Inductive Automation Blog

Let's kick off the 2023 Ignition Community Conference on a high note. Join Inductive Automation's leadership team as they reflect on the past year, look toward the future, and give you a bird's-eye view of our growing company, ever-evolving industry, and thriving Ignition community. This is ICC, elevated!

Transcript:

00:05
Colby Clegg: Wow. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

00:11
Colby Clegg: Wow. Wow. What an incredible start yesterday. In 11 years of doing this, I don't think we've ever had a first day quite like that. From morning to night this place was packed with people talking, connecting, and reconnecting. It was really amazing. And I think almost two-thirds of you are here for the first time, so I'm sure yesterday really gave you a sense of what ICC is all about. Well, I'll tell you what, we've squeezed more people than ever before into here. And although I don't think we succeeded in pushing the walls out, we have broken it down virtually and are streaming this in real time for the first time ever. We have people participating this week from all over the world: from South Africa, South America, Europe, Middle East, Australia. But I think the current leaders on my longest voyage travel board scoreboard, which I do keep track of, are our friends from Element8 in South Africa with 34 hours of travel to be here.

01:18
Colby Clegg: So if you can beat that, let me know and I'll go update the board, but I'm not sure anyone will. So whether you've come from near or from far or are joining us virtually today, I just wanna say once again, welcome and thank you for making the effort to participate because I'm confident with the content and the activities that we have lined up, this is really gonna be the best ICC ever. Alright, so it's been quite a year, hasn't it? Who had AI dominates the world on their 2023 bingo card?

01:49
Colby Clegg: But don't worry, I'm not gonna talk about AI, although that would be the cool thing to do. Sorry. But I do wanna highlight how I think it represents something really important. To me what it represents is a continuation of the trends, the discussions that we've been having for years. A lot of these technologies that we've been discussing that are starting to reach a level of utility and practical application that's starting to create a lot of attention. And it's starting to create a real sense of urgency around us.

02:19
Colby Clegg: Consider a couple recent quotes. "There is no alternative to Digital Transformation," says Jeff Bezos. "Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves, and those that don't adapt will fail." That's dramatic. "The next five years... " Oh, this is from Saul Berman from IBM, also says, "The next five years will be more disruptive than the last 15. This is not business as usual. A lot of technology that came in three years ago doesn't work anymore." Okay, well, despite all the hand-wringing, a lot of companies haven't taken action yet. A recent survey on Digital Transformation says that 90% of CEOs believe that the digital economy will impact their industry, and yet less than 15% are executing a digital strategy. Well, we all know that technology progresses at an exponential rate, and we're getting to the point where companies that have embraced Digital Transformation are really starting to distinguish themselves from those that haven't.

03:21
Colby Clegg: Now, I'm not trying to flatter you, but I do believe if you're joining us this week you're among the more forward-thinking companies in the world. That said, we all have different situations and are in different places. Our goal with this conference, as always, is to help you wherever you're at to fall on the productive side of that urgency, to help you start, continue, or elevate your Digital Transformation journey. And that's because no matter where you are, we are at a point in time where the technology ecosystem available to us, combined with the needs, the factors driving the need for Digital Transformation are creating an environment ripe for making real and lasting change.

04:04
Colby Clegg: Okay, but how do we get started and how do we make that change lasting and successful? At Inductive Automation we have an opinion, and it's a very strongly held one. We firmly believe that lasting change isn't forced from the top down, but it grows from the bottom up. As a company with roots in industrial integration, this is the story we've lived. This is how we've built everything from the ground up. We've continued that path as we've grown our company, cultivating the world's best integrator program, and then working with companies and partners to develop technologies and standards, and models that make it ever easier, more practical to move data upwards and into higher-order applications. Doing this and creating real value at every step of the way is how real Digital Transformation happens.

04:56
Colby Clegg: What do I mean by creating value at every step? Well, we can look at how we built Ignition, for example. We started by unlocking data with unlimited licensing. Then we added distributed functionality with our gateway network. After that, we introduced MQTT in partnership with Cirrus Link launching IIoT and edge data collection, which has now led to massive unified data systems. Most recently we introduced Ignition Cloud Edition to add one more building block to take things to the next level. But these are only tools. The next and most significant layer of value are the applications created on them, and that's where you come in. More than ever before, you, the community, are elevating automation through the incredible applications that you're building. Today, you are elevating your enterprises on a global scale, using tools from edge to cloud to deliver value layer by layer to build systems that introduce new operating paradigms.

06:01
Colby Clegg: Along the way we at Inductive Automation are working every day to elevate ourselves so that we can be there to support you in the best way possible. Have you started getting an idea of why we chose "Elevate" as this year's theme? This one word perfectly captures the mission that we are all on across their companies, across the technology, and across the world. It's an open invitation to consider what we're doing and what we can do to raise the bar in an ecosystem where there's virtually nothing stopping us except for our imaginations.

06:35
Colby Clegg: This morning we're gonna go on a journey through many incredible examples of how this Ignition community and our company are elevating industrial automation. You'll hear from Travis Cox and Kevin McClusky about how this community is leveraging all of the tools I just mentioned to build applications and solutions that are truly next-level. You'll hear from Carl Gould, Kat Jeschke, and myself about how our company is elevating our efforts to support, to continue to open up this incredible technology ecosystem to you through Ignition. Ultimately, this is a team effort and you'll see many members of Inductive Automation and this community highlighted this morning. In fact, every single one of you is a participant in this story. And I hope that our discussion this morning will inspire you to take this theme to heart as we dive fully into ICC. So with that, let's begin.

07:38
David Grussenmeyer: The Ignition community is really a remarkable community.

07:41
Jacqui Leake: They help us by sharing best practices, giving us regular feedback on the product.

07:46
Mara Pillott: I see a lot of just amazing and innovative ideas out there, but the really important part is that they're sharing those ideas and talking about them.

07:54
Madison Knowles: Our customers are taking those things and saying, "Hey, we need this. Let's talk on the forums. Let's build Exchange resources."

08:01
Daniel Forbes: Having the ability to share information, share knowledge, really helps accelerate development. It really helps accelerate new ideas.

08:10
Vannessa Garcia: Yeah, I'm consistently impressed by just the creativity of the community when it comes to the applications that they're building with Ignition.

08:18
Annie Wise: The Ignition community elevates the automation industry by its consistent transformation. This is a group of incredibly bright people that are asking, "Can we do this differently? Should we do this differently? And how can we make our customers have a better experience?" And that outlook, that approach is shaping our industry at large.

08:36
Laura Duckett: Sharing ideas, asking questions, encouraging conversations, that's gonna benefit all of us. It's really our combined knowledge that's going to elevate the automation industry.

08:49
Arnell Ignacio: The Ignition community has elevated the automation industry by developing some of the most amazing and innovative applications that we've seen today. They're finding solutions to everyday pain points, and they're figuring out what can be done with the software, Ignition.

09:03
David Grussenmeyer: Seeing their interaction through our partner programs or through our events or conferences has been something really remarkable.

09:09
Don Pearson: They're able to say yes, they're able to do more. They're able to really accelerate the plans of those end-user customers to make their Digital Transformation happen, to make their deployments happen, to solve their problems.

09:23
Kathy Applebaum: And you would think these people would be competitors, but they've realized that by helping each other, they make more jobs available and more interesting jobs available.

09:39
Travis Cox: Man, good morning everybody. How y'all doing today? Alright. Man, I'm excited to be back in ICC again. Yesterday was so much fun. There was so much energy out there. I'm sure y'all felt it. And this, Colby said, "This is what ICC is all about." It's been a year now that I've been in my new role here, and as part of my job I get to introduce Ignition to new people all the time. And during that I have to answer one really important question: Wha the heck is Ignition? Now, I've answered that question thousands of times over the years and that question's evolved over the years as well, but it's actually a pretty hard question to answer, right? From the beginning, we've talked about Ignition as being The New SCADA, right? It's SCADA, but there's so much more that's possible with that.

10:22
Travis Cox: Today we talk about it as an industrial application platform, one where you can build any kind of application out there from HMI, SCADA, MES, IIoT, and a lot more. But how do you encapsulate? How do you explain all that Ignition can do? It's been difficult. So that's why this year we launched a social media campaign to help get your answers to that question. And we got a lot of responses back, and we can tell in those responses how passionate you guys are about Ignition. We can see the impact that Ignition has had on the applications that you all are building. And we can see that your unique perspective that you bring to what Ignition means. And what I wanna do this morning is actually share a couple of those responses with you. So the first is: Ignition SCADA is a software platform used to build and deploy industrial automation and control systems. Yeah, absolutely, right? Ignition is a fully integrated asset-monitoring platform. It's an historian. It's an OPC UA server. It's a web server out the box. It's a platform to develop your own module. And this last one is my favorite: Ignition is like magic, but real.

11:32
Travis Cox: And how many of us feel that way about Ignition, right? About how it's been able to help us solve so many unique challenges. I can tell you that it is my partner in crime every day. When I have some challenges I need to be able to solve, I just pop open Ignition, and we take care of it. So, as you can see, we got some really great responses back with this campaign. And despite them all being different, they're all so totally true. And this is why it's so hard to pinpoint exactly what Ignition is because it means a million different things to a million different people. And I love being here at ICC getting your perspective on what Ignition means to you.

12:11
Travis Cox: So Ignition could be HMI software. It could be a SCADA system. It could be a complete IoT infrastructure. It can even be a home automation system. Ignition is what people make with it. And the applications that this community is building it helps shape people's ideas about what Ignition is. And more than that, your ideas are what elevate Ignition to a whole new level, and bringing something that's powerful, that's productive, and that's change-making for all that's using it. This community is building applications that can handle massive amounts of data, that can turn information into real action and insight, that can extend Ignition to brand new use cases that we never thought that were possible, and that can harness the collaborative power of large working groups and this amazing community that we have.

12:57
Travis Cox: And there's no better place, you'll all agree with me, there's no better place to see all of that than right here at ICC. And there's no better place to see all of the amazing applications that you're building than with our Discover Gallery. So if you haven't checked it out, I would highly encourage you to do that. Our Discover Gallery is a video showcase that really shows all the amazing outstanding projects that the community is building, and you can watch those videos while you're here at ICC. You could check it out on the app. You can also go online and check them out too. And we got some fantastic projects this year. Every year, I love being able to share these projects with all of you. But six of them really stood out to us, and those six are the ones that won the Firebrand Award winners, and those that demonstrate excellence in their Ignition project work. So those projects this year are: Vantage Data Centers, Grantek, ESM Automation Systems, Room in the Inn, 2Gi Technologie, and Skellig Automation. Let's give all of these projects a big round of applause.

14:04
Travis Cox: So the Discover Gallery is really a great example of how this community is elevating the industry. And today I wanna focus on four areas of Ignition application development that are helping companies take their operations to the next level. And those areas are scalability, data visualization, extensibility, and collaboration. Let's start with scalability. Every SCADA application has to be able to handle large amounts of data. But how do you build one that effectively manages over five million data points and over 750,000 alarms without compromising ease of use? And that was certainly the challenge that Vantage Data Centers was facing. Vantage Data Centers support some of the world's biggest cloud providers. With expansion to Europe and to Middle East, Vantage was challenged with building a framework and an approach to deploying thousand devices on short commissioning windows and on a massive scale. Ignition scalability was used to meet this challenge using a hub-and-spoke architecture and using Ignition's gateway network.

15:06
Travis Cox: Three layers of gateways were deployed: I/O gateways at the edge to collect data, frontend gateways to allow the user interface, and gateways for regional management. And using the Enterprise Administration Module to interconnect sites, Vantage can see the big picture of all of their data, and they can extrapolate trends, and they can look for areas for improvement. And to make the application easy to use and easy to navigate, they use the Perspective Module to create a universal pop-up that displays data consistently from any device based on the UDT instance. And the application's high-performance screen design enables operators to access data from anywhere with just four clicks.

15:48
Travis Cox: So visualization is a key to understanding and acting on data. If operators can't see their data in real time in the facilities, they can't take action, right? And this is especially important in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals. So Merck & Co., Inc., they needed a way to effectively manage alarms at a large scale at their West Point, Pennsylvania, facility. So they brought in Grantek to help. Using Ignition Perspective, Grantek developed a solution that provides alarm monitoring, historization, and management for over 10,000 points. They created a high-density alarm summary view that lets operators see all the relative metadata and all that status in a conveniently docked pane so they can view, they can dispatch, they can acknowledge, and they can annotate alarm events in just seconds. Now Merck Co. operators can turn data into action with the visualization system that gives them exceptional awareness so they can see and react quickly to whatever changes occur.

16:49
Travis Cox: So to effectively manage change, companies must be able to extend their applications. Ignition's extensibility can help by giving companies the tools that they need to meet almost any use case, even ones that we didn't think of. And that's exactly what happened. An example, one of our Premier Integrators, ESM, built for the Creature Technology Company. They needed software to help theatrical technicians create and modify the motion of complex animatronic figures. It is pretty cool. Using Ignition Perspective and studio animation tools, the solution gives operators an easy drag-and-drop interface to link together dynamic movements and functions to create these fluid movements for the figures. We certainly never designed Ignition for this use case. Exactly.

17:39
Travis Cox: But thanks to the Module SDK for Ignition and the ingenuity of the ESM engineers, this Ignition application was elevated to a brand new use case and even helped bring these dinosaurs back to life.

17:54
Travis Cox: So the last aspect of Ignition application development that I wanna explore is collaboration. And perhaps collaboration is the most powerful feature of Ignition because it harnesses the innovative power of this amazing community, where we're creating applications that can really impact people's lives. And that's exactly what it did for Room in the Inn. Room in the Inn works with over a hundred congregations in Middle Tennessee to provide safe shelter, warm meals, and fellowship to people struggling with homelessness. They were dealing with the logistical nightmare of using outdated software and spreadsheets to coordinate the work of over 13 shelters, over a hundred congregations, and thousands of homeless participants and volunteers. They needed one system to streamline their operation, but to do that they needed a team of integrators and they needed software, which of course they didn't have, and they didn't have a budget to go out there and spend millions of dollars to get something that they actually needed.

18:52
Travis Cox: But that's when a group of volunteers from this community offered their time to help. Using Ignition's ability to support concurrent designers and create and share project resources through the Ignition Exchange, volunteers collaborate in a way that would've been impossible using any other software. Working together, over 150 people from locations around the globe, they joined forces to build the application the Room in the Inn needed. Now, thanks to all of their help, Room in the Inn is better prepared to provide food and shelter to the many people who need it in their area this winter. This project was a true labor of love, and it took the collaborative efforts of hundreds of people from this community to deliver. When you add up all the time and the technology costs that it took to pull this off, it's estimated this project was over $1 million in value. Yet everybody, they provided and worked on and offered their time for free. Now...

19:54
Travis Cox: Exactly.

20:03
Travis Cox: And for all their time and efforts, each volunteer got as much as they put into it... They get a lot out of it as they put into it. Many new resources on the Exchange were created, new skills were learned throughout this process, and stronger connections were forged. All volunteers work not only help Room in the Inn, but they also lift up the project work for all those that took part, and they can take this back to the customers and bring those resources and those examples into these facilities. It was an amazing effort, and we couldn't be more proud of how this community pulled together. Let's give all the volunteers who worked on this project a big round of applause.

20:54
Travis Cox: Now, although we couldn't give every single person a Firebrand Award for this project, we did wanna honor the one person who spearheaded this project, Chris McLaughlin.

21:17
Travis Cox: Chris has been an amazing member of this community for years. And for his effort in leading this project for Room in the Inn, we are giving him a special Firebrand Award for community involvement. Thank you Chris, for all that you do.

21:36
Travis Cox: So this project really inspired us to give back to our local communities because it showed us the good that can come out of the people that share their time and their talents and technology with their neighbors, even if those neighbors are hundreds of thousands of miles away. Giving back to the community has always been an important value of Inductive Automation. And that's why we back in 2014, we launched the Inductive University to freely share knowledge with anyone so they can learn Ignition at their own pace. It's also why we released Ignition Maker Edition a few years ago so that anyone can use it for personal use. But you know what? We also provide free licenses for educational use. But we noticed this gap for nonprofits and for communities that can really benefit from Ignition, and we wanted to do something about that gap. We wanted to fill that gap with the launch of our brand new program, the Community Impact Program.

22:31
Travis Cox: This program will allow individuals to apply for a free Ignition license in order to create a project that benefits their community. And to qualify, people have to show their project benefits the community, that it's noncommercial, and that it's not feasible to do with a commercial license of Ignition. So if you can think of more examples like the amazing project, Room in the Inn, I encourage you all to apply. This program is launched today on our website, so you can go there and you can learn a lot more about it and definitely check it all out. We are honored to be a part of a giving community like this one, and we hope for this new program that we can all work together to help even more people in our local communities enjoy the benefits of Ignition.

23:13
Travis Cox: Another way, like I mentioned, we give back to this community is through that Ignition Exchange. We set up the Ignition Exchange years ago to help our community share resources to make it faster and easier to deploy and build applications. And it's been a huge success. We have over hundreds of resources in there that help people build array of different solutions. It is a powerful resource and it's a one-stop shop for a lot of people to go and get ideas and get inspired for what they can bring into their projects. And we want to enhance that; every year at the conference we want to enhance that experience with the Exchange. We wanna pump it up more. And this year what we did is we pulled together the first-ever ICC Community-Powered Sparkplug Data Dash.

23:55
Travis Cox: Now the Sparkplug Data Dash, if you haven't checked it out, it's upstairs in the tech lounge, it allows participants from all around the world to publish actual machine data and models from the edge to our cloud MQTT server using MQTT Sparkplug. And we have a dashboard up there that shows real visualizations of that data. We are showing the true power of leveraging Ignition and open standards to provide a single source of truth of asset data that is available to anyone and any service that's out there. We're talking about true democratization of data. And we're not just talking about it, we're actually doing it. We're showing real examples of data all around the world coming in there. And this is what Digital Transformation really requires. You need to focus on getting more out of your data rather than locking it down. You need to access data on dashboards no matter where you are in the world, and you need to be able to go further with that data, leveraging ML and AI tools. There's a lot of great tools that are out there today.

24:53
Travis Cox: So I'm excited to say that with this project we had over 50 participants and companies that took part, each contributing unique data models and Perspective templates that are all available on the Ignition Exchange. See, I definitely... And go check out the Data Dash. It is really cool. That's in that tech lounge. So with this, there's nowhere that you can see practical edge-to-cloud examples using actual data with context that is truly scalable. We're showing it with that. We're also talking about a lot here at this conference. For years the industry has been talking about Digital Transformation from with edge-to-cloud technologies, and instead of just talking about it, this community here has making it happen right now. Utilizing Ignition scalability, visualization, extensibility, and collaboration features, this community is elevating the industry with every application that you guys are building. And we're doing everything that we can to help facilitate and help enterprises use the best new technologies to transform their processes. Now to talk more about Digital Transformation, let's bring out our very own, Kevin McClusky.

26:01
Kevin McClusky: Thanks, Travis. Travis shared some great examples of how this community is elevating automation through Ignition application development. And keeping with this theme, I wanted to talk a little bit about another way that we're seeing this community take the industry to the next level by elevating enterprise systems through Digital Transformation. As a side note, I'll say it's really good to be here. It's really good to see all of you. And I know so many of you are doing these types of big enterprise architectures and applications. That part of what I'm talking about here is a big validation for you and for us from what you're doing for us too and for the community. As I'm sure you know, the concept of Digital Transformation, it's pretty simple. It's about using the best digital technology to improve operational technology or operational efficiency basically at its core. In reality, transforming industrial processes can be difficult because information technology and operation technology, as you know, isn't always work built. It isn't always built to work well together between the two. As a result, many companies have been slow to implement Digital Transformation.

