Open Source at Industrial Scale: Node-RED, Modbus, and the IIoT Future
Node-RED is running in factories, smart buildings, and renewable energy systems around the world — but most of the industry doesn’t know who built the foundational protocol packages that make it production-worthy.
Klaus Landsdorf, CEO of Iniationware and creator of PLUS for Node-RED (P4NR), first looked at Node-RED in 2015 as a favour. He found gaps — specifically in Modbus queue timing — that made existing packages unsafe for real industrial environments. So he rebuilt the package from scratch, setting a rule he has held ever since: no release ships below 92% code coverage.
Today, node-red-contrib-modbus is one of a small number of Node-RED packages to carry a certified designation from the Node-RED team. And Klaus is still the primary maintainer, 1,000-plus commits later.
In this conversation with Phil and Ed, Klaus shares why industrial software demands a different quality standard, why ISA-95 is the most underused framework in IIoT, and how the open source sustainability model behind P4NR shares costs across the entire ecosystem.
Klaus Landsdorf — CEO & Co-Founder, Iniationware (Lohne, Germany). Klaus created the P4NR B2B Community (PLUS for Node-RED) and has maintained node-red-contrib-modbus since 2016, accumulating more than 1,000 commits. He also built node-red-contrib-iiot-opcua as an educational-first OPC UA implementation. With more than twenty years of OT/IT integration experience and active participation in OPC Foundation Working Groups since 2013, Klaus holds an M.Sc. in computer science and focuses on making industrial automation and IIoT integration simpler and more accessible.