INTERVIEW WITH CONTROLLINO

Controllino can be described in one sentence: it’s like an industrialized Arduino. It combines the flexibility and open-source nature of the Arduino ecosystem with the safety and reliability of industrial grade PLCs. The company sells their products through distributors and their official online store www.controllino.biz to customers from all over the world.

Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?

Controllino: We are highly focused on the industrial automation and control market, where we also have the largest client base. Of course, as it is the nature of our product, our hardware is used in many other areas too, like industrial prototyping, home automation and similar fields. This means, that most of our activity circles around these use case areas. Another a bit smaller but still very relevant field is education.

E.E: What’s the news for 2020 about new products?

Controllino: This year will be a special one for CONTROLLINO. We are in the final stage of producing and releasing our CONTROLLINO myPLC – a fully user-customizable PLC with an online configurator and with way more computing power than the original CONTROLLINO series. But not only in that terms it will be special – we are furthermore releasing our first software product, the CONTROLLINO IoT Cloud. We will release more information on that part within the next few weeks.

E.E: What are the ranges of traded products?

Controllino: We are selling CONTROLLINO PLCs of many different sizes and for different use-cases. In total, there are 10 different CONTROLLINOs out on the market right now. Of course, we also sell useful accessories for the hardware, as well as a Training Kit for educators and starters.

E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?

Controllino: The market is at the same time highly developed and still incredibly dynamic. On the one hand, you have lots of standards, decade-old big players that are competing in the market, and stuff like that – but on the other hand, especially due to IoT, big data and AI, the space is moving towards directions that were unthinkable a decade ago. That makes the market enormously interesting for us, as the playing cards are getting mixed up again.

E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?

Controllino: As mentioned before, there is a huge transformation going on in the market, especially in terms of IoT, big data and AI. This is where the market is moving the most right now. Companies are moving away from old standards. Production streets and machinery is getting more intelligent and even more automated. This increases the demand for computing power and powerful hardware, from the edge to the cloud.

E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?

Controllino: Our most innovative product this year is definitely myPLC. The basic PLCs on the market often don’t have all the I/O channels you need. To solve this problem, you need to buy expensive modules – and even then you have to live with a fixed number of inputs and outputs. With CONTROLLINO myPLC you only put the components into your CONTROLLINO that you really need and want. You can choose between different I/O types, voltage levels, specialized drivers and more – directly from our myPLC Online Customizer.

E.E: What estimations do you have for 2020?

Controllino: We are constantly growing and increasing our user base from day to day. We had one successful year after another since our initial launch. We think that we can keep up with that growth this year too, especially with our new hardware and software launches. This year will still definitely be an interesting one on a wider economic perspective, due to COVID-19 and an upcoming economic crisis that could brew up due to the things that happened in the last few months. But we are certain that we will get through this crisis out well, as we have a lean and highly flexible company structure and a steadily rising demand for our products even during crisis times.