27:08
Kevin McClusky: But in the last few years we've actually seen a number of things that have been changing that significantly. Back in 2020 when the pandemic hit, the world changed overnight. My wife and I had just had our first child, and we were at home and I got a call that said, "Don't come back." No, they weren't firing me. As you probably have guessed, I was working from home from that point forward for Inductive Automation for the entire company, and like Inductive Automation companies everywhere we're forced to grapple with this new reality of conducting business remotely and needing to really transform how they worked. Companies frankly had mixed success. We saw that companies that had embraced digital technologies were much more capable of adapting quickly while companies that hadn't, struggled. So the ones that were able to do it quickly, for example, many of our customers, many of you were able to very quickly add the Perspective Module to your installations in order to add remote access or a good option for remote access.

28:20
Kevin McClusky: In fact, we saw sales of that module really increase during the pandemic. Adapting to change is important because the world can change fast, and as Colby mentioned, that pace is increasing. I've experienced this personally as well. Working with some of the leading companies inside the industry and inside the world, it has really shown me one thing. Companies have to keep up with the pace of technology change or they risk being left behind. Companies that combine IT and OT systems with Ignition can turn that noise of millions of data points into a clear, actionable information, and companies that don't use modern technologies can get stuck inside decision paralysis, drowning in rivers of data with no clear direction. In today's technology landscape, it really is sink or swim.

29:11
Kevin McClusky: Peter Drucker said it well: "The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. In a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast." With things moving faster, companies need to safeguard their processes for future-proofing their systems. Today's enterprises need a Digital Transformation strategy that helps elevate their old processes to Industry 4.0 standards. The factories of the future are connected, they're agile, and they're efficient, and they're being built today by members of this community. While the term "Digital Transformation" is far from new, it's actually something that the Ignition Community has been doing for over a decade since the Ignition platform was released.

30:01
Kevin McClusky: At Inductive Automation, I've worked with hundreds of integrators and end users who have transformed their processes using Ignition. And part of what makes Ignition a fantastic Digital Transformation platform is that it combines the best of OT and IT. With Ignition's full suite of products from Edge to Cloud, it can be the Digital Transformation platform for the entire enterprise by connecting people with their processes, their data, and an entire ecosystem of partners, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a few minutes here.

30:33
Kevin McClusky: When enterprises are more connected, they can make better decisions, and they see big gains in productivity and sustainability. And every process can benefit from new technologies, even processes that have existed for decades or more. Let me give you an example from one of this year's Firebrand Award-winning projects. Saint-Gobain PAM is the UK's leading supplier of ductile iron pipe fittings, valves, and secure manhole covers. They date all the way back to 1865. They launched a Digital Transformation initiative and chose their UK facility back in 2020. The 150-year-old plant was chosen to show how modern technologies can elevate long-established processes. The age of the plant presented many challenges to modernization. They used paper-based products which gave rise to inconsistencies and made analyzing production data in real time impossible. Basically clipboards. Their hardware and software obsolescence limited the plant's ability to connect to other systems like their ERP and limits for product traceability hampered quality improvement and data sharing with its customers.

31:45
Kevin McClusky: Saint-Gobain brought in experts 2Gi Technologie to bring their SCADA, MES, track and trace, and quality control systems all onto one universal platform. Ignition's open standards made it possible to easily interface with third-party systems, including SAP and some that even used VAX architectures designed all the way back in the '70s. Ignition was also used to collect scanned RFID tags on the surface of pipes to track production. This allowed operators to track product's locations from start to finish. And Ignition's visualization tools were used to create responsive HMIs for operators to stay in touch on the go. All of this was tested and rolled out without affecting the plant's productivity. With Ignition the people at Saint-Gobain PAM are now more connected to their processes than ever before with a system where they can monitor production data in real time for the first time in the plant's history.

32:45
Kevin McClusky: At the heart of what makes Ignition a great Digital Transformation platform is that it can connect people with their data. Ignition's ability to connect to virtually any data source on the plant floor to the cloud to the edge makes it the ultimate platform to bring all of this data from across the entire enterprise all together. One company that uses Ignition to transform its data management is the Center for Breakthrough Medicines or CBM for short. CBM is a large cell and gene therapy CDMO specializing in end-to-end capabilities for the entire market. They develop and manufacture life-changing treatments, and their work requires a massive amount of data. So they worked with Gold Certified Integrator Skellig to bring a cutting-edge data management system to life using Ignition that leverages Opto 22 groov EPICs for device data, Cirrus Link's MQTT modules for IIoT, and Ignition for visualization and deployment.

33:46
Kevin McClusky: Now CBM scientists can find the data they need easily. By better connecting people to data, CBM scientists can focus on higher-level analysis and research which can improve and save lives. That's it for our Firebrand Award winners, and after seeing all of them, I think you'll agree with me when I say that their excellent work with Ignition is really elevating automation. We already gave them a little bit of a round of applause, but now that you've seen them all, let's give them another hand.

34:25
Kevin McClusky: One of the things I really loved seeing in this year's group of Discover Gallery projects is how many are leveraging our ecosystem of partner solutions to enhance their Ignition systems. By the way, the Discover Gallery is just out there and to the right. I know in years past sometimes folks have missed it, but make sure that you check it out. We have these six projects, and we have many more Discover Gallery projects that are out there as well, which are great videos to watch and experience what some of the rest of the community is doing.

34:56
Kevin McClusky: Bringing together our partners is an important way that we're working to make the Digital Transformation process easier for enterprises. This year, as you can see, we updated our partner programs with the new Solution Partner Program category with companies who offer joint solutions that fully integrate with Ignition, including of course Sepasoft, 4IR, and Opto 22. And just last month we launched our new Alliance Partner Program. Alliance Partners are carefully vetted partnerships that provide valuable products and services that complement Ignition systems. The addition of Alliance Partners to our existing Strategic Partners and Solution Partners gives companies using Ignition a whole world of new solutions to enhance their systems.

35:45
Kevin McClusky: One example is our collaboration with Snowflake. Many of you have talked to us about Snowflake in recent years. As you may know, Snowflake provides a highly scalable cloud-based database platform based on open IT standards. They basically provide elastic data and database storage in the cloud, and they have a slew of offerings surrounding it, including some analytics and machine learning. As part of our collaboration, we've been working with Snowflake so Ignition users can leverage their platform's data and analytics tools by making data ingestion and access in the cloud as easy as working with SQL databases.

36:22
Kevin McClusky: Here's how it works. First, industrial data is pushed from sites and from the edge using MQTT Sparkplug. And after its coming there, data is stored automatically with its context in the Snowflake data cloud using Cirrus Link's new IIoT Bridge for Snowflake. You take your tags, you take your tag providers, you take your UDTs, all of that gets shipped over. After it's set up, it just works. You don't need any scripting for this, and everything just flows, even new data that's added later as it's sent over MQTT. Once the data's in Snowflake, users can easily query it back into Ignition so that they can use it to generate reports, perform advanced analytics, including anomaly detection, and create new applications. If you wanna learn more about how Snowflake and Ignition can be used together, check out the session that Cirrus Link is doing with Snowflake later in the conference.

37:21
Kevin McClusky: Snowflake is just one example of the great partnerships we have in the Alliance Partner Program, and highlighting any of these is an amazing story. I'd encourage you to explore the valuable offerings that these folks have. From pretty much all of our partners here, everyone you see listed on this, our Solutions Partners, our Strategic Partners, we very carefully vet all of our partnerships for folks who are going to be bringing you the community value, and I'd encourage you to talk to all of them. Many of them have booths inside the conference here, and they're all listed on our website as well. The value that they bring to the ecosystem helps elevate all of us, and we truly appreciate that relationship that they have and their passion for our community.

38:08
Kevin McClusky: We built Ignition to be the ultimate hub for plant floor connectivity, but our customers actually found that it does much more than that. Ignition connects more than devices; it connects people with their data, their processes, in this ecosystem of technology partners. By connecting the enterprise Ignition breaks down the barriers between companies and their Digital Transformation goals. It puts the tools in people's hands to elevate their enterprise systems to new heights. And that's part of what I see in the Firebrand Award-winning projects that we just talked about. It turns out we're not the only ones recognizing your work, so is the World Economic Forum.

38:51
Kevin McClusky: The World Economic Forum's Lighthouse Program highlights manufacturers from various industries who have demonstrated front-running leadership in Industry 4.0 innovation. And this year CEAT Tyres was officially certified as a Lighthouse Factory, making it the first tire company in the world to achieve that designation. CEAT Tyres is one of the largest tire manufacturers in India, with multiple plants across the country. Top executives leading the way, Ignition chosen as the base platform, CEAT worked to modernize every aspect of one of their plant's production. With the new system, the plant saw multiple positive outcomes, including reducing its carbon footprint, drastically cutting water and energy consumption, and increased productivity in this plant that already existed with no base machinery changes by an incredible 15%.

39:47
Kevin McClusky: It's an amazing project, and although it wasn't part of the Discover Gallery this year, I wanted to mention it here because their great work is part of leading the way in Industry 4.0 innovation. I also wanted to mention the amazing work of the integrators who worked on the project, expert Ignition integrators Automation Excellence and BASE Automation. We know that behind every Ignition application and enterprise stands a team of dedicated engineers and integrators working hard to transform their companies' and customers' projects. It's your work that's elevating the community, and it's our mission to support you. In this next section of the keynote, we'll look at what Inductive Automation is doing to help elevate the community.

40:45
Jacqui Leake: So we in the Support Division, we're a team of dedicated problem solvers. We're committed to helping our community with the support that they need to be successful. Whether you're a new user or a seasoned professional, we are here to help you get the most out of Ignition.

41:00
Daniel Forbes: I personally work in recruiting, and we really try to build a culture of people that are excited about what we're doing for the automation industry. And so we like to provide information for them, and then when we do interview them, I look for that spark. We look for people that are really excited, that we feel will be a good fit to the culture of Inductive Automation.

41:19
David Grussenmeyer: Just a few months back, we launched the Alliance Partner Program. We partner with companies that offer products or solutions that complement Ignition deployments. We're able to highlight these products or services through co-marketing efforts, and really show our customers and our community how these products or these services together provide a better experience for the end user or for the customer.

41:41
Arnell Ignacio: Luckily, with Ignition, the software pretty much sells itself. Our jobs here in marketing is to inform you of what it can do and to reveal what it does for a lot of our customers.

41:51
Kathy Applebaum: In software engineering, the obvious thing would be that we make it Ignition. But I have to say, I'm secretly really, really proud of our participation on the user forum. So many times I see our developers and myself included, we start every day with that cup of caffeine in hand, and we're going through the new posts on the forum. I see people answering questions about how the software works, how to make it work better. I see them writing tickets for bug fixes for new features all coming through that forum participation.

42:21
Don Pearson: I've actually had a good opportunity this year to spend a lot of time with our Premier Integrators. I get the opportunity to see how we really are elevating the game.

42:39
Carl Gould: Good morning, everybody. So we just had Travis and Kevin share some really incredible examples of the projects from the Discover Gallery, the Firebrand Award winners. And they represent an incredible diversity that is a good... It's emblematory of the kind of projects that are being built with Ignition, and I encourage you all to go and check out all of the projects in the Discover Gallery. There's so many excellent projects in there this year. They're really inspiring, and I really think they're of the highest caliber. And as one of the creators of Ignition, it's really gratifying to see because these projects help to validate one of our core beliefs, which is that it is open platforms that drive innovation. A regular software application can be quite useful; they often are. But ultimately, you might find that they become a bit limiting because they can only offer a fixed set of solutions for what they were originally designed to do, and they may have difficulty adapting to new situations.

43:36
Carl Gould: But a platform can give you the tools that you need to solve new problems in novel ways. And Ignition is set up like this as a platform to make you the innovator so that you can bring your domain knowledge, you can bring your expertise and your creativity to bear on whatever problem it is you're trying to solve. And that's what I see play out every year at ICC, with Ignition being showcased in a variety of fascinating and innovative new use cases across an ever-widening range of industries. I love seeing all that new technology being integrated with the platform, and as Kevin showed, this has now resulted in a growing ecosystem of technology partnerships. These partnerships open up new possibilities for the kinds of applications that you can build with Ignition. Ignition's open nature, its modular architecture and freely accessible SDK, make it readily adaptable to be used with any kind of new technology trend. And sometimes it can be hard to tell where our efforts with the software end and community efforts begin.

44:43
Carl Gould: And as an example of this, with all of the excitement around generative AI this past year, we saw someone on social media commenting about how they don't really know much about Inductive Automation, but from what they could tell we were just completely obsessed with ChatGPT. And we saw this comment, we sort of scratched our chins, and because we found this both amusing and ironic because we haven't done anything with ChatGPT as far as integrating it with the product. So what was this person reacting to? Entirely community-driven efforts, and they couldn't tell the difference between our efforts with Ignition and community integrations. And that's the point, that Ignition is so readily adaptable that it can be used with a new trending technology that can be rapidly and seamlessly integrated.

45:32
Carl Gould: And this type of extensibility is a major advantage for us because we don't have to constantly change Ignition to chase a new technology trend because Ignition is designed to be adapted by the user, by you, so you can integrate it with anything you need to. And this extensibility makes systems built with Ignition remarkably future-proof because you always have endless ways to continue to integrate new solutions into your application, and you can continually bring increasing value at every level of your organization that's using Ignition. For years, we've been improving Ignition's ability to operate at every layer of the infrastructure stack by gracefully integrating at each layer, making the right connections, we're able to create value along the way. It starts at the plant floor with the standard Ignition platform. This is really a home base for us. We're very comfortable here, we connect easily to technologies both on the OT side of the house as well as the IT side of the house, and we are used across the globe to build the common types of applications you find at this layer: HMI, SCADA, MES applications. But we also are used for a number of other applications at this layer that just defy all categorization.

46:51
Carl Gould: A few years ago, we added Ignition Edge. Edge has made it easy to deploy Ignition in remote environments on limited computing infrastructure that can be deployed adjacent to critical assets, and I think Edge and MQTT have really helped bring the promise of IIoT into reality. And earlier this year, we released Ignition Cloud Edition on the Amazon AWS Marketplace, and just last month we expanded the availability of Cloud Edition to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. So I'm really happy that it's now available on both of the major cloud infrastructure providers in our realm. Cloud Edition enables you to augment the capabilities of an Ignition system by leveraging cloud services and easily spinning up elastic cloud architectures.

47:41
Carl Gould: What's cool about Cloud Edition is that it enables you to build applications that can really span the breadth of an Ignition-based organization or an organization that uses Ignition in various places. It can integrate with assets on the plant floor or at the edge of the network, and you can create systems that are really greater than the sum of their parts. It's common for organizations to have Ignition installed in various places, often scattered around geographically, maybe communicating with each other, maybe not. And with Cloud Edition, you can easily spin up a scalable architecture in the cloud, it can securely gather KPIs from all these different facilities, bring them into a unified data model, and present them on a dashboard that can then be accessed securely from anywhere.

48:29
Carl Gould: When we develop Ignition, we follow a pretty simple philosophy. First, make it possible and then make it easy. And Cloud Edition is a good example of this. It's been possible to use Ignition in the cloud for years. Many of you have been doing just that. But with the release of Cloud Edition, we've made it so much easier. We've really improved the user experience and the purchasing model and the ease of implementing these architectures in the cloud.

48:55
Carl Gould: We follow the same approach for product maintenance. Take Perspective, for example, where since the initial release of that module, we've added hundreds of new features and quality-of-life improvements and performance improvements. We even got Phil using it this year so you know it's getting good.

49:14
Carl Gould: This methodical and agile approach helps us get new features into your hands sooner and then just steadily improve them over time. It also helps us respond quickly to security concerns. So every year we participate in this big contest hosted by ZDI, the Zero Day Initiative. This is a conference where security researchers gather and they compete for big cash bounties by finding new vulnerabilities in industrial control systems like Ignition and a bunch of others. And when a new vulnerability arises, as they inevitably do, we often have a patch developed and released within the week, thanks to our agile process and our nightly release mechanism. We consistently impress researchers with the speed of our responses. But this year we've taken a significant step further not just by responding quickly, but also by taking a more proactive approach by securing the development process itself. This year, our company-wide software development life cycle was certified by exida to be compliant with ISA 62443 and ISASecure.

50:22
Carl Gould: These are rigorous standards that set forth the best practices and procedures and policies for the secure design and implementation and deployment of industrial control software, and the certificate is only awarded to companies that pass a strict audit that shows that not only do you have all of these policies and procedures in place, but that they are actually being followed. What this means for you is that it gives your Ignition applications the assurance that they have the strongest security posture possible.

50:54
Carl Gould: Now at this point, some of you might be thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, just tell us about 8.3."

51:00
Carl Gould: I know a few of you might be thinking, "Wait a second, what happened to 8.2?" Good questions. I'll answer them both. So we're skipping 8.2 because even-numbered releases are cursed.

51:14
Carl Gould: No, the reality is a bit more boring. We have a tradition here of having odd-numbered releases come with long-term support. And because of the amount of time elapsed since the initial release of 8.1, we just wanna go straight into another LTS release, so we're calling it 8.3. As for the timeline we are hard at work in it right now, and we expect it to be released in the second half of next year, but it will be worth the wait. We have a lot of really exciting features coming in 8.3. We've got native drawing tools for Perspective. We've got a...

51:43
Audience Member 1: Woo!

51:44
Carl Gould: Yay!

51:46
Carl Gould: Long awaited. We have a new high-performance time-series historian, we've got this really interesting new method for ingesting streaming event data, and I know that was just a tease. So we will be back on this stage, Colby and I, tomorrow morning where we will go into detail about these features of 8.3, give you some sneak peeks of more features, as well as get into some more specifics about that release timeline.

52:11
Carl Gould: But back to the topic of this keynote. 8.3 is going to represent a really substantial elevation of the platform, and I'm thrilled to see what you all build on top of it. We're always amazed by the kinds of innovations you all bring to the applications you build in Ignition, and I know you will all continue to elevate the state-of-the-art of automation to new heights. And to help you do just that, here is Inductive Automation's Chief Operating Officer, Kat Jeschke.

52:49
Kat Jeschke: Hi everyone. I know you've been welcomed a lot by now, but I just wanna say, welcome. Thank you for being here. I wanted to share some company highlights with all of you, as well as some of our accomplishments and our company strategy. But before I go into those, I wanted to share just a little bit of my year with all of you. This year, I got the opportunity to attend conferences with many of you, and it's truly been a highlight of my year. In April we attended the HANNOVER MESSE with three of our international distributors, and it was incredible because we've been to shows in Germany before, but this time was different. The interest from the German market was amazing. We were in nonstop conversations all day long and well into the evening. We also got the chance to visit our Italian distributor EFA and attend SPS Parma. It was such an honor to meet all of our customers in Italy and to see the passion and enthusiasm shared across the globe for our software. These experiences reminded me how our Ignition community isn't just localized to one place, or this conference, but that it's truly everywhere.

