Smart Manufacturing Mindset™: When Two Paths Converge: UNS, i3X, and the Future of Manufacturing

Welcome to Smart Manufacturing Mindset, where we explore the strategies, technologies, and leadership perspectives driving the future of manufacturing.

This season, we're diving deep into the gritty details of what must be true for smart manufacturing success, covering key topics like organizational design, the role of technology partners, developing trust, change management, modern architectures, and skill development.

Smart manufacturing is a journey, a team sport, and success requires every stakeholder working together to drive real transformation.

This is smart manufacturing mindset.

Let's dive in.

Welcome to Sesame Smart Manufacturing Mindset Podcast.

I'm Jeff Winter, your host, and today we're going to be tackling one of the more interesting conversations happening in the industrial data architecture.

Unified namespace, or UNS, has become one of the most influential ideas in industrial data communities.

But at the same time, Sesame has been working on many of the same underlying problems through smart manufacturing profiles.

And now they're I3X, which is the Industrial Information Interoperability Exchange.

And these paths started very differently, but increasingly they're converging.

And I'm joined by three people that I personally know and very much respect who bring very different perspectives to this.

So first we have John Dyke, CEO of Sesame.

John has spent years in his career at kind of the intersection of manufacturing, technology, business, and is now leading Sesame.

And I think of John as the person in the conversation who will eventually be the one that asks you, Yeah, this is all fascinating, but will it actually help manufacturers become more competitive and more productive? Then we have Jonathan Wise, chief technology architect at Sesame.

And Jonathan has lived on both sides of this ITOT divide and has worked across industrial companies and even hyperscalers.

He's also probably the person on this panel most likely to stop me halfway through one of my analogies and explain why my analogy is architecturally incorrect.

And based off some recent conversations I've had with him, he's probably right.

And finally, Walker Reynolds, one of the most recognizable voices behind the unified namespace and one of the industry's great, I'll say, provocateurs.

Walker spent years pushing manufacturing toward open, event-driven architecture and spent his time teaching UNS and challenging conventional industrial software thinking and occasionally, or more often than occasionally, calling BS a little bit more directly than the average marketing team would probably recommend.

And it's going to be my job today to keep these three big opinionated voices on track and concise in their answers.

So I know I have a tough task.

But what makes this conversation particularly interesting, what I'm looking forward to out of this, is that I view it as it's no longer a story about these competing camps.

I mean, as an example, at Proveit, 2026, Sesame demonstrated i3X with multiple industrial technology providers, and Walker has now become one of its louder advocates.

So today, I want to kind of explore three things.

I want to talk about kind of why these approaches emerged, where they generally align, and where they may differ.

And third, what are any of the changes that are happening as a result of it for manufacturers? So let's start with the first topic.

Welcome to Smart Manufacturing Mindset, where we explore the strategies, technologies, and leadership perspectives driving the future of manufacturing.

This season, we're diving deep into the gritty details of what must be true for smart manufacturing success, covering key topics like organizational design, the role of technology partners, developing trust, change management, modern architectures, and skill development.

Smart manufacturing is a journey, a team sport, and success requires every stakeholder working together to drive real transformation.

This is smart manufacturing mindset.

Let's dive in.

Welcome to Sesame Smart Manufacturing Mindset Podcast.

I'm Jeff Winter, your host, and today we're going to be tackling one of the more interesting conversations happening in the industrial data architecture.

Unified namespace, or UNS, has become one of the most influential ideas in industrial data communities.

But at the same time, Sesame has been working on many of the same underlying problems through smart manufacturing profiles.

And now they're I3X, which is the Industrial Information Interoperability Exchange.

And these paths started very differently, but increasingly they're converging.

And I'm joined by three people that I personally know and very much respect who bring very different perspectives to this.

So first we have John Dyke, CEO of Sesame.

John has spent years in his career at kind of the intersection of manufacturing, technology, business, and is now leading Sesame.

And I think of John as the person in the conversation who will eventually be the one that asks you, Yeah, this is all fascinating, but will it actually help manufacturers become more competitive and more productive? Then we have Jonathan Wise, chief technology architect at Sesame.

And Jonathan has lived on both sides of this ITOT divide and has worked across industrial companies and even hyperscalers.

He's also probably the person on this panel most likely to stop me halfway through one of my analogies and explain why my analogy is architecturally incorrect.

And based off some recent conversations I've had with him, he's probably right.

And finally, Walker Reynolds, one of the most recognizable voices behind the unified namespace and one of the industry's great, I'll say, provocateurs.

Walker spent years pushing manufacturing toward open, event-driven architecture and spent his time teaching UNS and challenging conventional industrial software thinking and occasionally, or more often than occasionally, calling BS a little bit more directly than the average marketing team would probably recommend.

And it's going to be my job today to keep these three big opinionated voices on track and concise in their answers.

So I know I have a tough task.

But what makes this conversation particularly interesting, what I'm looking forward to out of this, is that I view it as it's no longer a story about these competing camps.

I mean, as an example, at Proveit, 2026, Sesame demonstrated i3X with multiple industrial technology providers, and Walker has now become one of its louder advocates.

So today, I want to kind of explore three things.

I want to talk about kind of why these approaches emerged, where they generally align, and where they may differ.

And third, what are any of the changes that are happening as a result of it for manufacturers? So let's start with the first topic.