Inductive Automation Blog

00:08
Shay: Welcome to the final installment of our series on the Ignition sales presentation. I'm Shay.

00:13
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we will be showing you the power of installing Ignition live.

00:18
Shay: To do that, with us today is Kent Melville, Sales Engineering Manager. Thanks for being here today, Kent.

00:23
Kent: Thank you, glad to be here.

00:24
Lauren: We have to start by asking you about your musical talents. In particular, recently at ICC 2019, that's our conference, you wowed the audience with your performance as part of Kent and the Ignition 8, the Inductive Automation Band.

00:42
Kent: Yeah, we do rock pretty hard, but yeah, it's funny. So at the end of ICC every year now, we have a final session called the Build-a-Thon, and it's an opportunity for us to let our hair down, so to speak, to have a little fun and interact with the community. And as part of that, the company made maybe their fatal flaw of letting me have free rein to do whatever I wanted. And so, starting in 2018, I did a song on stage. We scaled it up this year, and got a whole band involved, all fueled by members of our company. And when you start something like that, it doesn't just die. No, it lives on.

01:24
Lauren: Is the band still together?

01:26
Kent: The band is still together. We still practice on occasion. And who knows, you may see us again, 2020, come to ICC.

01:34
Lauren: Fame hasn't gone to your heads yet, then.

01:37
Kent: We say no. We'll see what happens. Yeah.

01:40
Lauren: Well, we're looking forward to seeing what's next for the Ignition 8 and you, the frontman.

01:45
Kent: It's Kent and the Ignition 8. Yes, of course.

01:46
Lauren: Yes. It's very important.

01:47
Shay: Kent and the Ignition 8. That's an important point. Yeah.

01:49
Kent: Oh, absolutely.

01:50
Shay: So we're actually here today though to discuss a live install and how that can be a really powerful piece of someone's sales presentation. So Kent, can you speak to a little bit of why doing a live install is so powerful?

02:06
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people, they fear the live install because there's a little bit of risk involved, that you have to actually go install it on some computer, you have to connect up to devices or databases, all these things. There are lots of moving parts, and something can go wrong. And so they might ask, why would I even attempt that if I can just show a demo project? And it may be that that risk isn't worth it sometimes. But, we have found that there's a different target of people that find value in the demo project, versus in a live install.

02:43
Kent: And so some people, all they care about is they want to see what the potential of Ignition is. And that's enough. And so, we show them the demo project, they're like, "Oh my gosh, it can do all these great things. Perfect, I'm sold." But other people say, "Anybody with any platform can build something great," but they wanna know how much complexity, how much time and effort went into actually building that. Because if it takes you weeks, months, years, to build that, it's not a valuable solution. But if you can do that really quickly, and how much training is involved to do that, then they start to see real value. So, the simple answer to your question is, why do it? It's because some people wanna know about the complexity.

03:24
Shay: So what does it say about you when you do a live install?

03:27
Kent: Yeah, great question. And so, when you show a live install, it's not just showing the ease of Ignition, how easy it is, and making it feel real to them. But in addition to showing Ignition's credibility, it shows your credibility, that you're able to take this platform and do something meaningful with it in just a few minutes. And so, they see Ignition as the platform they want, and they see you as the solutions provider that they want.

03:54
Lauren: Well, you've kind of established for us that not every situation is a fresh install, a live install situation. When are the right times to use a live install?

04:05
Kent: Yeah. So you gotta gauge to your audience. It's gonna depend on who's in the room with you, who you're talking to. If you're talking to a technical person, an engineer, they're almost always gonna wanna see a live install, because that's their bread and butter. They're gonna be the ones who build these screens, and so they want that level of depth. But, it gets a little bit harder to gauge when you get to say, like an operator, 'cause some operators, they just wanna know, "What's my day-to-day gonna look like? I just wanna see, what are my screens gonna look like? What am I gonna click on?" that kind of stuff. And so maybe the demo project's enough for them. Other ones will also be involved in the development process, they will wanna know the level of complexity of the thing for things. So, you might show it to them too.