54:06
Kat Jeschke: Seeing this community in action is what drives us to be the best company we can be. That mission to be the best came from our founders, Steve and Wendi-Lynn Hechtman, who were driven to build a different type of industrial automation software company. The result of their efforts is what you see today. So last year when the torch got passed to the new leadership team, we all came together and we wanted to continue to carry out that mission, continue to build and grow the best possible company in the industrial automation software industry. And I have to say if you could be a fly on the wall at our leadership summits, you'd be overwhelmed with the sense of purpose, care, and dedication that our leadership team embodies. It is their daily work, ideas, and creative spirit that are the driving force behind Inductive Automation.

55:07
Kat Jeschke: They truly embody our company motto, "Dream It, Do It." This motto isn't just something that we say. It's the creative spirit we strive to foster in our company, and we see examples of it every day. I just wanna highlight a few for you. There's Kevin Collins, who came up with the idea of Ignition Cloud Edition and played a huge role in developing it. And Sabrina Reese, who assembled the product council in software engineering to help steer the direction of Ignition development. And Jessica Geisser, who first thought of using the word "elevate" as the theme for this year's conference. And the incredible HR team who assembled a committee dedicated to keeping our company culture strong. And then there's more than a dozen of members of our software support team who came together to create the first-ever SCADA Arcade, which is a fun way for our support staff to develop their skills. These are just a few highlights of Dream It, Do It. And the reality is, I'm barely scratching the surface of all the talented team members at Inductive Automation that dream up new ideas every single day.

56:24
Kat Jeschke: Working with such talented people is what makes Inductive Automation a great place to work. And we see this clearly reflected in our retention numbers. Our retention numbers are far above industry averages, and much of our company's core staff has been at Inductive Automation since its early years. A great example of this is Jim Meisler. Jim was our first salesperson. He joined Inductive Automation in 2006, and he made hundreds of cold calls to any and all potential customers that would listen to him. Over these years, Jim has worked with thousands of people and helped scores of companies get started with Ignition. I'm sure many of you have probably talked with Jim over the years. In fact, I think it's fair to say that a good part of this audience may not even be at this conference today if it wasn't for Jim and his outstanding efforts. Well, at the end of this year, Jim is retiring. So before he goes, please help me give him a huge round of applause. He's right over there for seven...

57:43
Kat Jeschke: Woo!

57:55
Kat Jeschke: Thank you, Jim. Shifting now to the company strategy. At the beginning of each year we choose a handful of distinct areas that we think are vital for supporting the growth of Inductive Automation and this community. I'd like to take a few minutes here and highlight each one of these areas. I'm happy to say we've made tremendous progress in all of these areas. You've just heard about the product from Carl, and you'll learn even more in tomorrow's Technical Keynote. Suffice it to say though we've done a ton of work on the product this year, and our vision for where we want our software to go is as strong as ever.

58:40
Kat Jeschke: Growing our direct sales to more customers through more verticals has been a strategy for this year. One of the strengths of our company is the fantastic diversity of our customer base. We have thousands of customers, and our largest customer only makes up a very small percentage of our total sales. Having customers spread over hundreds of verticals shows how flexible Ignition is, and it makes our company extremely stable because we're not dependent on any one industry.

59:19
Kat Jeschke: Last year we saw strong growth in automotive, water and wastewater, and energy, and we saw substantial growth in newer verticals like transportation, data centers, public administration, and healthcare. Strong sales across these verticals and many more helped us finish last year with over 30% growth in revenue from the previous year, which continues our trend of strong year-over-year growth dating all the way back to 2010.

59:54
Kat Jeschke: Our channel sales programs continue to develop and we improve them. The program overall continues to grow a very strong rate, and distributors have done more shows and reach more customers than ever before. Our international sales grew by 33%, and today Ignition is being used in 130 countries, and that number continues to grow. We also added a new distributor, Clarion Solutions, which covers the Middle East and North Africa regions. The Integrator Program continues to be one of our key focus areas, and we've seen a ton of great growth in the program this year. We currently have 3,900 integration companies in the program, and since last September we've added 548 new integration firms, and there's five we've elevated to our highest level of Premier. The new Premier Integrators are Tristar Electrical, SAFEgroup Automation, Polaris Automation, Gray Solutions, and AXCEND Automation. Please give them a round of applause.

01:01:11
Kat Jeschke: Another focus area for us is employee development. This year we continued to hire a lot of new employees, bringing our total employee count to 340 total employees. This means we've nearly tripled since 2020, which is incredible. It can be a challenge to grow so quickly and maintain company culture and core values, which is why I'm extremely proud of all the work each division has done to help us stay true to our founding principles. Along those lines we also leveraged our Inductive University platform this year and created a course dedicated to onboarding new employees, and we're gonna continue to expand the series in the coming year. We put a very strong emphasis on employee growth and employee development, which is why I'm extremely proud to let you know we've had nearly 90 internal promotions in the last year. And finally our Educational Engagement Program has continued to grow, and we now have over 100 universities in the program. What's even more exciting is we continue to invest in this program, and we recently created a team that is dedicated to helping create curriculum for schools. So with all these efforts working together, we're striving to make the best possible software, spread it around the world, and create a one-of-a-kind customer experience.

01:02:43
Kat Jeschke: We've always believed that the impact of our software goes beyond what it can do on the plant floor. It extends to the impact it can have on people's lives. The fact is when people buy Ignition they usually have a specific purpose in mind, but then as they start using it, that purpose develops and grows, and it grows well past the original idea. So often what starts out as a solution to one problem grows organically over time to involve an entire plant, region, or even enterprise. This is because Ignition is unlimited both in licensing and functionality, and because it's backed by a company that is driven first and foremost by customer success. Together this can have quite the magic effect on the user, which we've taken to calling "The Ignition Effect."

01:03:41
Kat Jeschke: The best way to understand the Ignition effect is to hear from the people that have experienced it. So we've created a whole new video series that highlights members of this community to show you the impact Ignition has had on their companies, industries, and lives. I'd like to give you a sneak peek of the series now.

01:04:11
Bart Mans: For me, of course, it has a huge effect on my career.

01:04:13
Jerry Eppler: In like eight years I went from... I had never even heard of Ignition to now run a successful business.

01:04:19
Julio Velasco: Now, we've created a powerhouse right with Ignition from people who were straight out of the college.

01:04:24
Chris McLaughlin: If you happen to have even one year of experience actually implementing Ignition, seriously, there will be companies fighting over you.

01:04:32
Will Baker: Our hiring process has changed, where we're specifically calling out Ignition expertise.

01:04:36
Alicia Lomas: It kinda helps my chances of getting somebody excited about the role, being able to tell them that you're gonna be able to develop in Ignition.

01:04:45
J.C. Harrison: You had a lot of people ready for something different in the industrial automation.

01:04:49
Elizabeth Hill Reed: Ignition has allowed us to grow in our solutions that we're able to provide to customers.

01:04:55
Keith Gamble: I was building production applications and something that just came out of its beta.

01:05:00
Remus Pop: We flew out to Arizona on a Wednesday, and by Thursday afternoon we had a fully deployed OEE system monitoring four assembly lines.

01:05:07
Steven Downer: We've been able to provide features that are asked for and requested.

01:05:11
Julio Velasco: There was a very solid line between the IT world and the controls world. Now that line is completely obliterated, right? It's gone.

01:05:20
Alicia Lomas: What Ignition did was kind of open up everybody's minds.

01:05:23
Arnaud De Clerck: The only limit is the creativity that you have.

01:05:28
Jerry Eppler: Once they get Ignition in place, it spreads like a virus, but in a good way.

01:05:32
Will Baker: It's changed the way that I communicate with customers.

01:05:34
Keith Gamble: We're really starting to open those doors where clients were previously terrified of custom code and applications that were unsupportable.

01:05:42
Chris McLaughlin: And you put Ignition in there and that changed everything.

01:05:46
Bart Mans: A lot of customers still write things down on paper as spreadsheets, type everything in, and then they do some analysis, and we can automate that.

01:05:53
Chris Taylor: It's about giving value, giving new information, new data, even if a customer hasn't asked for it.

01:06:00
Evelyn Granizo: Before Ignition, the conversation with the customer were about limitation. The question now is, "What problem you need to solve?"

01:06:07
Remus Pop: The customer was so blown away that the next question was, "How fast can you deploy this to the rest of our company?"

01:06:15
Phillip Bourner: Everyone is sharing what they've done in the past, and everyone is taking that, innovating on top of it, making it better.

01:06:21
Arnaud De Clerck: When I saw the feedback on the LinkedIn from someone from Australia that say, "What? My resources is used in Australia? Come on."

01:06:30
Alicia Lomas: It would be kind of interesting to be the customer that kinda push some of these integrators towards Ignition.

01:06:38
Jerry Eppler: Why would you use 10 different pieces of software when none of them do exactly what you want, when you could build it exactly how you want?

01:06:44
Elizabeth Hill Reed: A lot was changing throughout the project, it was a very tight timeline, and I do not think that that project would have been possible without Ignition.

01:06:51
Chris Taylor: I swear we're not supposed to be doing the things we're doing, but Ignition is so flexible, it just allows us to do it.

01:07:00
Jonathan Swisher: Yeah, Ignition is a great solution because it's not tailored to any one industry.

01:07:06
Rob Raffaele: This is fundamentally what I think is a shift and really a game changer in the industry.

01:07:12
Remus Pop: What kinda shocked me a little bit is that Ignition is already almost everywhere, so.

01:07:18
Keith Gamble: Ignition was working its way into that education space, in a place that I don't think two years ago you would have ever seen.

01:07:25
Evelyn Granizo: It was exciting to see new talents being amazed by the power of the tool they were learning at the classroom.

01:07:31
Julio Velasco: His first day back he was like, "Oh, by the way, I finished the Inductive University. When can I get certified?" I was like, "What?"

01:07:40
Bart Mans: We did projects for really big companies in Europe.

01:07:42
Chris McLaughlin: So many people, they come from Australia and India and Sweden and Norway and Ecuador.

01:07:50
Madiha Javed: It's crazy kinda to see how far that software has gone.

01:07:53
Chris McLaughlin: And Canada and Mexico and all over the US.

01:08:00
Courtney Smith: We keep pushing the boundaries of what is actually possible with Ignition. How far can this thing go?

01:08:08
Elizabeth Hill Reed: I was actually the first person at TMC to learn Ignition.

01:08:11
Jerry Eppler: I think I was the first hire to actually go through Inductive University.

01:08:16
Jonathan Swisher: As far as I know, we were one of the first customers.

01:08:18
Bart Mans: I was the first Ignition programmer at the AT Automation.

01:08:21
Will Baker: It was a new world for me. I wasn't taught this stuff in school.

01:08:24
Remus Pop: I just went to Google and I googled off-the-shelf MES.

01:08:27
Chris McLaughlin: When I joined Vertech, they had done zero Ignition projects.

01:08:30
Alicia Lomas: And when the outbreak happened, I was in Italy with an equipment vendor.

01:08:34
Julio Velasco: In the Amazon jungle, teaching Ignition.

01:08:37
Keith Gamble: I knew your entire support staff on a first name basis.

01:08:41
Chris Taylor: That was the point at which I turned to my wife and I said, "We've got a huge opportunity."

01:08:49
Interviewer: What do you think the Ignition effect is?

01:08:53
J.C. Harrison: That's a good question.

01:09:00
Kat Jeschke: Pretty cool, huh?

01:09:07
Kat Jeschke: So The Ignition Effect launched today on our website along with five episodes, and we will release more throughout the year. In this series we documented a lot of incredible effects of Ignition, which all center around how Ignition is helping obliterate the line between IT and OT, to shift mindsets from limitations to solutions and make the impossible possible for people all across the globe. Helping people everywhere, "Dream It, Do It" is why we make software, and it's what drives us to keep elevating our organization. To talk more about how we're doing that, please help me welcome back to the stage Inductive Automation's CEO, Colby Clegg.

01:09:53
Colby Clegg: Thank you, Kat. Thank you. Well, as you can see, we've grown a lot as a company and a community. We're on a path and a trajectory that we've been on for a long time now. And frankly, I see no reason why it should slow down. But we all know, everyone here knows that growth is a challenge. Growth can be difficult. As we grow in resources, in stature, and in reach, there are real difficulties to confront. How do we maintain and scale the true essence of who we are and what you all love about us? How do we grow in sophistication and maturity to serve the needs of the large global enterprises that are approaching us every day now without forsaking the innovative early adopters and the dynamic integrators who have been here to support us since the beginning? Finally, with so much opportunity in front of us, how do we resist the urge to splinter out and dilute our focus, as unfortunately, so many companies do?

01:10:57
Colby Clegg: Well, these are all important questions, and we think about them all the time. And while not easy, I am confident that we can be successful, and we can do that by coming back and staying true to our core mission. From our founding, our mission has ultimately been extremely simple: to create tools that empower you to get things done. We took a far different route to build our company than most companies would, choosing to grow in an organic and independent way with no outside investment or influence. And we did that because we knew this industry needed someone it could trust, someone who ultimately only had one goal: their success.

01:11:42
Colby Clegg: That requires vision, and it requires independence. Today, we greatly value that independence. As a business, of course, we have all of the same goals and aspirations that any business should, but at the end of the day the only person we have to truly answer to is you, our customer. It hasn't been easy, and we've worked since the beginning, all together, led by Steve's vision to make this independence stable and viable. As I've settled into this role over the last 18 months, this has taken on a new light for me. I've been reminded in so many ways how this independence is vital to achieving our core mission. It gives me the confidence to say that we can continue to grow in a way that is responsible and beneficial to this community, growing not just for the sake of growth but growing with purpose. This lets us confront any challenges that might arise because we can always come back to that purpose: empower you to get things done. Our independence makes us unique, and we are fully dedicated to maintaining that.

01:12:51
Colby Clegg: It's important for me to highlight that this morning, because I do believe it is the cornerstone of what sets us apart. Our competitive advantage is far more than our software. It's the entire experience that you have with us. It is our software, but it's our support, our philosophies, unlimited access, open data, free knowledge transfer, all of that works together to create an experience that leads to that amazing Ignition effect that Kat just introduced. Ultimately, it's this experience that sets us apart from the competition, and that makes being a member of this community so special. That means that as we grow, we ultimately have to protect and then enhance that experience. And I'm very excited to highlight our dedication to that this morning.

01:13:40
Colby Clegg: A vital part of the Inductive Automation experience is the amazing personal service that we provide in every way, from the advice that our sales and sales engineering teams give to the incredible tech support we offer. It's all based on the personal conviction of our staff that their ultimate goal is to make you successful. A key element of our approach to this service has historically focused on keeping our staff close together, united by our office here in Folsom. There are important benefits to this especially as we manage everything we do ourselves with no outsourcing. It's important that all areas of the company can be in close and efficient communication. The downside, of course, is that even though we can interact with the whole world and even as a remote-first company now, we're still very localized to this region and time zone.

01:14:31
Colby Clegg: As part of our strategy to address this, we've leaned onto our Integrator Program and of course have established our international distribution program. Both of these groups work every day to reach customers in their own time zones and their own languages, and our distributors are truly doing a wonderful job of representing all of our core values in their parts of the world. However, both continue to rely on Inductive Automation for high-level support, and of course, there are many functions that only we can fill. If we're going to succeed in pushing the envelope on the experience that all of our customers have, our distributors, our integrators, our end users, we have to expand. And that is exactly what I'm thrilled to present to you this morning with the introduction of Inductive Automation Australia.

01:15:27
Colby Clegg: Australia is an excellent strategic location because it gives us direct coverage over a significant and important part of the world. This is the home of iControls, our long-time distributor and partner, and they have done a tremendous job of opening up and developing this market. We've reached an agreement to bring over the staff and assets of iControls as Inductive Automation Australia, meaning that immediately we have a full team of knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and dedicated staff, ready and excited to help provide the best experience possible in this important region of the world.

01:16:03
Colby Clegg: Not only will Australia give us the opportunity to provide more support and resources to our current customers, it'll also give us a great base of operations on which to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts to other vital countries in this region over time. We also look forward to being able to offer extended tech support, reducing response times and the need for after-hour support for all of our customers. This will, of course, ramp up over time, and as of this morning we have an announcement up on our website, laying out our timeline and our plans over the next few months. But coming back to a high level, this means that after 20 years, Inductive Automation is finally a multinational company. As our community grows to span the entire globe, we wanna be right there with you to provide the best experience possible. Please help me in welcoming the New Australian members of Inductive Automation, now joining us today and remotely.

01:17:19
Colby Clegg: Well, since I mentioned 20 years, when I think that Inductive Automation turns 20 this year, what excites me the most isn't how far we've come, it's how far we can go. This anniversary is a milestone to be certain. It's a testament to Steve and Wendi-Lynn's vision and drive to push forward when most of the industry thought that the established solutions were as far as we could go. But it's clear to me that this year is so much more. It's a starting point for what's to come. Ignition was developed with all kinds of features to break down barriers, but perhaps the most powerful feature of all isn't anything that we coded it to do. It's the fact that by removing limits, Ignition brings people, data, and ideas together. This morning you've seen many examples of that and have seen that the heights to which this community can elevate automation are truly unlimited. You've learned how companies are making Digital Transformation a reality today.

01:18:22
Colby Clegg: You've seen the impact that we can have on society by leveraging Ignition for more than just automation. You've seen our dedication to growing with purpose and striving to provide an ever richer and more fulfilling experience to this entire community. Ultimately, every day we all have different challenges to confront, new technologies to figure out trying to find the best path forward. But I know there's no better place for innovation and world-changing progress to be made than right here in this community. Supporting you is our purpose, and we promise to do everything we can to be there for you for the next 20 years, just as you've been here to support us for the first 20. With that, I welcome you once again to ICC 2023, and hope you have a wonderful conference. 

This year marks Inductive Automation’s tenth year hosting the Ignition Community Conference! In that time, it’s been amazing to see the community's growth and the positive impact its members have made on the industry. For this year’s company keynote, you’ll hear from Inductive Automation’s leadership team about the growth and direction of our company and our community as we celebrate the last decade and look forward to what’s to come.

Webinar Transcript

00:03
Announcer: Welcome to the 10th Annual Ignition Community Conference. Please give a round of applause to Executive Chairmen of Inductive Automation, Steve Hechtman and, Wendi-Lynn Hechtman.

00:25
Steve Hechtman: Hello, and welcome to ICC X.

00:36
Steve Hechtman: Thank you. It's really great to be back here at Harris Center and see all of you. Being here at this conference and reconnecting with you is definitely the biggest highlight of our year. Whether you're part of ICC in person or joining us virtually, we welcome you, and we look forward to talking with you while you're here. Okay, I was an integrator for many years and I've attended a lot of conferences, but nothing compares to this community's spirit of cooperation and innovation. Ignition was created to help controls engineers and IT professionals to deliver easy, affordable, and fun solutions in record time. And I'm actually thrilled and honored by your response to it. We couldn't have predicted how you would embrace Ignition and come together as the amazing group that you are. So thank you for joining us and being a part of this community, and we wouldn't be what we are today without you.

01:49
Wendi-Lynn Hechtman: We are not just a tech-heavy software company. We have built a strong and balanced organization to support the ever-increasing demands for Ignition. And over the years, we've established the highly competent leadership team who embrace our core values. And we knew that one day, we would turn over our C-roles to these rising leaders. So in July, we appointed Colby Clegg to CEO, Kat Robinett to COO, and Carl Gould to CTO. Steve and I remain as the Executive Chairmen and will continue to guide IA's top-level strategies. Colby and Kat will execute strategic plans and focus on the company's day-to-day operations, and Carl will guide the development roadmap and usher in new innovation. Since this transition, we've been impressed by their energy, passion, and intelligent planning, and it's already taking us to the next level.

