Insights from ProveIt! 2025: Unified Namespace Solutions in Action

The first edition of the ProveIt! conference was held at the Westin Galleria in Dallas, TX in February 2025. This was organized by Industry 4.0 Influencer Walker Reynolds and his team at 4.0 Solutions. Unlike traditional conferences that prioritize sales presentations, ProveIt! was built around an innovative premise—vendors had to prove the real-world feasibility of their solutions on stage.

With 630 participants, 65% of whom were industrial end users, ProveIt! provided an immersive, hands-on look at digital transformation and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies. The event was built on a real, working digital infrastructure modeled after a food packaging manufacturer in Dallas, utilizing Unified Namespace (UNS) architecture.

The ProveIt! Tech Stack

All vendors were required to plug their solution into the conference infrastructure. HiveMQ was chosen as the enterprise MQTT broker of choice for the conference providing the messaging infrastructure for all of the vendors to build their ProveIt! demos on top. A functional specification was created based on this and shared with all participating vendors 16 weeks prior to the show. Dry runs were conducted 4 weeks prior to the show to ensure that vendors' demos are conforming to the rules set forth by the ProveIt! technical committee. The conference data architecture is showcased below (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Conference data architecture diagram for Edge and Cloud stacks 

During the event, each vendor that came on stage got 30 minutes to demonstrate their solution, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. All Q&A started with the same standard set of questions from the moderators which included describing what they had discovered about the plant, articulating what key problem(s) they are solving, showing how their solution solves those problems, how long it took them to develop the solution, how much it would cost if customers were to purchase the solution, the next best alternative, and why they believe their solution is better.

I had the good fortune to attend the conference representing HiveMQ. I attended some of the ProveIt! sessions, interacted with customers/vendors, managed the HiveMQ booth traffic, and visited many of the other vendors’ booths. Here are some insights that I gathered from this event:

The New Gold Standard for Manufacturing Conferences

To say that the ProveIt! conference was a grand success would be an understatement. From start to finish, this event really delivered on the promise of the raw, unfiltered, unbiased information that industrial end users were always yearning for.  This event definitely did not look like a first time organized one. Obviously the 4.0 team with help from the Intellic team did a great job organizing it (Fig. 2). It is interesting to see the team is already reflecting on how to improve the conference next year by making a few changes. That really shows me the level of professionalism, and I have no doubt that ProveIt! 2026 will be an even bigger success. Any of the participants that I spoke to were of the same opinion as me here.

Figure 2: Keynote and walkarounds by Walker

ROI for Vendors and End Customers

Speaking on behalf of HiveMQ, I can certainly attest to the fact that we absolutely saw a huge ROI from this event. We have been to many events where the number of vendors is usually more than the end customer. Compared to that, this event had 65% end customers. Most of these end customer personas that attended were technical folks in the Operations Technology and/or Information Technology team and were the main decision makers on IIoT projects within their organizations. Most of them were well and truly invested in their Industry 4.0/smart manufacturing journey. 

The quality of the conversations was very good and very fulfilling on all three days of the conference (Fig. 3).

As I walked the halls of the showroom floor, I could sense the same level of enriching conversations happening in other vendor booths as well. The fact was corroborated by many vendors that I talked to. The most gratifying part is that every booth demo was practical, based on true customer problems or use cases that showcased their technology or how the technology worked in the ecosystem of smart manufacturing. This made it rather easy for end users to get total ROI for their visit to the conference as well. I did see a few end users complaining that the level of detail was rather overwhelming given the ProveIt! stage demos and the demos in the show floors. This is something that the organizers promised that they would address next year.

Figure 3: Intense and deep conversations happening at our booth

Focus on Standardization

Even though the vendor presentations were commercial in nature, there were enough references to the use of standardization in software that were gratifying to see. Vendors like Inductive Automation, CirrusLink, Opto22, Flow Software, and others talked at length about the benefits of open source software like Sparkplug and how it enables the Unified Namespace by offering features like State Awareness, Data Standardization, Auto-Discovery of Devices & Tags, Efficient Payload Encoding and Edge-to-Cloud Synchronization. HiveMQ and HighByte also play well into this ecosystem supporting both MQTT and Sparkplug in their UNS ecosystem.