04:52
Kent: And so in those cases, just ask. Say, "Today, I can do X, Y and Z; Z being I could do a live install for you. Would you guys be interested in seeing the development, environment, the install, all that?" And if they say yes, go for it. And the last category of people that really fit in there would be business people or management, because they could go either way, as well. Sometimes, they just wanna say, "Show me what's possible, that's enough." But other times, they want to know when they're assigning people to go to work on this in the future, or they hire you as an integrator or whatever to come in and do a project. They wanna know approximately, how long is that gonna take? How hard is this task that I'm providing? And so, they like seeing a live install so that they've got that to gauge it in the future. And so, it can vary based on who's in the room. But when is the right time? The right time is when you have the right people, and when in doubt, ask.

05:51
Shay: If this is a part of an entire sales presentation, then how long should someone be spending going through that live installation process?

06:00
Kent: Yeah, a fair question. Once again, it depends. And so, traditionally, for me, if I'm going through a sales presentation and I've got an hour, then I try to spend 30 minutes on going through just the sales presentation, things like what you talked about with Vanessa. And then I'll spend just five to 10 minutes going through the demo projects, like what you did do with Matt. And then I spend the remainder of the time, so maybe 20 minutes, on a live fresh install. But as I'm watching the clock, I know it's gonna take me at least 10 minutes to show something of value from a fresh install. And so if it gets past the 10-minute mark, and I've only got nine minutes left, I don't even try, I don't even go into it.

06:45
Kent: But I have a short version that I do in 10 minutes, and then at the same time I have a long version that could take 30 minutes or an hour. And so I just have all these supplemental pieces that I know I could show. Maybe I'm gonna throw in UDTs, maybe I'm gonna throw in transaction groups, something like that. How long should you spend? Well, gauge your audience, if it's gonna be part of a big presentation, 20 minutes or so. But if it's gonna be in a subsequent call, where you're gonna have more engineers on the line, you need to be prepared to do a 30-60 minute presentation.

07:17
Lauren: So, what functionalities overall do you usually show during the live install?

07:22
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question, and I can probably answer that best by just showing you.

07:27
Lauren: Well, awesome.

07:27
Kent: Let's actually jump into it.

07:28
Lauren: Let's do it.

07:29
Kent: So here is a fresh laptop. All I have done so far is I went to the Downloads page of our website, and I downloaded Ignition, and so you can see that shortcut here. That's 8.0.6, which is our latest version as of us filming this video. The only other thing I've done to prep this is I've installed Postgres as a database, and so I'll be connecting it to that later. What we're gonna do now, is I'm gonna go ahead and just run this installer, and you could, if you're doing a demo, actually download it from our website live on the fly. But that's one more variable I don't like to deal with, 'cause the network connectivity might be slow or something like that, so I like to have it pre-downloaded. When you're going to the downloads page, you'll see that you can download the latest version or you could grab a nightly or an RC version or something like that. I like to stay on the official releases, just once again to eliminate variables, a little less risk.

08:26
Shay: Good tip.

08:27
Kent: So as you can see I've clicked on it, it brought up this window. As you're going through this, I just leave everything as the defaults except on this page where I have the installation mode. I'm gonna end up choosing this typical install, but I actually select custom first and go to next, just so I can show that there are all these modules that are being installed with this. So that they don't have to think, "Oh, what if I wanna install this module or this module? " It's all in one installer, it all happens all at once, and it's part of the magic of Ignition. So I just show that, but then I click back, click typical, and go ahead and move on. And so with that, you can see now, it's installing and it goes pretty quick, this is only a couple of minutes. But just be aware that in a demo that can feel like an eternity.

09:16
Lauren: So what do you usually do to fill the time?

