.
Interoperability is a challenge with multiple facets and personas. In order to stay focused on solving the market’s pain points, Margo’s contributors use a persona based user story as the tangible guideline for the collaboration, where the plant operator is at the center. A plant operator is an individual or a team, responsible for keeping a manufacturing process of an industrial manufacturer operational. These organizations can scale from enterprises with a single plant with a few production lines, to entities with multiple plants or locations around the world. With respect to Margo’s scope, these plant operators have a common objective: deploy, manage, and maintain a fleet of edge apps & associated hosting devices in an optimized manner.
In Margo’s primary user story we follow a plant operator who identified two apps promised to improve the throughput of their manufacturing process. These apps are supplied by two different vendors. They first test and validate this promise in a proof of concept in a test line. When the value of the apps is confirmed, they deploy five hundred instances throughout their manufacturing plants across the world. They limit the required tooling for deploying, updating & maintaining their fleet of edge devices and applications throughout their lifecycle, and obtain a single pane of glass to monitor health of the fleet, and to automate necessary actions on their apps and devices hosted at their edge.
During this journey, the plant operator interacts with multiple personas, each with their own objectives and expectations.
App developers deliver the value-add apps that plant operators demand. The app developers desire to build, describe & package their application once and make it available to as many plant operators as possible. They support the deployment at scale of these apps, regardless of the fleet management and observability platforms selected by the plant operators and regardless of the edge compute devices, as l