This episode is brought to you by Cirrus Link Solutions and Canary Labs.
Cirrus Link: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link
Canary Labs: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs
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Arlen Nipper — MQTT co-inventor and President & CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions — returns for his third appearance on Unplugged.
Twenty-five years after co-inventing MQTT to connect an oil pipeline over a satellite link in the Middle East, Arlen walks through the current state of the protocol: 15 million tags in a single deployment at millisecond SLAs, a UNS market that has grown to $2B+, and why data centre operators are choosing MQTT 3.1.1 over MQTT 5.
Topics covered:
- The UNS market arc: from cryptic tags to $2B+ and what changed
- 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA: report-by-exception at scale
- Nextera Energy: 524 solar, BESS and wind sites in one Remote Operations Centre
- How data centres became AI factories — and why MQTT won
- A large customer's white paper rejecting MQTT 5 entirely
- The AI + UNS framework: decouple, define the UDT, train AI on the live feed
- Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT and event pipelines
- The ProveIt! Lifetime Award and the NVIDIA acceptance speech
- ICC 2026: what to expect from the AI-first year
Guest: Arlen Nipper — President & CTO, Cirrus Link Solutions | MQTT co-inventor
Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-60-mqtt-sparkplug-unified-namespace
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
05:00 Co-inventing MQTT in 1999
12:00 From cryptic tags to $2B+: the UNS market
18:00 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA
25:00 Nextera Energy: 524 sites in one ops centre
32:00 Data centres become AI factories
40:00 AI + UNS: the single source of truth
47:00 Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT
52:00 MQTT 3.1.1 vs MQTT 5
57:00 The ProveIt! Lifetime Award
61:00 ICC 2026
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Cirrus Link Solutions: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link