09:18
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question. I've done all kinds of things to try to fill this space. Sometimes I'll talk about how you can install Ignition on any operating system. It's cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, or Mac. Sometimes I'll talk about, right here, once again, that this is installing the whole Ignition application. This is as if I wasn't installing it on a server, and as you can see, it actually finished installing now, and I'm gonna go ahead and let that start up. But as that's going ... But you can see that it has brought up what we call our commissioning phase. So once it's installed the Ignition, it lets you go through and do some of the initial configuration directly in a browser. And so, to show that, I go ahead and agree to the terms and conditions. I'm gonna create a default username and password for Ignition. You'll notice that we have a password strength tester, there for you. Please pick something more secure than what I just did.

10:22
Kent: But after that, you go ahead and choose your ports. And so, I'm just gonna leave the default ports. But you could set it to be whatever you want, make sure it doesn't conflict with any other applications running on your system. And with that, we'll go ahead and start the Gateway. So this is taking ... It's building a Windows service because we're installing it on a Windows and then it will start that service now.

10:45
Shay: And so far, this has gone really smoothly, but I've done quite a few of these presentations. So, what is your advice if something doesn't go as well?

10:53
Kent: Yeah, sometimes things go wrong. Maybe there's a conflicting port or you have other things running on your computer, your memory goes high or it already had Ignition installed, there's some weird cache thing, all that kind of stuff can happen. It happens with any software, and you never wanna make Ignition look bad if it's what you're trying to highlight. And so, sometimes you say, "Apparently, the demo gods aren't with me today, and so we're gonna go back to the demo project." You can always break, but the big thing is not just to start going, "Oh, Ignition must be broken, and... " Causing them to start doubting the software. But with that, Ignition is now fully installed. And it's worth noting here that I could go in and click one of those links to jump into some configuration, but I like clicking, just open the Gateway, the whole Gateway, so they can see this screen. This is our Gateway webpage, and it is kind of the homepage of Ignition, so to speak. And the first thing that I highlight on this page is right on the top, it says trial mode and it has this count down timer. And I even take my mouse just like I just did and I highlight that timer to show them Ignition, just when you first install it, is in a two-hour trial mode.

12:09
Kent: And I talk about how that trial is fully featured, that it still can let you build all your screens, you can still store history to a database, you can still do everything that you would normally do in standard Ignition. It's just that when that two hours expires, it'll stop writing to the database and your clients will stop running. But you'll get this little button over here, next to activate Ignition. And if you click on that, it'll give you another two hours and then you can reset that as many times as you want, infinitely reset-able, and you can keep evaluating Ignition for as long as you want.

12:45
Kent: So, that's a nice feature inside Ignition, and so that's why I like to highlight that first. The next thing I highlight is the, over on the side, there are three icons. There's Home, Status, and Config. And I tell them that let's go ahead and go to Config, 'cause we're configuring a new Gateway and it'll prompt you to log in. And I'm gonna go ahead and put in my same user name and password that I put in when I was doing my commissioning phase of the install. And we're now into that configuration screen. And this is outlined with, you can choose these little short cuts in the middle, but I like to choose just everything from my side navigation there on the left. And there's lots of things that you can configure inside the Gateway. Things like adding additional modules, if you hadn't checked one of those boxes during the install and you want to add a module now, you can click in there and do that. You can set up redundancy. You could manage users and roles. You could set up alarm journals or alarm history there.

13:46
Kent: But what I wanna show you today was first connecting up to my Postgres database that I told you I had pre-installed on this server. And so, I went ahead and went to databases, said I'd add a new database connection. And you can see we have some built-in drivers added to Ignition, and one of those is Postgres. So I'm gonna go ahead and connect to that.

14:10
Lauren: Would you always use a Postgres database, when you're doing a demo?

14:14
Kent: That's a great question. I like Postgres, 'cause it's pretty lightweight and it's open source. I don't have to pay for it on my demo machine. And also the editor for it runs directly in the browser, so that's really convenient, as well. But you're certainly not limited to just using Postgres. You could use Microsoft SQL Server. That one's a really common one that your customers would be using, and so that can be a great choice. Another good choice is MySQL, and that's what we used to always demo with, but we actually no longer distribute the MySQL driver file as part of Ignition, and so there's a file you have to go download from their website and add it. And that's just an extra step I don't like to show during the demo. And so because of that, that's why I switched from using MySQL to Postgres just for demo purposes. But Ignition can talk to all kinds of SQL databases. So it's really up to you.