02:58
Steve Hechtman: That's exactly right. But I also wanna emphasize one other thing, and that is this new leadership team fully embodies our four pillars. These encompass the areas of technology, licensing, business, and ethics. There's a lot to these four pillars that I could go into, but just in a nutshell, let me explain 'em. Our new technology model leverages technologies from IT and OT and combines them together into one easy, fun, and affordable platform. Our new licensing model gives you the freedom to innovate and scale without limits. Our new business model balances software development with organizational development so that we can deliver the best possible products and services to you. And our new ethical model commits us to treating people fairly, retaining our culture, continuing our expansion, and remaining viable. These are our guideposts, and we've been living 'em for almost 20 years. So know that as we pass the torch to these stellar performers that they'll always uphold our core values.

04:17
Wendi-Lynn Hechtman: We have a wonderful workforce here at Inductive Automation composed of a wide range of talented people, and I'm especially proud of the many women leaders in management and technology. We have amazing women leading the way across the organization, from software engineering, sales, marketing, finance, HR, community alliances, and the executive level, such as our new COO, Kat Robinett. Kat has worked directly with Steve and me for years, learning what it takes to run a lean and mean organization. She epitomizes the intelligence, energy, and integrity that we strive for in executive leadership. Let's hear from her now. Please welcome the new COO of Inductive Automation, Kat Robinett.

05:20
Kat Robinett: Thank you, Wendi, for that introduction and for your trust in me and all the other new company leaders. I'm so excited to be here today. In my new role as a COO, I'm responsible for the company's daily operations and facilities. I work to oversee the tactical execution of strategic goals and projects, as well as support and back up Colby in his CEO role. Steve and Wendi have set a high bar for us to follow, and it's amazing to see what they've accomplished. Working together, they turned an idea to solve their customers' pain points into an industry-leading company with Ignition installations in nearly every industry and in more than 100 countries. It's incredible.

06:05
Kat Robinett: In today's keynote, we'll be talking about the progress of our company and this community. Colby, Karl, and I will take the first part of the keynote to look at the state of our company's growth and the plans for the coming year. And then Don, Travis, and Kevin will take the second half of the keynote to look at the growth of this community. So, let's start with the growth of Inductive Automation in the last year.

06:31
Kat Robinett: Wow, it's been quite a year. Since 2003, Inductive Automation has experienced astounding year-over-year growth, and this last year has been no exception. Last year, we achieved an overall sales growth of 27%, and through the first three quarters of this year, our strong year-over-year growth remains intact. One of the unique things about Ignition's customer base is how diverse it is. Ignition is used in almost every industry, including food and beverage, oil and gas, water and wastewater, automotive, data centers, energy, and many more, and we've seen substantial growth in Ignition sales in many key industries over the last year. For example, in manufacturing, we saw a 62% growth, and a 76% growth in packaged foods and meats. Ignition sales in electronics more than doubled, with a growth rate of 113%. And dairy products grew by an incredible 239%. And in the biotechnology industry, Ignition sales nearly quadrupled, with an astounding growth rate of 276%.

08:00
Kat Robinett: Internationally, we've also seen substantial growth, thanks to the great work of our distributor partners, who saw a 34% growth rate in 2021. Thanks to the fantastic work of our sales and marketing teams, Ignition's name and market presence is growing larger every day, and it's growing stronger in more vertical industries than ever before. And it's being used by some of the world's largest and most successful companies. Today, Ignition is being used by 44% of the Fortune 500 companies and 57% of the Fortune 100 companies. So to keep up with all this growth, our company has stepped up our efforts over the last year to grow our staff to ensure that our company's services match the demand for our software.

08:54
Kat Robinett: Since the last ICC, we've grown our HR team by 75% to help bolster hiring efforts. The HR division is near and dear to my heart. And not only have they done a fantastic job hiring they've done an incredible job taking care of all of our employees. With many new team members, both local and remote, the company has prioritized the importance of our IT support and cybersecurity. In the last year, we've doubled our IT team and strengthened our cybersecurity team to ensure that our company's data is always secure. In the same period, we've also hired 97 new employees, including 36 team members for our support and training divisions.

09:42
Kat Robinett: Speaking of our support team, I'd like to give a shout-out here. Our amazing support team is the unsung hero of Inductive Automation. They work day in and day out to help Ignition users with the knowledge and customer service they need to keep their Ignition systems running strong. And we know they're doing a great job because you've told us so. Here's a few things this community has shared with us on your experience working with our support team. Brant from Agile Automation says, "We don't call with easy questions, so great job in training your support team." And Ryan from Technical Services says, "The support team has been an instrumental component of why we love Ignition so much. They're happy to work with my colleagues to solve issues and provide recommendations. It has been very much appreciated." And Pete from Eramosa Engineering says, "We always look to provide best-in-class services to our clients, and for us, to have a strong partner in the background such as Inductive Automation, providing us technical support at a high level, we're able to bring that value to our customers."

10:52
Kat Robinett: And James from C. Tech says, "All I can say is not only is the Ignition product great, their tech support team is #phenomenal!" Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and thank you to our support team for their stellar work. Let's give them a round of applause.

11:20
Kat Robinett: Thanks to the rock-solid foundation built by Steve and Wendi, Inductive Automation is stable, bigger, and more profitable than ever before. But beyond those impressive sales and growth numbers, the more important thing is what those numbers represent to us. Steve started this company with a mission, to improve the industry, solving one pain point at a time. Each Ignition sale isn't just a line item on a spreadsheet. It's a problem solved. It's a project delivered on time. It's a successful launch of a new product line, or it's a new idea just waiting to happen. We work every day to put the right tools into the right hands to make this industry the best it can be. Those hands are your hands. And we wanna thank you for making Ignition and Inductive Automation a success. Our team is inspired by this community every day. Your efforts are what drives us to keep improving. We make Ignition, but you make it awesome. And we promise to continue doing our part so that you can do yours now and into the future. So to talk more about the future of the company, please help me welcome Inductive Automation’s new CEO, Colby Clegg.

13:00
Colby Clegg: Thank you, Kat. Thank you, Steve and Wendi, and thank all of you for being here today. Man, after three years, it's really, really incredible. The virtual conferences were great. It was a way to connect with thousands of people, far more than we can ever host here in Folsom. And if you're joining us virtually, welcome, and we're glad to have you. For all of you, though, who made the extra-special effort to be here today, I just wanna give you a special thanks. I mean, talking to everyone yesterday, the various people I was able to talk to, really showed me that the spirit of ICC is alive and well and embodied by all of us getting together and connecting in person. So, I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about the last few years and where things stand, and I can't get away from this feeling that we've lived through a little bit of a paradox. I feel like everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Does anyone feel this way? No? It's gonna be a long 10 minutes, but I think I can explain.

14:01
Colby Clegg: Clearly, everything has changed. The fact that I'm standing here talking to you in this new role is one obvious data point, at least for myself. And Kat just described how our company has grown. Do you know that over 50% of our employees didn't work here the last time we had an in-person ICC? And how many of you have only discovered and started using Ignition in the last few years? I know there are at least a few because I talked to you yesterday. So we've doubled our workforce since the pandemic began, and we've moved to being remote first, which means that we structure all of our activities to support remote work natively. The result has really been great. This was a 180-degree change from how we operated before when we were fiercely proud to perform all of our activities from our office here in Folsom. Of course, we're still very proud of the work we do and of our strong vertical integration, but now, we've broken down the barriers of the walls.

15:00
Colby Clegg: We've been able to hire so many talented individuals that we wouldn't have had access to before, and we now have over 40 employees working full-time in other states or far-away towns. As we've grown, naturally, we've had to adapt and evolve our structures, which is what Steve and Wendi just talked a little bit about, highlighting especially my role, Kat's, Carl's, but we've recently made a few other high-level changes, and I'd like to take a moment to highlight them a little bit.

15:30
Colby Clegg: Travis Cox is now our Chief Technology Evangelist. His mission is to drive awareness and excitement around Ignition in the industry. I know that many of you have worked directly with Travis, and I think virtually everyone has experienced him in some way, either through webinars, presentations here at the conference, and so I'm sure that you will all agree with me when I say that there is no one better suited to this role than Travis. I have simply never seen anybody leave a meeting with him not being more excited and enthusiastic about our software, and that includes myself.

16:05
Colby Clegg: We promoted Kevin McClusky to the role of Chief Technology Architect. Kevin has guided many customers towards enterprise-wide adoption of Ignition over the last few years. In this new role, he'll continue to provide broad-scale architectural guidance, but he'll also act as an important bridge between customers and our leadership team, bringing back important feedback that will help us ensure that our technology, our product offerings, and our company are well-suited to meet the needs of this growing community. Kevin is a sharp technical mind and a skilled businessman, and I'm excited to see where this role develops. Finally, with security as a core company focus, we've promoted Jason Waits to the role of Chief Information Security Officer. Jason will work with leaders throughout the company to ensure that we have a strong security stance across all of our products and offerings and operations. Jason eats, sleeps, and breathes security, and I am so excited to have someone with his talent and demeanor in this very important role.

17:08
Colby Clegg: The creation of these new more public-facing roles and the elevation of these individuals has had a cascading effect throughout the rest of the company. As a result, we have new VPs, new directors, new managers, all staffed with individuals who have a long track record here at Inductive Automation and a deep understanding of our culture and values. Truly, our company continues to evolve to meet the demands of growth. And yet, our core values remain the same. Our mission is to break down barriers and enable customers to solve real, tangible problems with no economic or technological barriers. Our company rests on the four pillars that Steve established and just described: technology, licensing, business model, and ethics. Those remain as relevant and important today as they've ever been, and I can assure you that our entire leadership team is as focused and dedicated as ever in carrying these values forward.

18:07
Colby Clegg: So you see, things have changed. And yet, they haven't. Well, that's one half of the equation, our company. What about the other half? Perhaps even more important, the industry. In March of 2020, clearly, everything changed. I don't think there was a single company out there that didn't wish they had better remote access and control of their plants, processes, and facilities at that time. Globally-dispersed supply chains wreaked havoc on society. And even today, you can't get so many normal products with the regularity and ease that we were used to a few years ago. A few weeks ago, I had to buy a new washing machine. Has anyone tried to do this recently? Clearly, there's a lot of work to do. When you throw in talk of trade tensions and the very substantial conflicts going on around the world, it's easy to understand why everywhere, governments and companies are so engaged in trying to figure out how to build back smarter, stronger, with more resiliency and more flexibility.

19:06
Colby Clegg: Companies everywhere have been pulled forward on their technology plans. Manufacturing is being thrust ahead in an accelerated evolution, and we have to get smart about resources. Hardware abstraction, platform independence, architecture as a service, have become crucial in an age where you're lucky to find any kind of hardware, let alone a specific device model or even firmware revision that you might need. Digital Transformation sounded nice a few years ago, but today, it stands for a wide range of initiatives that are solving real, fundamental issues that have been exposed over the last few years. These quotes from a recent Deloitte industry outlook highlight a few of those needs. Data integration, supply-chain management, security, these are just a few of the many sectors under heightened scrutiny at the moment. And not to mention people. The St. Louis Fed says that labor shortages may represent the single greatest obstacle to the manufacturing sector's growth. I think we all know this perfectly well. We've all experienced it. It's simply hard to find qualified people.

20:12
Colby Clegg: Now, with an emphasis on reshoring and increased domestic production, it's gonna be harder than ever, and more than ever before, we have to make manufacturing jobs attractive to new talent. We have to train and develop the people we need, and then we have to augment them with automation and intelligent systems. But okay. Digital Transformation, knowledge transfer, improving automation, improving manufacturing, isn't this what we've been talking about here at ICC for 10 years now, and here at Inductive Automation for 20 years now? You know, I love when things line up. Perhaps it's my programmer's mentality, but I get a kick out of reusable concepts. So I'm gonna call this section object-oriented theming.

20:56
Colby Clegg: This year is ICC X. The X, you have been told many times already, stands for 10. It's our 10th edition. But I see something else: I see a crossroads. Perhaps I'm forcing the issue, but I don't think so. I think you can look at everything I just described and see our industry and in fact our company at a crossroads. I mean, we've been talking about OT and IT convergence for a long time now, but what happens when they actually converge? Is this what it looks like? We can't get hardware, so platform independence and architecture infrastructure as a service are crucial. Ignition introduced platform independence to the SCADA market in 2010, and is better suited to both of these concepts than any other product I'm aware of in this space. We need to bring data together in loosely coupled, interoperable, unified data systems, data models, concepts we've been promoting since the beginning through technologies like OPC UA, MQTT, SQL databases, and so on. We need to be agile, quick to develop, and quick to respond.

22:00
Colby Clegg: This is what people love about Ignition. It's a rapid application development environment, and we have structured everything towards agility: our pricing, our unlimited licensing model, our quick install, our demo mode, how you launch clients, how you launch designers. Should I keep going? Keep going? No? Finally, we need to be able to leverage the latest technologies to drive innovation. Ignition is the ultimate hub that connects the plant floor to the immense possibilities of the latest technologies, like AI, stream processing, advanced analytics, and so on. Many of the projects that you see highlighted here in the Discover Gallery and in our case studies use these technologies today to solve real-world problems. So X is the crossroads where industry needs meet the technology trends that have been developing for years. And so where does that leave Ignition? Right in the middle, of course.

22:54
Colby Clegg: Inductive Automation has made the right choices along the way. We've established technology to take you in the right direction, and we've built the company to be there to support you. All of this working together towards one goal: enablement. To enable you to capture the moment and deliver lasting change, to deliver you to break down barriers, disrupt the status quo, and deliver the systems that modern industry needs today, all backed by a company that's strong, independent, and here to support you. We've walked the path to decisions and developments that have led us here. Industry and market needs have developed and evolved along the way bringing us to this point now, the crossroads of Digital Transformation. I can assure you that you are all on the correct path. How do I know that? Well, clearly because you're here with us today.

23:52
Colby Clegg: So there we are. Everything has changed, and yet everything is still the same, and that we're all here walking this path together. So, okay, now, where are we now? Where does that path lead? How do we capitalize on where we are and continue to lean in to all the incredible opportunities that we have in front of us? To help explain this, I'd like to now invite out on stage our newly minted CTO, of course, my good friend and counterpart, Carl Gould.

24:29
Carl Gould: Thank you, Colby. Good morning, everybody. Great to be back here in the Harris Center again. So this morning, I'd like to pick up right where Colby left off and consider how Ignition fits into this moment. We've been talking a lot over the last few years about Digital Transformation. How does Ignition fit with that? Well, quite simply, Ignition enables you to create the solution that means Digital Transformation to your organization. Okay, kind of a bold claim, if you think about it. It sort of begs more questions, like what is Ignition, and how could this really be true? How could one product enable the solutions that come to define Digital Transformations for organizations across such a wide swath of the global economy in such a huge range of industries?

25:15
Carl Gould: I am sort of hesitant to even try to answer that first question. What is Ignition? We all sort of have our favorite way to attempt to do that around here. Often, it'll get defined by categories. Is it a SCADA platform? Is it an IIoT platform? Yeah. My favorite way to describe what is Ignition is it's an industrial application platform, but I will admit that this can feel a little bit maybe too convenient, a little too neat and tidy. But I don't even wanna worry about that 'cause I'm much more interested in tackling the second question, the how question. How is Ignition able to be this enabler of Digital Transformation across such a wide part of the economy? How can it be such a chameleon? And the answer to that question is more nuanced, a little bit more multifaceted. And exploring these facets kind of helps us examine some of Ignition's fundamental traits and philosophies.

26:09
Carl Gould: So when we set out to design Ignition, we wanted to build a pragmatic toolkit that would let a motivated, creative controls engineer build any kind of industrial application that they set their mind to. And to us, this meant four important things. They needed to be able to run it anywhere, connect it to anything, extend its functionality when needed, and that we needed to get out of the way. And if along the way, we could make it fun to use and fast and pretty, yeah, we were pretty happy to do those things, too. So I wanna examine these four things, and we're gonna do it in reverse order. So, first of all, getting out of your way. This is a pretty important one to us. There's a lot of examples of what I mean by this. A good one would be our licensing. We, from the get-go, introduced unlimited licensing because we had seen too many of our own projects have their ambitions nerfed because of licensing restrictions. We didn't want those kinds of restrictions to get in your way, to prevent you from building something awesome, and really being able to use the product to its full potential.

27:11
Carl Gould: Another example would be, "Hey, you wanna try Ignition? Great. Go to our website, download it, install it, run it in the two-hour trial mode as much as you want." Sometimes I think that simply by not gatekeeping is a large part of how we enable so much innovation in this community to happen.

27:30
Carl Gould: So number two, extending Ignition's functionality. This is a really important one, and it means a lot of different things. Simple things like having the right places throughout the product to layer in bits and pieces of scripting and expressions to really fine-tune and customize Ignition's behavior in so many different ways. It also means having a public SDK so that anybody can just go write a new module that brings brand-new features to Ignition. You can see this in action, right? We have our partners building awesome new modules for Ignition. Cirrus Link modules have really allowed the IIoT space to flourish with Ignition. If you add Sepasoft modules to Ignition, it transforms into a full-fledged MES solution. And I know that many of you have created modules as well when you needed that little extra bit of functionality that wasn't built into the product.

28:20
Carl Gould: So this emphasis on extensibility in all layers of the product is really the key to its wide applicability across so many different industries. It's also the key to us staying really lean and mean and focused. We get to focus on the core platform, data acquisition, and application-building, security, scalability, stability, and then you bring the expertise to bring the product that last mile and build something really custom and amazing and tailored for your industry.

28:57
Carl Gould: Connecting to anything and everything. When we started, this mostly meant connecting to any SQL database, any OPC server. And the scope has grown from there. So, after that, we had to build our own OPC server in order to remain cross-platform, which meant we needed to build our own device and protocol drivers. And while I'm at it, I'd be amiss if I didn't mention that we have a new protocol driver coming out soon. We have an IEC 61850 protocol driver that is currently in beta. Should be welcome news for anybody in the power industry. We expect that to be released within the next few months. But it's not just databases and industrial devices that we strive to have Ignition to be able to connect and interoperate with. We've always had this philosophy that the broader world of IT software is always going to be able to come up with solutions for data storage and retrieval and messaging that are going to be better than anything we might build in-house. And so it's a better strategy for us to be able to easily connect and interoperate with those solutions using open-data formats than it would be to try to build something proprietary. And I'll circle back to this in a few minutes.

30:08
Carl Gould: But fourth, being able to run anywhere. So, Ignition is a JVM-based application, which means that it's very naturally a cross-platform application. In the early days, this was kind of an intellectual curiosity. We had a few European customers who were pretty excited about running on Linux, a few of you were pretty happy to be able to run the designer on a MacBook. But it wasn't that important in the early days. But it has grown in importance, and these days, it's one of our most important architectural capabilities, for two important reasons. One is that by being cross-platform and being based on the JVM, Ignition fits into so many different places, computationally speaking. You can run it on devices large and small across a variety of computing architecture.

30:51
Carl Gould: So you can take Ignition, put it on an arm-powered Edge device where it will happily collect some data, maybe send it up to an MQTT broker. You can take that same product, throw it on a cutting-edge rack mount server, throw a bunch of RAM at it, and it will happily power hundreds of clients and manage terabytes of data through a big SQL database. And having one product that can do both of those things and everything in between is really a huge advantage. It's a big advantage for us because we have a narrower testing footprint, a simpler deployment model. When we develop a feature, that feature is then usable at all those places in the architectural stack. And it's a big advantage for you because you invest a lot of time and effort building your own expertise in Ignition, and then you are able to parlay that expertise into so many different kinds of scenarios.