CESMII was pushing their standardized contextual information API (Fig. 4) which offers a robust and standardized way for the various vendors to share information models across the IIoT architecture. While in the past CESMII with their Smart Manufacturing profile and UNS with their namespace concept were not in agreement with each other, it was great to see some potential synergies realized at this conference with the presence of CESMII technologists like Matthew Parris and Jonathan Wise at this conference. They were even in a fireside chat with Walker which was very interesting. Check out Jonathan Wise’s blog on his insights from the conference for more detail.

Figure 4: CESMII proposed API (Diagram courtesy: CESMII)

Walker and the team at 4.0 Solutions liked this API concept so much that they decided that Matthew Parris will be part of the ProveIt! technical steering committee for next year and that they would enforce vendors supporting this API if they want to participate in ProveIt! next year.

Talking about next year’s plans as mentioned earlier, the team has already started planning for the same. Here is a Podcast held by Walker and Zach to do a post mortem of the event and discuss some initial plans for next year.

ProveIt! Sessions on Stage

Given that HiveMQ was one of the vendors for the event with our booth and given the high booth traffic that we were having over the 3 days, I didn’t get a chance to check out too many of the ProveIt! sessions. 

I obviously attended the HiveMQ ProveIt! session done by Magnus McCune and Dominik Obermeier. Magnus focused on the actual HiveMQ ProveIt! which was showcasing HiveMQ’s ability to scale reliably and securely to support petabytes of conference vendor data to flow through our MQTT broker with zero message loss enabling all the ProveIt! sessions to happen seamlessly. Dominik then went on stage and announced the private preview of HiveMQ Pulse—the next-generation Distributed Data Intelligence Platform. Both of these were very well received with a lot of great feedback and wonderful questions (Fig. 5). 

Figure 5: HiveMQ ProveIt! session

A few other ProveIt! sessions that really stood out for me were that of Inductive Automation, Opto22, Flow, Tulip, HighByte, and Reply/Snowflake.

Impressive Booth Presentations

Apart from HiveMQ, some other notable booths that I got a chance to visit and that had some interesting demos were Concept Reply US with their OEE analyzer chatbot which they designed with HighByte and Snowflake, Tulip factory operations optimization app, Aveva with their Virtual Factory optimization demo, Dell Technologies NativeEdge demo, MaintainX CMMS solution demo, and many others. Some of the smaller players like Software Tool box with their demo on how to convert legacy equipment to UNS, and Eukodyne with their multilingual UNS bot which does full duplex voice interaction, were equally impressive. This show really proved that as long as you have a robust solution, you will be talked about whether you are big or small. 

I still got to hear a lot of the industry buzzwords—UNS, edge, edge to cloud, distributed data compute, no code low code, DataOps, data modelling, MQTT, Sparkplug, and many others. However, these buzzwords were interlaced with rich demos showcasing these concepts.

ProveIt! 2026: Yes It Will Be Back

ProveIt! had a rookie year in 2025, and it was highly successful. It will definitely be back next year and now the pressure is on to be even bigger, better, and to bring in additional industry tracks like Pharma and others. The demo virtual factory that was created and funded by 4.0 solutions will be open to the vendor community to subscribe to and contribute to so that demos can be created year round. 

One thing is guaranteed—there will be a lot of comparisons done between many of the current conferences with ProveIt!, and participants are going to use ProveIt! as the benchmark and demand that level of focus on technical details and demos. Other conference organizers will change their strategy to start following the ProveIt! blueprint to try to emulate the success formula. Only time will tell if they will be successful or not. In the meantime, if you are intrigued by what HiveMQ has to offer, download HiveMQ for free and try us out.