15:07
Kent: I'm gonna go ahead and give my database connection a name there. I'm just gonna call it Postgres. And it is connecting up to a database. When you install Postgres it has a built-in database just called Postgres. So, that's what I'm connecting to. You could certainly go create another database called Ignition or demo or whatever you wanted, but mine is just Postgres. And you go ahead and give it a username and password. And so, I'll go ahead and put these in there as well. And then you can leave all these other settings just default. You don't need to add extra connection properties or failover data sources or anything like that. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say, "Create new database connection." And with that, it says, "Status valid." If that doesn't say valid, if it says faulted, then you should go back in to edit, and the first thing I always try is go in and type in my password again. And nine times out of 10, it's 'cause I fat-fingered it, and it was my fault.

16:06
Kent: If that does continue to say faulted, then maybe there's something wrong with your database or whatever, and you can decide at this point if you wanna take the time to try to troubleshoot that, or if you just say, "You know what if I had a valid database connection, I could store history, but there's plenty I can show you without a database," and you could just keep moving on.

16:23
Kent: So with that, we've got a database connection now. And I am going to just do one other thing here in the Gateway web page, which is connect to some devices. And so, come in here under OPC UA, we have device connections, and I'm gonna go ahead and say, "Create new device." And you can see we have a bunch of different drivers to talk to all different kinds of PLCs out there. And I'm gonna go ahead and connect up to an Allen Bradley micrologix. It can be valuable for you to take a PLC with you to go do a demo, so that you can connect to it live, and just do a little ethernet connection to it. And that can be really powerful for people. And so with this, I'm just gonna call my device name MLX. And for the host name, I'm just putting in the IP address to this device, and I'll go ahead and leave everything else default. Say create and you can see that it shows disconnected and now connected. And so, I'm connected up to a live PLC. But in the event that you can't take a PLC, or you can't successfully connect to a PLC, we do have some simulators built in down here that you can take advantage of.

17:35
Kent: And so, I personally like this dairy demo simulator, since most of my customers are not necessarily dairy specific. When I type in my name, I just call it SIM, but it's gonna give me some named tags, which will contrast my MicroLogix, which is all address-based. So now we've got two devices connected and we've connected to a database, and so with that, that's everything I need to do for the demo inside the Gateway webpage. And so I'm gonna come back up to the Home icon, and from here, I start talking about this Designer launcher. And so I can go ahead and click download there and this Designer launcher will install right here on my computer. And from there, I will be able to launch the design environment to start developing my screens, my tags, all that kind of stuff.

18:29
Lauren: Can you only install the launcher on the server where you've installed Ignition?

18:34
Kent: No, that's a great question. You can actually install it anywhere on the network and so that you can be having multiple people all on their own computers, launching the Designer, and doing concurrent development on your Ignition system. So, it's pretty powerful. But I'm gonna come in and tell it to create, and I'm even gonna let it create a little desktop shortcut for me. And while this is installing, one thing I like to talk about is ... And you don't get to talk about it much 'cause as you can see it's done there, but with the Designer launcher, I like to talk about how, there's so many things to talk about.

19:09
Kent: It already showed up that my Gateway was found, my local Gateway. And that comes up here. You can see that IT named this loaner laptop, so you can see it right there. They loaned this to me for this demo. How nice of them. But I like to talk about how from here this same Designer launcher can be connected up to multiple Ignition Gateways. So you could have one development machine or one demo machine, and you could show, I'm gonna connect to my local install, plus my cloud server, and in somebody else’s site or whatever. So, one Designer Launcher for many Gateways.

19:39
Lauren: Thanks so much for sitting down with us today, Ken. It was a real pleasure to have you show us the ropes.

19:45
Kent: Yeah, absolutely, it was my pleasure as well, so thank you so much.