31:45
Carl Gould: But beyond device and operating system compatibility, being cross-platform and based on the JVM also means that we really get to naturally participate in what is nothing short of a technological revolution that has taken hold. And that is container-powered deployment orchestration techniques. We really think this is one of the biggest stories in tech over the last five years. Container orchestration allows you to bring computing resources to bear on a problem with orders of magnitude improvement in speed and ease and reliability and repeatability, making service deployment, testing, upgrades, disaster recovery, all kinds of things that used to be hard because hardware was physical much easier because now hardware is basically software. And it's our roots as a cross-platform application that allows Ignition to so naturally participate with these techniques.

32:39
Carl Gould: So for these four reasons, we're really confident that Ignition is the right choice for so many organizations’ needs for Digital Transformation. But of course, there's always room for improvement. So today, I'd like to talk about one thing that we have coming. And of course tomorrow, we'll be back up onstage, tomorrow morning, in the tech keynote, we'll have a more product-focused discussion talking about what we've been up to and plans for the future. But today, I wanna cherry-pick one thing to mention this morning, because it fits so nicely with these themes I've laid out. And that is Ignition Cloud Edition. So, what is Ignition Cloud Edition? It's Ignition that runs in the cloud, but many of you have been running Ignition in the cloud already. So, Cloud Edition is a custom-tailored version of Ignition specifically built to run in the cloud. It'll be available initially through the AWS Marketplace, followed shortly by availability through the Azure Container Registry. And it's different from standard edition in three important ways.

33:39
Carl Gould: Number one is distribution. You don't download Cloud Edition from us and then go install it. It's a product that's available through your cloud infrastructure marketplace, available as a prebuilt image or container. And that leads to important difference number two, which is that you don't purchase an upfront license for Cloud Edition. Instead, purchasing goes through that same application marketplace, which is important because it opens up various kinds of scalable pay-as-you-go purchasing schemes. And that is important because it enables elastic deployments. So now, by being able to pay for your usage as you go, you can have much easier elastic deployments, either elasticity in instance count or in compute size.

34:27
Carl Gould: And there's also some feature differences in Cloud Edition. So, Cloud Edition, being an edition that is running in the cloud, isn't really appropriate for direct data acquisition, right? You don't really want a network path from the cloud directly into your plant's PLC, that would be pretty poor practice. So, Cloud Edition won't have our normal device drivers built in, but instead, it'll have a collection of cloud connector modules. These modules will allow for connectivity and integration with common cloud-native technologies, things like document databases and message queues, key-value stores, these types of things. Think about MongoDB and Kafka and RITA, those sorts of things.

35:13
Carl Gould: So you can see how Cloud Edition really kinda rounds out our commercial offerings of Ignition. You have Ignition Edge for running in embedded devices, standard Ignition for running on premise, and Cloud Edition now specifically for running in the cloud. And you can also see how it fits into the philosophies that I laid out, specifically, the ability to run anywhere and connect to anything. Now, a quick caveat or maybe clarifying point 'cause I really don't want anybody to get this message twisted. This is not us moving Ignition toward a SaaS business model. We have no interest in doing that. Cloud Edition is not SaaS; it's a product that you can buy through your cloud infrastructure provider, but once you do, it is your cloud infrastructure. It's not a service that we're providing. So that might seem like splitting a hair, but it's an important hair to split.

36:02
Carl Gould: We actually really believe in on-premise software for the most part being the appropriate choice for controls applications. But what we're seeing now is a lot of really interesting hybrid architectures where you have on-premise assets all communicating and coordinating with cloud-deployed assets so that you can kind of get the best of both worlds, right? You can get your controls applications running on premise where they belong, but also get your data up into the cloud where you have essentially infinite storage and compute power, easier access to machine learning models. And these hybrid architectures offer some really compelling advantages, and we're really excited to see what kind of new solutions you all create with these types of architectures. So we're excited to be able to bring you Cloud Edition early next year.

36:54
Carl Gould: And as I wrap up, on a more personal note, I'm really excited to be taking on this role of CTO at Inductive Automation. For the past few years, my role as Director of Software Engineering has been a largely reactive one, and I'm looking forward to pivoting to a more proactive role. And so in service of that, I am gonna be hitting the road more, hopefully visiting with many of you if you'd like to host me and show me the cool stuff you've built and bend my ear about frustrations you have, let me know, not just over the next few days, but in the future as well. 'Cause I really wanna be in the best position I can be in here to guide the team and understand where our opportunities are.

37:33
Carl Gould: It is really true that the most gratifying thing about working on Ignition all these years is seeing how this community has grown up around it. It's really amazing, and I'm really looking forward to getting even more connected with all of you. So, on the topic of community and its growth, I'd like to hand it over now to Inductive Automation's Chief Strategy Officer, Don Pearson.

38:06
Don Pearson: Well, good morning, everyone. I know it's already been said, but it's really nice to have an opportunity to actually connect again in person. And even the reception last night was great to see a bunch of folks I haven't talked to in a long time and get some conversations, some updates on where you're going and what you're doing. You know, for me, one of the things that's absolutely the best part of my job here is I do have the opportunity to get out and work with a bunch of our partners and really work with you to build this community together. The spirit of partnership is really what ICC is all about. And for us, when we look back at our first ICC, it was really kind of the beginning of what's come to be known as our community era, an era that goes on to this day.

38:58
Don Pearson: But if you take a little more historical note before we started the conference, we actually didn't even know that we had a community. We knew that we had a lot of companies who were using Ignition, but we had never gotten them together before. So, when we did that first conference, we weren't really very sure if any of you guys would show up. But you did. And many people in the crowd today and people I talked to last night were actually in that first ICC and have spent the last 10 years coming every year that we have a conference. And to me, the really impressive thing about the first ICC was not the number of people who came. It was the impact that you had on us. It was the impact that you had on each other. And as time has born out, the impact that you continue to have on the industry overall.

39:56
Don Pearson: You see, as it works out, when you get a whole bunch of Ignition enthusiasts together and you put them in the same place at the same time, you folks start working together. And we certainly have seen a tremendous amount of growth back to the integrators that came to our various conferences. We saw relationships forged and working groups set up and collaborating with each other happening. And 10 years later, I would say that this amazing group of integration professionals, granted what I'm about to say is a little bit self-serving and biased, but I think you've grown into one of the strongest, if not the strongest, successful group of competent integrators across the globe. And it's demonstrated by the projects you're doing every single day.

40:39
Don Pearson: The program overall has grown to over 3,400 integrators, which is absolutely amazing. And we have 86 Premier Integrators, which are... That's our highest level. And when I think about that, I also look at it from a different viewpoint. I know you have, on the one hand, you kind of have what I've heard referred to as Fred and the Shed, and then you got integrators with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of integrated professionals. I figure that those companies represent somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 individual engineers, integrators, and automation professionals. And back to Premier for a second, being a Premier Integrator means that you have deep knowledge and expertise in Ignition and that you work extremely well with Inductive Automation as a partner. We take the partnership with you as integrators very seriously.

41:29
Don Pearson: To us, it really is. I know it's been mentioned in passing, but your success ends up being our success. Just a couple of success stories I wanna share with you. This one's from Grantek. Alissa Daly is a Partner Program Manager there at Grantek. They're a long-term integrator of ours in the Premier program. "In the true spirit of partnership, Inductive Automation provides open lines of communication, clarity around version releases and improvements, and even incorporates integrative feedback in their product development." And a few weeks ago, I had a chance to be in Indiana for a Discovery Day where we were co-hosting with a number of partners in the state of Indiana. And I was invited by Scott, would like to go out and go to Fishers, Indiana, and spent some time with Scott and some of the members of his team. They're one of our program's strongest integrators, going back many years. And in fact, they won the Integrator of the Year Award in 2020.

42:26
Don Pearson: Here's what Dwayne Butcher, who's the Marketing Director there said about his relationship with the program: "For years, Inductive Automation has been a positive market disruptor. This has provided countless Ignition-related opportunities for Flexware Innovation’s customers and prospects. Being part of Inductive's Integrator Program has been both effortless and rewarding." And last, just one more, DMC. Great partner in our program, you're gonna get a chance to see them in action tomorrow 'cause they're competing in the Build-a-Thon. Elizabeth Hill Reed is a Project Manager there, and she told us about her experience. "With support from Inductive and a great online community, DMC can confidently tackle new challenges and consistently deliver great results that push the boundary of what a SCADA system can do."

43:21
Don Pearson: So, really, when you look back at it and you think about Integrator Program, it really is the case that we partner you, ends up being what Steve intended, actually. When he started out, he did it to make the work of integrators easier, and also, as he said many times, a little bit more fun again. And each success that we hear confirms from feedback of you that we're on the right track, and we should stay the course and keep doing what we're doing with supporting you as integrators. We are truly stronger together. And I realize that may sound like a nice marketing slogan. It's not a bad one, actually, but, it's truly factual. When we work together, we really can change the industry and have a significant impact on what happens in the industrial sector going forward.

44:14
Don Pearson: So, if you're not part of the program, just a quick little pitch here, please, now's the perfect time to join. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of opportunity, and there's plenty of opportunity for everyone. In fact, more than just a kind invitation, we actually need you. The truth of the matter is your participation is what makes this a great community. The section I'm in is talking about the community and what it means is I'm talking about you because you are the community and we're a part of it with you. And I think there's vast opportunities for all of us as we continue to grow and work together.

44:53
Don Pearson: Now, in addition to the success of the Integrator Program, we've also seen a lot of growth internationally. Kat mentioned a little bit earlier, Inductive Automation now has international distributor partners in eight regions, including Italy, France, Central America, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, Switzerland, Norway, and Brazil. These distributorships cover 20 countries, expanding all the while. And as mentioned earlier, our distributors saw great growth last year, and it's also been rewarding to see more and more people coming to the conference from across the world. All the distributors are represented here, but there's a lot of other people from, I don't know, two or three dozen countries that are joining us here. So if you are joining from other countries, we welcome you and really look forward to working together with you and getting to know each other better.

45:46
Don Pearson: You know, to shift gears just a little bit here, one of the main reasons that we started doing this conference was for knowledge transfer. Because we knew that to support our community, we really did need to share more than just our software. In fact, enablement through knowledge transfer has always been one of the core missions of Inductive Automation. And you see several initiatives that focus on that. That's the reason that we launched Inductive University. As you know, it makes hundreds of videos available to anyone free online across the world, you can learn Ignition just 'cause you want to, and it's there. And millions and millions of video views have occurred up to this day, and it continues to grow every day.

46:32
Don Pearson: That's also why we launched Ignition Maker Edition. This allows students and hobbyists use Ignition for free, for non-commercial personal projects. And many of you here are taking advantage of that. Additionally, we have Ignition Exchange, which enables you as users to create, upload, and share Ignition resources with the community. And it was in that growing spirit of enablement through knowledge transfer that we started the Educational Engagement program a few years ago. This program has a specific goal: It aims to foster relationships in our local, national, and global communities by creating a bridge between industry professionals on the one hand and educational institutions on the other.

47:24
Don Pearson: The idea is a very simple one: promote creativity and innovation through meaningful educational experiences with Ignition. We donate our software to these educational institutions, and then we work with them to ensure that they get maximum benefit with their students. It's a great combination, great work. And even with the pandemic sidelining many universities and schools for a good part of 2020, we've seen incredible growth on this program. We're now at 60-plus academic institutions covering 10 countries, and we got another 20 in the pipeline, which will be coming on over the next couple of months. This program is extremely important because it's the investment that we make in our community's future. Enabling the workforce of tomorrow absolutely starts with education today. We need another generation of engineers coming up and going out into the workforce. And really, I get really excited about this 'cause there's so much potential.

48:24
Don Pearson: Can you just get the idea that we have 200 top engineering schools all across the world with Ignition in the curriculum, along with their engineering skills? We're gonna basically totally change the industry in a way that will only improve the results that everyone's able to get. And also, I might also add, I think I'd like to give you a little pitch here. Not to get too excited, but it's always good to have an action item when you leave. So, the action item, the pitch is just about a minute long. But here's my pitch: If you know of a trade school or a university that would be interested in students learning more about industrial automation, and utilizing Ignition, then get involved in your local area, go out, I don't know, put in some time, share your knowledge and expertise, do an internship, get on some advisory board from industry. Do an internship, whatever it is. But investing in those students is gonna help us build a better industry for the future. And additionally, it'll be a great investment for your own company. So really, I promise you, your efforts will be appreciated and worthwhile.

49:37
Don Pearson: Now, another area that we saw a lot of growth in and has been ever since the beginning of our conference is the area of the strategic partnerships that we've forged with many organizations that extend our product in more ways than ever before. We developed alliances with hardware companies through promoting Ignition Edge through an Onboard program. Our work with the state of Indiana is an exciting recent development that I just mentioned briefly earlier, but I'd like to mention again here. You see, Energy Insights is a new Indiana statewide program seeking to engage a hundred manufacturers this year, 400 next year, and a growing number beyond, to integrate an Amazon web services-connected factory platform that will gather data from legacy factory equipment and energy management systems. It's a huge opportunity 'cause there's more than 8,000 manufacturers just in Indiana.

50:34
Don Pearson: So, in collaboration with Energy Systems Network, the Emerging Manufacturing Collaboration Center or EMC Squared in Indianapolis, and Indiana Economic Development Corporation, the program was created with the goal of helping Indiana manufacturers track their energy use, start there, and real-time provide data analytics to help them basically reduce their energy costs. So working with AWS, Cirrus Link Solutions, Opto 22, Megha AI, and Premier Integrators like Feyen Zylstra, we're combining our efforts to make an incredibly quick, easy, and cost-effective for companies to really get started and take a few steps on their Digital Transformation journey and do it with a demonstrable ROI. So they might just get the idea that they go forward with the art of the possible as they grow beyond that across their organization.

51:30
Don Pearson: I'm particularly excited about this program because it's a great example of how the Ignition platform can facilitate an entire ecosystem of companies and solutions that's then capable of delivering real, practical, and measurable results. It's a great example of how we really are stronger together. Now, that's the kind of collaboration that just happens when you get a group like this together. That's what happens at ICC. And that leads me to my final invitation, final invitation to you. For well over a hundred of our staff, this is their first ICC. It was mentioned before. Dozens of our remote team members have come in from out of the area just to be together for us all to be together this week. This applies to all of us. If you wanna make the most out of this conference, please just don't be a passive observer.

52:27
Don Pearson: Walk up to somebody, introduce yourself, talk, share some ideas, look for ways that you can work together, and you will find ways that you can work together. Back to our first conference where we talked about connections, powerful connections, our power is in our connections. And as Colby said, this conference is at a crossroads, where great ideas and technology come together. And this community's collaboration, its innovation, its energy. This is such an exciting time, 'cause you may not know it, but you really are one-of-a-kind in this industry. When we get together like this, it becomes very evident to us. So, make the most of the opportunity. Your next big idea may be just around the corner.

53:14
Don Pearson: We talked a lot about moving the industry forward, and really, it has been said and resaid that it's the work that you do that really is what moves us forward. The projects big or small, your innovation and ingenuity that make the difference. So, for the next part of the presentation, we'd like to take a little bit deeper look into some of the fantastic project work of this community. And I can tell you, I cannot think of two people who would be better to do that than our new Chief Technology Evangelist, Travis Cox, and our new Chief Technology Architect, Kevin McClusky. So, if you could, please welcome to the stage Travis and Kevin.

54:10
Travis Cox: Alright, thank you, Don. Hello, everybody. I wanna take a moment first to say a thank you to Steve and Wendi, Colby, Carl, and Kat. I'm really truly humbled to be in my new role here at Inductive Automation and I'm really excited to be back here in ICC in person, right? Come on.

54:31
Travis Cox: So I definitely can't wait to connect with all of you this week, and I also cannot wait to connect with all of you in my new role as Chief Technology Evangelist. I truly love the Ignition platform. It is an incredible platform. It can do so many different things. I know that it can open up a lot of opportunity, it can solve a lot of great challenges. And in fact, I'm always the first one to say, yes, Ignition can do that. And that's evident by what we're doing here at Inductive Automation. We use our own product for our CRM, for our lobby sign-in, for our building automation solution, and even our March Madness Bracket Software. Ignition is truly limitless. So, I am really excited to see what all of you guys are gonna continue to do with Ignition as we go forward. As Chief Technology Evangelist, I'm gonna work effortlessly to continue to educate you about what the art of possible is, what you can do with the Ignition, and show you that you can be confident in saying "Yes, Ignition can do that." And there's no better place to see the innovative uses of Ignition than here at ICC.

55:34
Kevin McClusky: Absolutely. Yeah. Ignition, as you all know, is a powerful tool set, but it's really what Ignition users do with it that makes it special. I love collaborating with the smart people in this community to build awesome new solutions. And that's really part of why I'm so excited to be the company's new Chief Technology Architect. Now, what does that actually mean? I've gotten that question a number of times yesterday, and I'm sure I will over the rest of the conference. But let me address that just a little bit right here. So, in that position, I'm going to get the opportunity to work even closer with the community to help ensure that the architectures of tomorrow are possible and well-supported going into the future. I'd say if that's a mission, that would be my main mission right there. I'll continue to work closely with the community, understanding project and technology needs. I'll be working closely with Carl, Colby, Travis, and the rest of the team to help ensure Ignition continues to be as useful and innovative as possible going into the future.

56:36
Kevin McClusky: And speaking of innovation, to talk about the projects that Don just referred to, this community has made some really amazing Ignition projects in the past. And this year is no exception. This year's Discover Gallery showcases innovative projects that have stood out across various industries. And six of these are the ones we're going to focus on.

57:00
Travis Cox: Yeah, that's right. And each year, we judge all the projects submitted to Discover Gallery on several criteria, including scope, including uniqueness, and overall user experience. And the best ones are awarded the Firebrand Award. Since 2013, the Ignition Firebrand Awards have honored industrial organizations and system integrators whose work showcases the limitless potential of the Ignition platform and transforms organizations and their customers for the better.

57:28
Kevin McClusky: By implementing bold new ideas, trailblazing new practices, and advancing Ignition around the world, these organizations really have earned that name Firebrand. Because of the great work with Ignition, six companies are being honored today with these Firebrand Award winners. These companies are BIJC, Flexware, Nordlaks Produkter, Réseau31, Streamline Controls, and Vertech. These companies did some really unique and incredible projects that honestly really blew us away. The list includes projects that leveraged the power of Ignition's module SDK, ones that used MQTT to create streamlined data pipelines and enterprise-wide applications.

58:14
Travis Cox: And we saw projects that really pushed the boundaries of visualization with beautiful designs and beautiful high-performance HMI applications, and projects with thousands of screens that they made viewable on any tablet, any mobile device, smart TV, and actual PC. So let's take a look at all these Firebrand Award-winning projects in more detail, starting with BIJC.

58:37
Kevin McClusky: So BIJC used their expert knowledge of Ignition to enable Scottish Leather Group to develop a method for tracking up to 1.4 million hides per year through an intake fridge system and an algorithm to assist operators with selecting the best available hides for several outfeed processes. One of the coolest things about the project is that it showcases the power of Ignition's software development kit. With Ignition's SDK, BIJC provided a way to access client USB cameras to take photos of each hide and add complex 2D and 3D charts to Perspective to give operators precisely the information that they need. With its Ignition system, Scottish Leather Group now has more useful information on the quality of their incoming raw materials, which helps them deliver the best possible product to their customers.

