‘If you’re not doing data collection today, you really need to start’
When Garrett Wagg first walked into Indoor Ag-Con in early 2025, he wasn’t there to sell anything, just to listen and gather as much information as possible. “I’m not the expert in that space. I want to hear from the grower what their needs and wants are, what they don’t like, what they want,” says Wagg, the Automation and Electrification Product Manager at Bosch Rexroth.
What he heard shaped everything that followed. A year later, Bosch Rexroth returned to Indoor Ag-Con with a booth, a partner ecosystem, and a clear point of view on what the CEA controls market was getting wrong.
A gap worth filling
Bosch Rexroth is best known as a leading supplier in motion control and drive technology, but when the company launched its ctrlX AUTOMATION platform in late 2019, it opened a much wider aperture. “When we rolled out ctrlX, our device had the capability of doing data collection, environmental control, a lot of PLC functionality that you’d find in smart building automation,” Wagg explains. “When we were looking at markets, we learned that there aren’t really products out there that can do environmental control and also do data collection, and also do motion control. We saw that there’s kind of a nice market here.”