59:29
Travis Cox: Alright, for the next project, Flexware Innovation teamed up with Automated Control Concepts to create a Perspective-built application for American Water. This system pulls in data from hundreds of devices and locations in a large hub-and-spoke architecture. Before the implementation, American Water's hundreds of locations across the United States ran in different disparate systems. And thanks to the great work of Flexware and ACC, the new Ignition system centralized the data and standardized everything on ISA 101, creating one powerful, simple, and consistent solution. Using multiple front-end servers behind a load balancer, the system was able to easily get data to hundreds of people across the organization at the enterprise level. And the system pulls in or uses high-performance HMIs on beautiful new Perspective screens to highlight abnormalities and increase operator awareness. It also has newly built enterprise portals to organize key data and key performance indicators for managers enterprise-wide.

01:00:29
Kevin McClusky: Swimming right along, the next Firebrand Award winner comes from a family-owned aquaculture group, Nordlaks. One of the most impressive things about this project is that it showcases Ignition as a full integration platform. The system retrieves data through a dizzying amount of protocols, including Allen-Bradley Ethernet IP, TCP, UDP, BACnet, and many more. And it connects to many different types of devices, including Siemens, Omron, Vega, IFM, and others. Using Ignition Vision, Perspective, and alarming modules, all the data is expertly brought together, and the operators are able to control their processes both on a large scale and a gradual level. This helps ensure that an excellent product is delivered to their customers every time.

01:01:18
Travis Cox: Okay, so we're standing in Europe now for the next Firebrand Award winner. And this is Réseau31. And they required a high degree of alarming and visualization with over 20,000 alarms and 1,000 screens. They need to be viewed everywhere, so they use Perspective to solve that need for ubiquity. Using Perspective, now any agent or client can securely access the Ignition system on a desktop, a panel PC, or a smartphone. The project showcases an impressive use of mobile responsive design, extensive use of maps, and integration with weather services. They even built a hypervision application which is used as a decision support tool for all their managers and department heads. Thanks to the great design and the development work of Réseau31, they can provide frequent updates and new additions to a rapidly changing infrastructure.

01:02:07
Kevin McClusky: The next Firebrand winner goes from the field to the boardroom. Streamline Controls worked with CHS Pipeline and Terminals to replace the legacy SCADA system with a new Ignition-based built system around standard communication, structured data, intuitive visualization, all with the network following the Purdue model. The system uses MQTT to track over 300,000 tags, and it uses both Vision and Perspective together for high-performance displays for enterprise users. In the field, over 30 Ignition Edge nodes gather and contextualize operational data points and interface with over 60 PLCs and flow computers for visibility and control. At the enterprise level, Ignition allowed the organization to build functional, maintainable, and repeatable operational dashboards and applications. Streamline leveraged its considerable amount of expertise and integration skills to really bring all of this together into one solution that provides robust and secure operation for the pipeline controllers, and it provides rich operational data to users across the entire enterprise.

01:03:19
Travis Cox: Okay, so the last Firebrand Award-winning project we'll shine a light on comes from Vertech. SB Energy needed a system to oversee six thorough locations and report industry standard KPIs and data analytics in real time. The Vertech team used an Ignition system to create a single platform, which is a multi-site management tool that enabled the Screenflow Operations Center full data access while optimizing performance at each remote site and easily maximizing energy production and resolving maintenance issues with less time and resources. The solution pulls a staggering 386,000 tags, and they're logging around 10,000 values per second. SB Energy now has complete visibility across its fleet of sites, assets, and energy production performance, and thanks to Vertech's masterful use of design, it has to be one of the most visually impressive projects that we've ever seen.

01:04:14
Kevin McClusky: So, really, if you get as excited about these things as I do, I wanna give a thanks to all of our Firebrand Award winners here for the fantastic work. Let's give them a round of applause.

01:04:31
Kevin McClusky: So for everyone out there, keep pushing the envelope of what's possible, and we'll keep supporting your efforts.

01:04:38
Travis Cox: Absolutely. And also, thanks to the amazing companies included in this year's Discover Gallery. The entire Discover Gallery is a pretty amazing thing. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, take a look at all the projects there. Make sure you make the time to do so. It's just out to the right, and then to the right over there. I guarantee, if you do, you'll find something and see something that inspires you for the next Ignition project that you have.

01:05:02
Kevin McClusky: I know that we saw a lot of projects that were inspiring here. So but now we've got one more surprise in store for you today. To honor this community's great contributions, we thought it would be appropriate to create an additional Firebrand Award specifically to honor the outstanding contributions of an individual member of our community. The Ignition Forum was our company's first effort at building a community around Ignition, and it's been a huge success. The Ignition Forum is one of the most lively gatherings of industrial control professionals on the Internet, and it's chock-full of thousands of helpful posts and friendly folks who know Ignition. And the key to its success is the active members who give their time and their knowledge daily.

01:05:45
Kevin McClusky: Phil Turmel has been one of the most active...

01:06:00
Kevin McClusky: Phil Turmel has been one of the most active members of the Ignition Forum for years. He's constantly jumping in to answer questions and providing helpful advice and practical tips. He posts more than anyone, with over 11,000 posts on the forum. Today, we're honoring Phil Turmel with Inductive Automation's first-ever Firebrand Award for community involvement. Phil, go ahead and stand up.

01:06:20
Audience Member 1: Hear, hear.

01:06:22
Kevin McClusky: Let's give him a round of applause.

01:06:31
Travis Cox: We personally want to say thank you, Phil, for being such an advocate for Ignition, and you have more than earned the distinction of being Ignition Firebrand.

01:06:40
Kevin McClusky: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Thanks, Phil, for everything that you do. And as a funny side note, we had a pause point for the applause, but everyone here apparently knows Phil. So, as soon as you saw that picture, yeah, fantastic. And to everybody, thanks for your fantastic work just in general. And now as a special note, if you want to see more amazing work from our community, be sure to join Travis, myself, up here on stage one at the end of the conference for the Build-a-Thon. After a grueling competition over the last few months, starting with 20 Premier Integrators, two integrators came out on top, DMC and Roeslein & Associates. They're gonna be competing head-to-head in a final no-holds-barred round with you, the audience, voting on the winner live. You won't want to miss it at the end of the conference.

01:07:34
Travis Cox: Absolutely, it's gonna be one of the most exciting events, and of course Kevin and I, we're gonna have some few secrets up our sleeve here for that event. And I really look forward to it. But now to wrap up our keynote here today, I'm gonna hand it back over to Kat Robinett. Thank you.

01:07:57
Kat Robinett: Thank you to everyone who presented today. It's been great to hear about this community's growth, and it's amazing to see all the things you're doing with Ignition. As we've mentioned before, this is our 10th year of doing ICC. And it's hard for us to believe how much this community and this conference has impacted us. This conference always has been about the exchange of ideas and the exploration of what's possible. And we hope, as you explore the various sessions and projects that we have in store for you, that you'll be inspired, like we are, with new ideas and new excitement for this industry. But most importantly, we hope you have the opportunity to meet the amazing folks that make up this community. Getting this community together is why we host this conference every year. And we wouldn't be here today if it weren't for you and your support. Thank you for your trust and for inspiring us. We're looking forward to speaking with you more in the coming days. Now, to end our keynote today, we'd like to close things out with a short video to celebrate this community and to thank you for 10 years of ICC.

01:09:16
Don Pearson: Well, first off, I just want to say welcome.

01:09:19
Don Pearson: We really appreciate the opportunity to get together with all of you today.

01:09:22
Steve Hechtman: We thought, "Wow, what if we could just get all of our users together and get them to talk to each other?"

01:09:33
Carl Gould: The major thing that we did this year is that we released Ignition 7.6.

01:09:39
Colby Clegg: That's the first time we've done a live demo in front of a studio audience.

01:09:45
Don Pearson: It is certainly my pleasure to welcome you to the Ignition Community Conference 2014. Discover some new community, discover some new technology, make new possibilities.

01:09:56
Carl Gould: If you haven't had a chance, you should check out the Discover Gallery.

01:10:00
Travis Cox: I bring to you the Inductive University.

01:10:06
Don Pearson: You're here at the Ignition Community Conference 2015. The food truck's good, you guys enjoy it.

01:10:08
Travis Cox: We challenge all of you guys to build great new projects, and you certainly did.

01:10:15
M.A.T.: Hello, my name is M.A.T., the first Ignition-powered robot.

01:10:21
Steve Hechtman: This is the ICC that almost didn't happen because we briefly entertained the idea of having these every other year, but we quickly came to realize the error of our ways. A number of you said, "Well, we're coming anyway.”

01:10:41
Don Pearson: Give yourselves a hand for being here, 2017 Ignition Community Conference.

01:10:47
Steve Hechtman: We'll be moving into new headquarters. We purchased the 56,000-square-foot building.

01:11:01
Don Pearson: When I look around this room, I do not see a room full of followers; I see a room full of leaders.

01:11:08
Colby Clegg: Ignition 8.

01:11:14
Carl Gould: Ignition Perspective.

01:11:15
Travis Cox: We have built the first-ever ICC Treasure Hunt.

01:11:28
Don Pearson: This is the Build-a-Thon.

01:11:35
Kent Melville: I give you the Exchange.

01:11:45
Don Pearson: This is our first-ever fully virtual conference.

01:11:47
Carl Gould: We figured we might as well make this even more fun with some live demos.

01:11:53
Kat Robinett: Welcome to the 2021 Ignition Community Conference.

This year, the co-creators of Ignition, Colby Clegg and Carl Gould will be expanding the traditional developer panel into a new format. In this new Technical Keynote, Colby and Carl will cover the recent progress of Ignition and look at the roadmap for the near future of the platform. They will also get some help from a few Software Engineering Division all-stars to give further insight into specific aspects of the platform like security, advanced analytics, and design tools. 

Transcript:

00:00 
Announcer: Welcome to the Technical Keynote. Please give a round of applause to Inductive Automation's CEO Colby Clegg and CTO Carl Gould.

00:16 
Carl Gould: Good morning, everybody.

00:20 
Carl Gould: I hope y'all had fun last night. I sure did. Really happy to be back here this morning.

00:26
Colby Clegg: Yeah, I guess they got my message to keep Carl muted, but it was a little bit of a mean trick to call you back at 9:00 AM when yesterday we started at 10:00, but we're glad that you made it. Yeah, what a day yesterday. It was really incredible. I realized, talking to so many of you, that my message about everything changing, but being the same, wasn't just complete fluff. And actually, it kind of feels that way. It feels like we've never... Three years have not passed. I feel like we were here just yesterday, but then talking to everyone, the scale of what's going on, what you are all working on, the projects, the way that customers are talking to you and users are talking to integrators, the way that the in-house engineering are tackling problems, really is a substantial change from, I feel like where we were a few years ago. So it's really incredible.

01:10
Carl Gould: Yeah, it's been interesting. Everybody keeps saying last year, but they mean 2019. It's kinda interesting. Yeah. So for those of you who've been here before, right off the bat, you'll notice things are a little bit different than how we normally run this session. We know that you love seeing Colby and I tap dance up here as we try to answer your questions, and we will do some of that. But this year, we kind of want to mix things up a little bit.

01:34
Colby Clegg: Yeah. We convinced marketing to change the name “tech keynote” right in time to do a dev panel which is what we're gonna do today. And there's no time like the present when Carl and I have now taken on these new roles to try to introduce you to some of the real magicians behind the scenes, some of our key developers and developmental leaders. So we're gonna bring them out soon and open this up as a panel. We're gonna discuss some things and have some real experts on stage finally, to answer your questions.

02:03
Carl Gould: Yeah, we'll still cover the normal bases that we cover. So we're gonna be talking about what we've been up to this past year since last year's virtual ICC, and of course we'll talk about some of our plans for the future. But this year we'll have some help, some of our fellow leaders in the dev department, and then we'll try to leave as much time as we can for questions at the end, of course. So, without further ado, let's bring out our panel and introduce everybody.

02:36 
Colby Clegg: First of all, we have Sabrina Reis, our new Director of Software Engineering. Sabrina has been here for three years now, and she's been instrumental in helping to manage all aspects of the software development life cycle. She now oversees our three main activities: software engineering, QA, and design.

02:56
Carl Gould: And next up we have Ray Sensenbach. Ray has been with us for many years, instrumental in many of the modern designs of Ignition, and now oversees the team of designers and user experience professionals that we have working on the product.

03:12 
Colby Clegg: We've got the Duke of Docker, the King of Containers, Mr. Kevin Collins. I'm sure most of you, many of you may know his name because of his work on Docker and our compatibility with these automated deployment systems that we're working on.

03:28 
Carl Gould: And last, but certainly not least, we have Joel Specht. Joel is another one of our lead software engineers, real security expert, works on features in Ignition around authentication, authorization, and IdP compatibility, as well as helping to analyze and validate incoming vulnerability reports that we get. Okay, so panel, welcome and let's dive right in. So, over the past year, we have obviously continued to focus on Ignition 8.1, and we're gonna cover some of the features that we've been adding throughout our various releases. But first, Sabrina, maybe you can remind everybody why we keep focusing on Ignition 8.1.

04:08
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, of course. So Ignition 8.1 has been a very significant version for us. It's our first long-term support version of Ignition 8, and so we really realized that customers are gonna be adopting and relying on this version for a long time to come. So we put a lot of focus in on stability and usability, and that would go beyond just bug fixes. Also keeping features in mind that sort of lend itself to that stability, usability, and providing quality of life and troubleshooting support as well. And this serves, not just our customers, but also our own division ourselves, and then also our support division. It also serves them as well.

04:55 
Colby Clegg: Yeah, absolutely. We've been working a lot this year in how we can improve stability and diagnosability and make sure that support and development are working so well together. And that's a good... This makes it a good time for me to mention. Yesterday I talked about some of the cascading changes we've had in terms of leadership, right? And so I wanna point out that my previous role, Vice President of Technology, is now being filled by Dave Fogle, sitting right there, who was previously the Director of Support and Training. And he's got over 10 years' experience working with the software and support. And so I think that it perfectly represents what we want to do, how we approach all of these activities to have somebody with his experience in that role. So it's very great. Alright. So let's look at a few of these features that kind of fit the bill of what we're talking about. First up, Kevin, why don't you tell us a little bit about the Metrics Dashboard that we recently introduced?

05:57 
Kevin Collins: Sure, sure. Yeah. The Metrics Dashboard, it's a new tool in the gateway web UI, and it lets you kind of collect in one place, a lot of the different performance metrics and things that drive a lot of the other disparate status pages throughout the web interface. The Metrics Dashboard allows you to kind of customize and create your own collection of those metrics to really zero in on a specific focus. And we're really excited about what Metrics Dashboard means for, not just customers to be able to observe their own system, but for support and what that'll mean when you really need to dial it in.

06:32 
Carl Gould: Yeah, for sure. It's a really useful tool for us because it helps us gain visibility into some of the internal implementation metrics that you just can't get any visibility into any other way. So that's been really helpful. And along a similar line of diagnostics features, we have another new feature that was just introduced recently, which we call the Diagnostic Bundle. Joel, you want to tell people what that's all about?

06:58 
Joel Specht: Yeah. This is really a straightforward feature that we've wanted a while now, but we believe it'll greatly speed up the support diagnostic process. Essentially, you can go to the gateway web interface, with a single button you can collect and download much of the key diagnostic data that support often asks for, things like logs, module information, thread dumps, and so forth. Instead of constantly coaching users on where to go and how to find these things, we can now just get it in one easy step. This also gives us the chance on our side to build tools to better present this information to support reps, which should improve the support experience as well.

07:36
Colby Clegg: Absolutely. And so support operates in kind of two different directions. One is to help customers solve problems and troubleshoot things which these features pertain to. The other direction is in helping customers achieve their goals. And in regards to this, this is where clean, usable, functional design is really very, very important. And so, Ray, I know this is your area of expertise. Can you perhaps tell us a little bit about what the design team has been doing to help with this?

08:06
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah. Absolutely. So we heard it so many times yesterday, right? Ignition and IA, we're here to solve customer problems. But in order to do that, we really need to be speaking to our customers and working with them and getting ideas from them. And then luckily, we have this really active user forum, where we're able to get a lot of good ideas, have discussions and then implement things from those discussions into the software. But over time, as the design department has sort of scaled, we've been able to get a little bit more proactive in our approach. So more recently, we are sort of integrating direct user feedback into our designs throughout the process. So for example, at the start of a feature, we might have customer interviews where we discuss and try to suss out what the real needs are of a feature.

08:48
Ray Sensenbach: And then halfway through design process or throughout it, we do a lot of prototype usability testing to sort of simulate the experience and get direct feedback on our concepts before they're developed. And then just sort of round it out at the end. A little bit more recently, we've been implementing these SUS surveys or System Usability Score surveys. And this is a tool that helps us sort of validate whether a released feature was successful and then also gain a little bit more ideas around how we can continue to iterate and make things better over time.

09:19
Carl Gould: Yeah, collecting feedback has been a really successful strategy for us, for sure. And we've implemented a number of features this past year, really directly based on feedback, one of... I've talked more on this conference the last few days than I normally talk in like a year.

09:36 
Colby Clegg: It's been a long time.

09:39
Sabrina Reis: Since 20...

09:39
Carl Gould: My poor voice is going. Maybe the noise of the Fat Rabbit might have had something to do with that. So, features driven by feedback. We've got quite a few of them that we've been adding. And a good example of that is one that we added pretty recently, which is this new Tag Report Tool. And the design department had a really outside influence, not on just how this tool looks, but really how the whole tool functions. Isn't that right?

10:03
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah. Absolutely. It's sort of emblematic of the process, I just sort of mentioned, it was a really highly desired feature for a long time from a lot of our customers, but a lot of folks were asking for it in a lot of different ways. So with this one, we kicked it off again with these customer interviews. And what we did was we targeted those from the Ideas Forum who were voting on the feature or actively discussing ideas around it. And from those conversations, we were able to really understand the goals and needs of the feature. In this case, some of the use cases that kind of bubbled up were things like being able to see all of the bad tags within my system that have a bad quality, for example. Also, a hot topic was being able to show all of my instances of UDTs within a system. And so all of that is now possible in this tool and you can kind of see how this process of direct user feedback is starting to really impact the shape and scope of features that we're developing.

10:58
Colby Clegg: It was fun to be part of that project because we had an idea, a pretty simple idea of what we wanted out of it. And then just to watch the process along the way, it turned into a really cool tool. And it's also backed by some cool scripting functions. And already, I've heard directly from tech support, "Oh, this is a game changer." They're so excited. I don't know who's more excited if it's them or our customers, but I know they spend so much time trying to help customers figure out where things are going wrong and tools like this really, really help. Anyhow, so another, on the subject of tags, another area that was directly driven by user feedback was improvements we recently made to our Tag Editor. So Kevin, why don't you tell us a little bit about what happened there?

11:40
Kevin Collins: Absolutely. Many of you know, Ignition 8 introduced some big changes to the tag system and it included a lot of changes to the user interface that we use to edit tags right there in the designer. This new UI that we did introduced some important features for extensibility, but we lost some of the quality of life and usability aspects that customers depend on and really enjoy. We got quite a earful about it on the forums. But we went to task, started collecting that feedback, and worked with design to kind of come up with a strategy that would help us solve those problems.

12:25
Kevin Collins: And the biggest change in Tag Editor is the reintroduction of categories. These help you really orient your view to what you want to focus on. But there are also improvements in property editing, expression, bindings, and really just things that help you focus on what you need to do. Things that may seem little on the surface, but they add up over time, when you spend a lot of time of your day editing tags, it makes a big difference. I think all told, we did at least a dozen pain points with the rework of the Tag Editor.

13:02
Carl Gould: Yeah, it's really nice and we recognize that UIs like this are really on sort of the hot path of UIs where people spend a lot of time in there. So all those little details really make a big difference. And another place that people spend a lot of time in is editing scripts. And this past year, we've put a lot of effort into improving that experience too. So maybe Joel, you can tell people what we've been up to?

13:27 
Joel Specht: Yeah, we introduced a big upgrade to the editing UI recently. Besides some really nice things like high DPI font support and code folding, I think my favorite is the vastly improved autocomplete system. Before we would provide basic autocomplete hints for the system functions that come with Ignition. With this new editor, it's much more type aware, and so we're able to provide autocomplete hints in many more situations, which should save a ton of time having to bounce back and forth between the designer and the reference manual.

14:00
Carl Gould: Yeah. It's really nice. I love using that new editor. And finally our last feature in our list of sort of user-requested feedback-driven features is Co-Branding for Perspective. People have been asking for this, for Perspective, pretty much since the day it was released, and we are pretty happy to be able to get it in there recently. Sabrina, you wanna tell people what this is about?

14:21
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, sure. So, Co-Branding is pretty straightforward. Essentially, you are able to reskin your Perspective application, so they look and feel more like your application, as opposed to our application. There was a few places in Perspective, such as the loading screen or the login screen, that were pretty heavily Ignition or Perspective-branded. So with this feature, you can change and customize your UI with your own colors, logos, graphics, really just bringing the ability to provide a look and feel that's more your own as opposed to specific to Ignition Perspective. Yeah.

15:08
Colby Clegg: My clicker's giving me a hard time. Well, on the subject though, going a little bit higher in the realm of user-driven features, customer-driven, is an area that we've been asked for or discussed... We've discussed it a lot over the years with a certain segment of our customer base, which is support for 21 CFR Part 11. And we've had various guides. Some people here have done really great jobs of implementing systems, but we've constantly been looking at what we can do to improve support and make it easier to achieve that. So Joel, why don't you tell us about some of the features we recently introduced to kind of help with this?

15:44 
Joel Specht: Yeah, we introduced a lot of great new security features and improvements this last year, but I'm particularly proud of the set of features we added to support building high quality 21 CFR Part 11 applications. Basically, at any time in a Perspective project, you can now invoke an authentication challenge to require a different user to log into an IdP so that their credentials may be used to approve and sign off on an action initiated by the first user. This all happens seamlessly within the same session, without having to log the first user out of the session. This was a challenging set of features to implement since IdP protocols were not designed for this use case, but we ultimately arrived at a solution that is secure and robust, and I gotta give a special shoutout to Tom Hechtman from Sepasoft and Joe Dolivo from 4IR Solutions and Grantek for working closely with us to solve some pain points here. So.

16:37
Carl Gould: Yeah, it's really helpful.

16:39
Colby Clegg: Yeah. Yeah, and it's great. I love when we, we're able to do this, to take something that people have been asking about for a while and deliver something that doesn't just solve the problem, but does it in a way that is incredibly modern and novel. The use of IdP, like Joel said, was a challenge, but now we're able to add this functionality using these modern technologies that really, I don't think anyone else is quite doing. And I wanna give my own shoutout to Joel, the work he's been doing behind the scenes on our security infrastructure in Ignition, because security is an area that doesn't get a lot of focus, like the UI features and the frontend features and all the stuff you see, but when you think about the components that make Ignition such an incredible product in the current marketplace, security is vital and fundamental and really a standout area. So Joel has been very instrumental in developing those systems. Another area that has come up as a key element of modern architectures, is something we've been talking a lot about recently, is deployment and orchestration technologies. And so Kevin, I know you had a session yesterday, but maybe you can also talk a little bit about what we've been doing recently with it, why it's important and so on.

17:58
Kevin Collins: Sure, sure. It's a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I think we've come a long way over the past couple years, improving the Ignition container image, really getting the foundation solidified to prepare it for use in a wide variety of different container orchestration, cloud-hosted platforms that are out there. All of those major cloud providers have their own services: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, there's a number of them. And our Ignition container image, it can be deployed there. It's something that I think really sets the stage well for the future. We've come a long way improving the image, we've done work on leased activation to make sure your production deployments can get licensed, but we've also done other work, helping folks get past that initial stage of just launching an Ignition container, but how to extend it, how to really customize it to your need. And along the way, we've also been identifying some other opportunities for integration with some of those application stacks. We're looking at logging, metrics, config management. There's a lot more to come. It's pretty exciting.

19:18
Carl Gould: Yeah, and that topic starts getting us into topics that start moving us to our future plans, like Cloud Edition. But before we get there, I wanna take a few minutes to highlight some of the work we've been doing this year on improving our testing strategies and process maturity. And Sabrina has really been instrumental in helping guide the team in this area, so maybe you'd like to talk about it.

19:39 
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, I'd love to. So this last year, we have put a lot of focus in on quality assurance. We have really aggressively staffed in that department, in fact, we've actually increased our staffing in the QA department by 40% over this last year. So, that's huge. A lot of focus on early detection and regression prevention. And James Lorenz, our QA Department Manager and his team have been very pivotal in pulling it off. And I actually would like to highlight some statistics here to just reflect that success.

20:14
Sabrina Reis: So this first one here is the number of automated test cases, this is 2021 versus 2022, and you can see there's quite a big jump here in numbers, there's actually a 43% increase in automated test cases last year to this year. This next statistic is... This is our number of released regressions. This one's very impressive to me. This is, again, 2021 to 2022, and it is a 49% decrease in released regressions. And this reflects, I feel like, beyond just the QA department, but also it shows the quality of the code and really the whole division working as a team, all three departments. It's really a fantastic statistic. We're very proud.

21:00
Carl Gould: I think this is my favorite slide of the whole conference.

21:00
Sabrina Reis: It's my favorite slide.

21:04
Carl Gould: Yeah, really proud of how well the whole team has pulled together this year to improve overall quality, it's really been excellent. And a similar topic, talking about process and testing, and those sorts of things, we've also been working toward getting our first certification in that area, working toward the ISA-62443 certification. You wanna tell people what that's about?

21:26
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, so ISA-62443. So we've been looking at getting a formal certification, and ISA-62443 was a great fit for us because, well, obviously not only were customers interested in us obtaining a formal certification, but we were also very interested in this, and seeing how having some guidance in documenting the processes we already have in place that are successful, as well as some guidance in documenting the areas we already knew we were looking to improve: stability, security, quality assurance. So, it's a really great path for us. So we are striving for, somewhere at the end of our first level of certification, somewhere at the end of this year, early next year, and then sort of on the same line in regards to security, one component we've been working on is threat modeling. And Joel has been very instrumental in that. Joel, do you wanna give a little update on what we've been working on with modeling?

22:26
Joel Specht: Sure, yeah, 62443 requires that we perform threat modeling as a part of our software development process. Threat modeling is the process of analyzing a system to look for weaknesses, which come from less desirable design choices. The goal of threat modeling is to identify and address those weaknesses before they become baked into the system. We believe it's a worthy requirement since it formalizes the threat modeling that we already do organically, it just puts more structure to our process and helps us get certified along the way. Since it's related to security, I think it's important to talk about Pwn2Own as well. Pwn2Own is an ethical hacking competition sponsored by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative. It's been around for years, but only recently came to the ICS space, and Ignition has been chosen as one of the attack targets by the ZDI each time they held it in the ICS space. It's completely optional for the vendors to participate in the competition, but we always choose to actively engage.

23:25
Colby Clegg: That's an important point. It's optional, and so when you don't see vulnerabilities exposed there for other systems that may not be there, it's not necessarily because they don't have vulnerabilities. But the point is, is that I wanna highlight that because it really just... We've made a conscious decision to tackle security headfirst. It's not an area we talk about a lot, but I wanna make it clear that as a company, it is primary to what we're trying to do. And so, I think this represents our dedication to that, right Joel?

23:57
Joel Specht: Absolutely, yeah, we find it incredibly valuable. It's basically... We see it as a free pen test. We get to learn about previously unknown vulnerabilities directly from the security researchers who discover them at the earliest possible opportunity, which gives us a chance, like Colby said, to really tackle the security issues head-on and address them before the bad guys even know how to exploit them. So we think it's great and we hope we participate again next year. We hope we're chosen again. We also have a new CVD policy that we implemented with Pwn2Own this year, so basically, we work with security researchers to coordinate publication of details of vulnerabilities until at least 60 days has passed since we release a fix for the vulnerability. We believe this strikes a balance between us continuing to be as open and transparent as possible, but also protecting users and giving them a chance to upgrade before their systems are more at risk. We believe it's the right thing to do, and we hope our users can appreciate what we're doing here as well.

25:00
Colby Clegg: And you see in this some of the ways these different things we've been working on for a while now come together; a release train system, and obviously, the focus on quality is very important, backwards compatibility, all of that, because we want people to feel comfortable upgrading and making sure that they stay secure. All of this kind of touches on the subject of how we add the structure and the rigor that we need in order to continue to grow, while maintaining the agile and adventurous spirit that so many of you love about us. And I hope that you can see that the entire team is very dedicated to trying to maintain both of those aspects, and we really approach it as a process of continuous improvement and refinement. So with that, let's start to get in a little bit further into the future, and we'll start by highlighting a few of the features that we're going to roll out over the next few months, the next year, into 8.1. So Ray, why don't we start with Perspective drawing that I know a lot of people are eager to hear about?

26:07
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean we've been wanting to add vector drawing and editing to Perspective since its release, and I know a lot of you here have been asking for it as well. So, to that note we've sort of had a lot of internal discussion and strategy around how to accomplish this and what the right approach might be. And sort of what we came to, we think, is a really good balance between powerful functionality that you expect and also an easy-to-use intuitive experience. So our solution is essentially SVGs or vector drawings within the designer are becoming what's known as the Drawing Component in the palette. And then manipulation of that component happens in this new dedicated Drawing Editor Tool. And so you can obviously create things from scratch within the Drawing Editor, or you can import and edit existing graphics or SVGs there. So it really is this very complete feature set, it's gonna be on par with what you expect to see from maybe something in Vision or external third-party tools like Inkscape or Illustrator, and it's being built directly in Ignition obviously, so that gives us a lot of clear advantages as well.

27:14
Ray Sensenbach: Like I mentioned, because there is this dedicated Drawing Editor UI right within the designer, we were able to add and augment things that are in Ignition, meaning we're adding dedicated UIs for binding properties within drawings, also a nice layers panel to let you navigate your SVG drawings, but the whole goal here is to really make the whole workflow less disruptive. So previously, you're editing a graphic, you have to export it, use your third-party tool, import it, and that really sort of breaks the designer flow state. So we're really excited about how this is gonna improve that. And I’ll mention also that it's actively being developed, we're seeing live builds every few sprints and it's getting there and it's very exciting.

28:00
Carl Gould: Yeah, we know a lot of you have been waiting for this and we appreciate your patience, it's obviously a big lift to build a brand new drawing editor from scratch but it's really exciting to see it come along. Another project that we'd like to highlight is something we're calling the Tag Reference Tracker. Kevin, you wanna talk about that one?

28:18 
Kevin Collins: Sure, yeah. This is a feature that's going to let us answer a commonly asked question about Ignition systems: Who's using that tag? Because of the dynamic nature of Ignition, how you can interact to tags, this seemingly simple question is actually non-trivial to answer. So what we're gonna do is we're going to keep track of the usage of any given tag, who subscribed to it, so that over time, we build this index and accounting of where a tag is used throughout the whole system. I think there's obviously some compelling advantages to this in design time, but I'm pretty excited about the potential also for runtime integration and some of the things folks may be able to create with the Tag Reference Tracker output.

29:10
Colby Clegg: This is an area that we've been asked about for a long time, I believe it's probably the number one request on the Ideas Forum, which yes, we do watch. It might take a while to get to everything, but we look at it. So yeah, it's very exciting, and I'm sure that we'll continue to evolve this concept down the road. Alright, finally, let's talk a little bit more about Cloud Edition, which Carl introduced yesterday. He mentioned some of the fundamentals about what it is, but Sabrina why don't you, in your own words, kinda tell us how you see it fitting into our product strategy?

29:44
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, sure. So you know, of course, people have been running Ignition in the cloud for years, but now with Cloud Edition, we can offer a much more cloud-native type of experience. Ignition as a platform scales so well from edge to plant to cloud, and now we have those additions to match. We're really excited to see how the new elastic licensing and Cloud Connector Modules help to create some really interesting applications that take advantage of this hybrid architecture.

30:15
Carl Gould: Yeah, we've mentioned it yesterday, and I've already talked to a number of you about it already at the conference, people seem pretty excited about it. We're really excited to have tailored editions for all these different use cases, and I'm really excited about what those connector modules will mean for new integrations with Ignition. And Travis gave a... And Kevin gave a really interesting sneak peek yesterday at the AWS Quick Starts, which will also be able to provide more of that kind of CloudFormation templates and scaffolding for infrastructure as code that will really help I think some, help you spin up these complex architectures really pretty darn easily. So that's exciting.

31:00
Colby Clegg: Yeah. So let's go a little deeper into the future now, and let's talk about the next major version of Ignition. I think in a lot of discussions yesterday, I don't know how many people noticed, but I kept using the term "next major version" instead of a number, there's maybe a reason for that. Sabrina, why don't you explain what that is?

31:17
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, so just gonna change some things up here. So traditionally through the life of Ignition, we've done major releases about every year and a half, every other version being a long-term support version, supported for at least five years. So as I mentioned before, 8.1 we're treating a bit different, a bit more special here, and basically, with the features that we're putting into it and things like Cloud Edition coming out, we realized that the jump to 8 was big for some customers. There's some larger enterprise customers that are still working on their 8.1 migration, so with all that in mind and with what we're doing with 8.1 and with Cloud Edition coming out, we just did not think it made sense to have our next major release be a non-LTS version. So therefore, we are skipping 8.2 and we are going right to 8.3.

32:15
Sabrina Reis: Which is long-term support. And so obviously, that implies a bit of a longer dev cycle, so we're looking at somewhere near the end of 2023, early 2024. Yeah.

32:31
Carl Gould: Yeah. Once we hit upon this idea, we all just looked around at each other and we're like, “Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We should definitely do that.”

32:38
Colby Clegg: The numbers add up.

32:40 
Carl Gould: Yeah. It just... We're not making any long-term judgments on what the release cadence might be going forward, but for right now, it makes sense to take the time to really build up 8.1 as much as we can and then get right to 8.3. After that, who knows? So now, talking about 8.3, let's talk a little bit about what we're planning to actually put into that product. Some of those features sort of continue in the same focus of usability and design that we've already been talking about. So Ray, maybe you can talk about the first major feature we have planned?

33:21
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah, sure. So this first major feature we're talking about for 8.3 is essentially a complete rework of the gateway web interface. Now, the functionality of the gateway hasn't changed too much at its core since the very early versions of Ignition. And we've noticed some certain pain points start to crop up and grow within that old information architecture. On your left there, you're kinda seeing the rough architecture of 8.1 builds currently, and on the right, the 8.3 proposal for where we're going to be going. Essentially, the main pain points we noticed were things like having duplicate versions of lists of items, right? So highlighted in red there are what we noted as duplicate pages. So you get sort of the same information for maybe a list of databases, for example, on a status page, and then a little bit different information with some actions on the config pages. So that eliminates folks having a single source of truth, which is what we're really striving for in the redesign.

34:17
Ray Sensenbach: And then also, you'll note the config navigation just grows and grows and grows and grows, and that becomes pretty difficult to navigate, so we're also trying to account for that. But yeah, it's more than just a structural overhaul. We're tackling something like 80 or 90 bugs and features with the restructure, and it's gonna hopefully eliminate a lot of the little paper cuts, little annoyances that exist throughout the experience. And the new designs, I mean, it's not often you get the green light to redesign an entire web application, so design is really excited. We're introducing a lot of new modern UI/UX paradigms throughout, which will make it more consistent and intuitive to use everywhere. But more exciting than that are just these new features that we're able to layer in at the same time.

35:00
Ray Sensenbach: I just wanted to highlight a few of these new ideas and concepts on the gateway here. What you see on the main left is the Configuration Index. This is a new page that we're developing, which will essentially be an overview of every configuration that exists within a gateway. So it'll give you a nice top-level look as to what this gateway is, as well as the state of all of those items within that to hopefully highlight like faulted-state items. We're also developing this system of keywords, which is essentially going to be our solution for foldering or grouping items. It's really flexible and will help to manage and organize the scale that we see on a lot of gateways nowadays. And finally, I wanted to highlight system alerts. So this is gonna be a way for us to broadcast like really critical system messages across the platform. So you're seeing it here on the new gateway designs, but it'll also exist throughout the platform, like in the designer, for instance.

35:52
Carl Gould: Yeah, it's really exciting, it's... Yeah, you're right. It's not every day you get to redesign everything from scratch. We've been working on Ignition for a long time, obviously, and sometimes you'll find a UI that was clearly written before Ray's influence.

36:10
Carl Gould: Before Ray and after Ray. So no, we don't have that inconsistency anymore. I'm really excited about that. And beyond the visual changes, or beneath the visual changes, there's another really exciting layer, which is that we are going to have 100% of the functionality that you can get to through that web UI exposed via RESTful APIs. So people have... Yeah. Let's take that.

36:38
Carl Gould: Yeah. People have been trying to sort of programmatically alter Ignition's configuration forever, and right now, a lot of that has to go through scripting, which is awkward, 'cause you have to do that within the product, and so it's a little weird to have to configure a product from within itself. So this is gonna be a really nice way to be able to manage Ignition 100% externally. And it also ties in with all the deployment orchestration stuff we've been talking about. Kevin, you wanna talk about that?

37:07
Kevin Collins: Yeah, this is really kind of a compelling topic that'll open the door for more standardized ways to leverage infrastructure automation tools like Ansible, to really standardize how we interact with configuration of a fleet of gateways. The web UI and the changes there, really important when you're up close and personal with one or a few gateways, and I'm really excited about the coming changes there. But when you're talking about deploying maybe just a simple change, like rotating credentials to your MQTT infrastructure, a number of different things. When you're talking about propagating that to 100 or 1,000 connected edge devices, suddenly that simple interaction becomes quite a non-trivial task to achieve. And I think this API is gonna be what opens that up and makes that possible. So I think it's gonna really improve the potential for managing and monitoring Ignition at scale.

38:14
Colby Clegg: Yeah, and if they're excited about the API beneath the UI changes, I'm excited about the changes beneath the API, which is to say that we're doing a lot of work on the underlying storage system as well. So Joel, maybe can touch on a few of those points.

38:30
Joel Specht: Yeah, we're finally gonna get rid of the internal database so that all config will be in an open standardized JSON format.

38:40
Joel Specht: Besides the implications on configuration and deployment and such, it also means that it'll be much more friendly to source control systems.

38:56
Carl Gould: Yeah, I've been waiting for this for a while. This is really exciting... Yeah, all these things go together so nicely, we've... The file storage format that we're planning on is actually sort of forked off of what we did for the project system, so if you're familiar with how we store resources for projects, that'll be really similar to how we start storing the config resources for the entire gateway. And what we found was that there is an interesting opportunity that opened up, which was, we can use the inheritance system of the project modeling to enable this new deployment mode concept that we have. Ray, you wanna tell them about that?

39:40
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah, absolutely, so everything's sort of cascading here, and that opens up this different opportunity which is real support for deployment nodes on the gateway. So these nodes are things like testing mode, QA, production, so essentially how it'd work is any item that is configurable on the gateway, will have versions of itself that exist, you can modify them concurrently or separately. So for example, a database in your test production, excuse me, your test mode might point to server address A, and then in your production mode, server address B in the live database. So it's sort of these clear standard pipelines that exist, which are gonna really help to minimize system risk and also increase stability of our platform, especially in these enterprise models that we're talking about more.

40:31
Carl Gould: Yeah, I'm really excited about how all these things kind of all support each other, this feature is kind of like the spiritual successor to our old Ignition 7 staging and publishing system, except this time it applies to the whole gateway instead of a project, which is really exciting. A lot of these changes kind of bring to fruition some of the stuff that we started in 8.0 so we're really excited to get to 8.3.

40:53
Colby Clegg: Yeah, it's right in time, from what I could tell, this was a subject that multiple people talked about yesterday, like Carl said, we've had these ideas, we've been systematically trying to build towards some of these points, and I think we're gonna see a lot of it come together the next year or so. And one thing that comes to mind is that we've been talking a lot about Docker containerization, orchestration and whatnot, maybe we take it for granted that people are interested in that, but one aspect of it that really strikes me is that it represents a new generation of a message that's been at the cornerstone of our company since the beginning, which is IT-friendly, right? We started with SQL databases as a way to break down the wall between OT and IT, and I see a lot of these as being kind of fundamental to doing that because IT departments are leveraging these technologies. You mentioned Ansible, there's others, this is what they're using all the time, I know a lot of you are using it.

41:53
Colby Clegg: I just really wanted to underline that. Okay, going in a completely different direction. One final point that I just wanted to throw out there is that, of course, we are looking at... We're gonna look at Tag Historian functionality a lot in 8.3, we're not exactly ready at this moment to describe it in detail, but I knew it would probably be one of the first questions if I didn't mention it. A couple of key points about it is that we are dedicated to taking a very open and interoperable approach to it, and we have some great ideas, we have some things that are evolutions on what we have already been working on, but I know it's an area that a lot of... Everyone is interested in, so I just wanted to mention that.

42:39 
Carl Gould: Alright, Carl. I think we've talked enough. I think we should probably be mindful of the time here and start getting some questions asked because that's everybody's favorite part of this anyways.

42:50 
Colby Clegg: Let's start easy with Phil Turmel right in the front.

43:00 
Audience Member 1: So your new module development implications for your configuration API suggest that you might need a new life cycle state for the gateway to enable configuration before you actually start, where modules could know that the gateway is being configured through the REST API or for whatever other reason before calling the life cycle state to actually start up. You might wanna consider...

43:37
Carl Gould: Somebody been whispering in your ear, Phil.

43:38
Audience Member 1: What?

43:41
Carl Gould: Okay, let me see if I can paraphrase this question so that we can make sure we're talking about the same thing. So you have read between the lines about the config API and how that might imply changes to module life cycles.

44:00
Audience Member 1: And the implications that has for my modules.

44:05
Carl Gould: Yeah. Yeah, it's an astute question. So we are planning on changing... Any modules out there, or module authors out there, will have to dedicate some time to migrating their module to 8.3 just because of the UI changes alone, because any UI you have implemented isn't gonna work anymore, you're gonna have to redo all the web UI, so budget some time for that, but you're right that we are planning on changing module life cycle pretty dramatically in 8.3.

44:47
Carl Gould: This may be somewhat unpopular, but we are going to drop hot module loading, entirely. Hot module loading, we have decided really doesn't add enough for the risk that it also adds. There's a lot of really, really dangerous parts about loading a module, hot into a system that's already running. It's a very dangerous move. I wouldn't recommend necessarily doing it in production, and we're at a point now where anything that we don't recommend doing in production really doesn't belong in the product anyhow, so anything that can simplify and increase stability, in my opinion, is the right move.

45:30 
Carl Gould: So it actually will make module authorship a lot simpler, to have a much simpler life cycle where your life cycle as a module is linked fundamentally to the gateway's life cycle, to the JVM life cycle. So you'll start up at the JVM modules, It also simplifies module interdependencies so that we can have multiple dependencies, so there's a lot of benefits to this system.

45:57
Audience Member 1: Follow-up. Access to 8.3 early builds for module developers to get synchronized before it releases.

46:06
Carl Gould: That'll be necessary. It's too early to worry about that right now, but at some point, we certainly will.

46:18
Audience Member 2: So on deployment modes, sound awesome. Really cool. Need a feature like that. You mentioned three modes, will there be the ability to create as many modes as we need to create, to profile various types of deployment pipelines?

46:37
Joel Specht: Yeah, I believe so. That was the plan. You can define N number of modes, it's really up to you, and what those modes mean in your environments, I don't think it's a good idea for us to just kind of force that on you that you should have a production and a test or something.

46:56
Kevin Collins: There's no need to constrain it...

46:57
Joel Specht: Right, yeah.

47:00 
Carl Gould: Plus, it was a mode as a string, so.

47:01 
Colby Clegg: Yeah, it's really about the override-ability of and the partial configurability of things, and I think that then people can get really creative with their... Plus with the source control and everything else, you know the way that they're piecing things together.

47:17 
Audience Member 2: Awesome.

47:22
Audience Member 3: This is a question for Joel. The recent compromisation of Twilio and Okta made me reconsider my allegiance to IdP, and I know that you guys are planning on coming out with IdP for... Well, you already have it for Ignition built in, but now you're gonna have 2FA and FIDO, I think. What's your view? Am I more at risk using Ignition with a FIDO or Okta with FIDO?

48:04
Joel Specht: I think it is totally up to you on how you feel about that, but you're safe using our internal IdP. We do our due diligence to make it as secure as possible, of course. The thing with using an external IdP is it gives you the expertise of the fact that they do that 24/7, right? That's like their main focus is the IdP functionality and all of the security controls around that. Whereas this is a part of, the internal IdP is a part of a larger project so we're not fully focused on just IdP, we have a lot going on, so you weigh that out a little bit, but there's no reason that you can't just trust our internal IdP if you don't trust Okta anymore. That's totally fine. But yeah, it really is up to you at the end of the day on who you trust.

49:06 
Audience Member 3: Okta just has a bigger target on its back, I mean, when I'm running a gateway, they have to know to look for that gateway where everybody's looking at Okta.

49:13
Joel Specht: Yeah, that's a fair point. At the same time, I would just say, to make sure you have good auditing in place in Ignition configured and that you have the process and the people monitoring it to be able to know if you're potentially getting attacked by somebody. Whereas like in Okta, they may have that already built in and you're using that as a service, so just something to think about, but...

49:43
Audience Member 3: So speaking of auditing, are there tools that are coming forward that we'll be able to use for watching for things like that?

49:51 
Joel Specht: Well, we have auditing built into Ignition, so I would recommend using the auditing profiles there. And then yeah, there's certainly tools that you can use to extract that auditing data into a centralized auditing platform, if you wanna have complete visibility of potentially other applications in your environment besides Ignition. I know you're a little bit more familiar with some of those tools than me.

50:19
Kevin Collins: We've even been exploring the ability to do that log shipping, and that's probably a good strategy for enabling tracking of some of those things on a broader scale across multiple devices in a dispersed geography, so we've got some ideas on what we wanna do there. I know that one of the tickets that we have even is to enable actually some of that auditing output to be admitted in the logs, so that way it plays right into a log shipping solution. So there's definitely some features there to improve that.

51:00 
Carl Gould: Aren't there non-Ignition tools that they should probably be deploying as well for intrusion detection that would be out of scope for us? That Okta is probably already doing?

51:08
Joel Specht: Yeah, for sure, like at different layers in the environment, like perhaps a web application firewall that sits in front of the gateway to have it detect patterns of, say, password spring or somebody's trying to brute force into the IdP, they're flooding the IdP. Maybe it could detect that in an earlier layer and shut them out of the gateway. It's a more generic solution that could apply here, so... Yeah.

51:39 
Audience Member 4: Are there any considerations for offline mode for Perspective? Sorry.

51:44 
Carl Gould: Oh, offline mode in Perspective. Yes. The first... We have a feature, we didn't talk about it on the slides, but we're working on a form feature for Perspective that specifically will be built to work offline. After that, the next thing we would need for really full offline support is mostly just in the loading, to have cache, local caching of all the resources. I mean, Perspective was built for offline mode from day one, we just haven't had a lot of demand to continue pushing that forward, but it is definitely something that I'm pretty interested in. So it's definitely still pretty high on our radar.

52:36
Audience Member 5: Hello, I have a question... Sorry, I have a question regarding the Vision Module and what the future... Is it worth doing any new development, is it... What's the LTS life cycle for that older module?

52:57
Carl Gould: Anybody wanna take that?

53:01
Joel Specht: Yeah, we have no plans on stopping support of Vision. It's gonna be around as long as Perspective will be around. So yeah, continue using Vision if it makes sense for your situation. I think they're just completely different technologies and apply in different situations but yeah.

53:20
Carl Gould: There's no end-of-life plans on it.

53:23
Sabrina Reis: Yeah, it's not going anywhere right now.

53:24
Carl Gould: Yeah.

53:27
Audience Member 6: I have a question on release philosophy. Every release of Ignition, every point release, fixes bugs and new features. Have you considered some alternating schedule where every other release is bug fixes and every other release is new features?

53:51
Carl Gould: We sure have. Considered... Not alternating quite like that, I don't think that would be all that helpful, but we've considered a variety of schemes...

54:03
Sabrina Reis: Something similar to that we've considered. No conclusive change.

54:09 
Audience Member 6: There was a string of releases last year, where we'd take a release and it would fix some old things, but introduce a bunch of new things, and we just kinda got out of cycle and for a while, we just haven't had any updates.

54:22
Carl Gould: Yeah, we are pretty acutely aware of that concern. It's a tricky balance. If all we ever did was... First of all, the line between bug fix and feature is much spongier than you might think, so that's a tricky one. One person's... Yeah you get it. So we toyed with the idea of having almost like an alternate branch, like, oh, here's the bug-fix-only branch and here's the also-features branch. Almost having like a... Browsers sometimes do this, where you can sort of opt in to which, you're like, “Oh, I want the stable branch or I want the more interesting branch…”

55:14
Kevin Collins: Insider's build or something.

55:18
Carl Gould: But that's a very short-term concept because pretty soon the branch that you add features into, you have to start fixing the bugs of those features and it all... As soon as you draw that concept out in time, it all falls apart pretty quickly...

55:34
Audience Member 6: Yeah, I'm not really interested in two branches like that, but it would be nice to say, some cadence in terms of... I know that I can put this in there only fix the bugs you've got listed, I don't have to worry about the new stuff that's being implemented.

55:51
Carl Gould: Yeah, although there's also a fallacy in this line of reasoning that only new features introduce new problems. And that's not true at all.

56:04
Colby Clegg: No, in fact, most... Yeah, actually, most of the new features we put in were very conscientious about…

56:09 
Carl Gould: Off to the side, sort of isolated.

56:14
Colby Clegg: So it's more of the true regressions, the fix is to... A fix here causing a problem there, and one thing not really directed to your question, but just kind of expanding on this idea of release cadence and philosophy, you noticed that we've put a lot more into 8.1 than we've ever done before in a release. Typically in the past, we would do bug fixes and then you'd have the next major version. And so you see what happened is that we kind of decided to skip 8.2. But part of the drive for that is really very much this situation we're in, where we have people who want new things all the time, and we have our more conservative customers who need things to just work and not break other things.

57:06 
Colby Clegg: So the main point there, it leads us to... We knew 8.1 would have to be around for a long time. Our LTS policy is what it is, but we're under constant pressure to extend it, and then there's a practical aspect, we already have defined, it could be after the point that the next LTS is released. So long story short, we said, we're gonna be supporting 8.1 for a while. Let's make sure that we put in things that help us make it as stable as possible, as diagnosable as possible, supportable as possible... Those types of things. So it's just, it's an area, I guess, business area that we kind of are always working on engineering just as much as the software itself. Yeah, I appreciate your feedback on it.

57:55
Audience Member 7: So with the changes to the module life cycle and not being able to hot load modules anymore, will you still be able to restart modules? Because I know in production sometimes you can fix some small bugs without restarting the whole gateway and affecting production.

58:17 
Colby Clegg: Say it, Carl, say it.

58:19
Carl Gould: No.

58:20
Colby Clegg: Alright...

58:23
Carl Gould: No. It's not.

58:26
Colby Clegg: And then I'll say, the answer is no. But you know, this is funny 'cause this is one of these parts where Carl and I are on different sides of the fence, I wasn't super convinced about this 'cause I'm more with you that, oh, this is a cool feature of the platform. But what we really arrived at is, you can also put your own buttons in the gateway to restart the things that you care about because all you're doing with your module anyhow is restarting your own code, so I think that you could probably achieve a lot of what you care about through that mechanism.

59:00
Carl Gould: Yeah, that's right. The real, the deeper answer besides no is that you have to start talking about what does restarting mean to you? Right now, what restarting means on a module basis, that's a strong no, because what restarting means is we throw away the whole class order and build a whole new one, which is terribly dangerous, so that's a no, we're not gonna do that. But if you have some subsystem that has its own life cycle that can be restarted, if you can define what restarting means, sure. Have a restart button, that's fine, and we will have that also for some of our things, because sometimes restarting is a useful, a useful...

59:35 
Colby Clegg: Right. For example, in 8, we introduced better restart-ability of tags, the tags themselves. That's an example.

59:42 
Audience Member 8: Hello, is this thing on?

59:46
Carl Gould: It sounds like it.

59:46
Audience Member 8: Alright, awesome. So for the company that I work for, Precision Warehouse Design, I am the guy in charge of doing the UI/UX design for a lot of the HMI. And I just wanna say thank you so much for creating that Perspective Drawing Editor, that thing is going to be so much help... Oh my gosh.

01:00:08
Audience Member 8: Yes, yes. Thank you, thank you. And I just have a quick question, just out of pure curiosity, is there any other features or anything in the works regarding further UI/UX development or maybe even some graphic design for the general Ignition designer?

01:00:26
Carl Gould: What do you mean for the general Ignition designer?

01:00:33
Audience Member 8: Mainly either maybe changes to Vision or maybe some few things for the Perspective Module.

01:00:41
Carl Gould: Well... We don't have any big UI/UX changes planned for Vision. Vision is pretty steady state. Perspective has tons of plans for it, but that's a pretty broad question...

01:01:00
Ray Sensenbach: The biggest coming component that comes to mind is the form component that Carl mentioned earlier, it should be a pretty dynamic interactive way to build out large sets of data inputs and hopefully, make that experience a little bit less cumbersome.

01:01:14
Carl Gould: Yeah, there's also a new container type that we are working on for Perspective that will sort of have almost like a map-like experience from a zoom-ability, cluttering and decluttering, that sort of thing. Those are all pretty Perspective-specific answers, I'm not sure we have any satisfying answers for the designer at large.

01:01:39
Audience Member 8: Alright, thank you.

01:01:40
Carl Gould: Yep.

01:01:40
Audience Member 9: Hi, so I have a question regarding the same realm, but more of the components. So I train a lot of newer systems engineers and I have a software background, so scripting isn't a problem for me, but one of the biggest headaches were always tables and trying to get them to be more customizable and things like that. Do you guys have any plans to update the components for Perspective, for example, to make that easier for the non-software-related people for scripting?

01:02:11
Carl Gould: To make tables specifically more customizable?

01:02:14 
Audience Member 9: Tables could be one of them, yes.

01:02:21
Carl Gould: That's a pretty open-ended question to answer with any specificity, we always are trying to make everything more customizable, but I think I would need something more specific.

01:02:32
Audience Member 9: So, for an example, color coding cells based on values and things like that, normally we have to do scripting to do that. Is there any plans to make things like that more accessible?

01:02:46
Carl Gould: I don't know if we have any written plans along those lines.

01:02:49
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah, I don't know what that specifically... And I know there are a number of smaller feature requests that we should probably take and bubble up into some sort of epic and tackle it all at once, but definitely if you have specific ideas, which it sounds like you do, to maybe move some things out of the scripting space and more into the properties, is what it kind of sounds like, reach out to us and let us know what those are, so we can get them on our backlog.

01:03:15
Colby Clegg: Ray, can you... That brings to mind, on one slide, you had a ia.io/feedback. Can you explain what that is?

01:03:22
Ray Sensenbach: Yeah, yeah, I was definitely trying to get a plug for that there, so that's our Usability Feedback Program that we've been talking a lot about how we get this feedback from you all into the product, so it's a really simple sign-up form, and we basically use that to target who we're gonna reach out for to, based on your experience level with the product. We definitely need a lot of people that are really green, maybe you're just learning about Ignition this week... Weekend or week, and we also really need a lot of more power users who can really bend and break our more complex designs at their early stages. So again, it's ia.io/feedback, please, please sign up. Thank you.

01:04:01
Carl Gould: Yeah, that's really helpful. And Colby also mentioned the ideas forum, which has been around for a long time, but more recently, we have integrated the ideas forum into our own internal ticket tracking system, which has been really helpful for us, so those votes, we really do see those...

01:04:18
Sabrina Reis: Yeah. They come through on our side now, we automatically will tick up.

01:04:24
Colby Clegg: Well, we're five minutes over, so I think with that, we should wrap it up, and thank you all for coming this morning, and thank our panel, please and...

01:04:39 
Announcer: That ends our Technical Keynote this morning. We hope you enjoyed the presentation. There will now be a short break before the next session block, thank you and enjoy your time here at ICC.

Seeing the community growth over the last 10 years at ICC has been extremely rewarding. Inductive Automation wouldn't be where it is today without you. Our Ignition Community Conference has always been about the exchange of ideas and the exploration of what's possible. It's a great way to connect and learn about all that our users accomplish with Ignition. In honor of how much this community has inspired us over the years, we put together a fun video to look back on 10 years of ICC! Thank you. 

At ICC 2019, we discussed the limitless possibilities of Ignition. Last year we envisioned the bright future of innovation in store for the Ignition community. Now, at ICC 2021, as the industrial world changes, the community continues to evolve to create smarter, faster, and stronger solutions than ever before. Join the leaders of Inductive Automation as they discuss the growth of the company and the community over the last year. In this year’s keynote, we’ll celebrate the community’s innovation by looking at the fantastic success they are achieving using the Ignition platform to evolve the industry for the better.

As we enter a new decade, let’s look together with fresh eyes and envision a prosperous new future where the arbitrary limitations of the past are gone and innovation is free and open for all. Join the leaders of Inductive Automation at our annual keynote address as they reflect on the past year in the Ignition community, envision what the future holds for the industry, and share exciting glimpses of where the Ignition platform is headed and what that means for Ignition users.

The industrial automation space has seen amazing growth and change in the past few years, opening up endless possibilities for manufacturing professionals and the software they use. Empowered with unlimited licensing, driven by a passion for problem-solving, and energized by collaboration with colleagues from around the globe, the Ignition Community has redefined conventional boundaries to create virtually limitless opportunities for growth and innovation in the industrial automation field and beyond. Join Inductive Automation’s leadership team as they discuss the future of the company, Ignition, and the industry in this exciting annual keynote address. Be sure to come early – this session is always a full house!