Traditionally, we've always held the Technical Keynote or Development Panel on Day Three of the conference, but this year, we've got something big to discuss, so we've moved it up to Day One of our conference content schedule. It's no secret that we've been working on the newest version of Ignition for several years now, and now we're finally able to dive deep into what's coming in Ignition 8.3 and how its powerful new features can lead users to their next big breakthrough idea!

Transcript:

00:02
Colby Clegg: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Welcome to the Ignition Community Conference, 2024 edition, Breakthrough. If you can't tell from the pictures, I'm Colby; that's Carl. I think we've been doing this so long, we're starting to look alike. I don't know. But we are very thrilled to welcome you here to Folsom for this week of discovery, learning, and collaboration.

00:37
Carl Gould: Yeah, this event is really the highlight of our year. It's our chance to get together with all of you and, of course, discuss what we've been up to this year. But at the same time, it's just as important for us to hear from you, hear what are your challenges, what are your successes throughout the year, and what are you most interested in right now? Because the collaborative nature of this community is really what makes ICC so special. So whether you're a returning ICC veteran or you're here for the first time, we're really glad you made it out, and we're looking forward to an incredible week.

01:11
Colby: Yes, and what a week it'll be. The pace of innovation in our industry has really been accelerating. It's an incredible place right now. Fundamental technological building blocks have been put in place over the last few years, are being used with new thought processes, new methodologies to build incredible, global, unified systems that are defining the future of automation right now.

01:25
Carl: And, of course, we see Ignition as a foundational part of this future, driving and supporting all of that innovation. And to that end, we're thrilled to be here this afternoon to introduce to you the latest major version of Ignition, version 8.3.

01:45
Colby: Indeed. Thank you. Yeah, certainly, in some regards, this release has been a long time coming. But from a different perspective, the new release is a culmination of a journey that we've been on for a few years. And Carl and I can say with confidence that we really feel that it is the right product for where the industry is at right now. So we can't wait to share it with you. Also, Ignition 8.3 is our most substantial and ambitious release we've ever done. I know we say that each time, but when you consider that the last time we did a major release, consider that our development team was about one-third of what it is now. So this is a substantial release, and we're gonna share a lot of it with you this afternoon by going over three key parts.

02:37
Carl: Yeah, and those three parts are applications, the historian, and our approach to infrastructure. And then, so we're gonna be out here giving a high-level overview of what's new in each of these three areas. And after that, Travis and Kevin will come out, and they're going to go over some examples of architectural use cases, and then after this keynote, right here on this stage, we're gonna be back for some deeper dive sessions going into what these... All these new features that we're about to go over are all about and how to use them. And then finally, we'll be back for a closing keynote on Thursday, where we'll touch briefly on what the future looks like beyond Ignition 8.3.

03:10
Colby: So with the agenda out of the way, we are ready to get started, but we wanted to take one moment just to talk about numbers, because I think that everyone here who's qualified to use our software knows that three does not come right after one. So very quickly, we wanted to talk about why we're calling it this with two key points.

03:27
Carl: Yeah, so the first is just that we really used the time frame that would have gone into developing what would have been a theoretical 8.2 just to make Ignition 8.1 all that much better. And the second one is that we use even numbers to represent releases that don't come with long-term support, and we don't think anybody wants a version of Ignition without long-term support, so we wanted to use another odd number. And those are both fine and accurate explanations, but it's also not a pattern that we wanna keep going with. So after 8.3, we're gonna be getting back to a slightly faster release cycle, roughly two to three years. Four was too long. And the next version will fix this numbering scheme we've gotten into.

04:07
Colby: Ignition XP?

04:09
Carl: Time will tell.

04:12
Carl: Well, let's call it Ignition XP.

04:12
Colby: Well, I got a few years to convince him on that one. But I'll tell you for now, a side effect of calling it 8.3 is that the three invokes perhaps the third part of a trilogy, which is really very much how we see this release. 8.0, 8.1, and 8.3 represent a philosophical progression towards delivering what was our ultimate vision starting a few years ago: to build a completely modern platform to support the next generation of industrial applications.

04:41
Carl: Evolving a platform like Ignition in this way is not easy. And historically, a lot of vendors in this space have really struggled with it over the long term. Continuing to innovate and stay modern while at the same time providing stability and continuity that this industry demands is pretty challenging. But we're proud of our strong track record in this area. We have a 20-year track record of doing exactly that. And 8.3 really continues in that tradition, promising a smooth upgrade experience as we have totally modernized the platform. In fact, when we think about our development process and how we approach what to include in the product and how to change it, we realize that there's really four key forces that we're always working to keep in balance. And those are innovation, continuity, stability, and security.

05:39
Colby: Taking the first two, innovation and security, both of these require constant evolution and change, and those fight against the desire for continuity and stability, which are paramount for plant floor operations. Really, there's one goal on the plant floor, and that is to keep running and keep running well. Well, stability is crucial here, as well as continuity, so that you don't have to continuously reinvent the wheel as new solutions come along. Typically in our industry, though, that has been achieved through the years by sacrificing innovation and security. Innovation is about bringing in new technologies to expand what you're doing, and security really often depends on your ability to evolve infrastructure, adapt to changing environments, and roll out security updates effectively. Balancing these four forces is a complex struggle, but as Carl said, we're very proud of the track record we've built.

06:26
Carl: Yeah, let's take a look at each one individually. So let's start with security. This year, we passed our audit for ISA 62443 security maturity level 3, which attests to the fact that our software development lifecycle considers security at every point along the chain. We also routinely participate in security conference competitions where we put Ignition up in front of security researchers who are highly motivated by some pretty sizable cash prizes to find new vulnerabilities in Ignition. If and when a new vulnerability is found, we're known throughout the industry for having a rapid response time and a transparent disclosure policy so that you can all be apprised of any new vulnerabilities that are found, including information so that you can evaluate whether or not your systems may be at risk, and if so, how to patch them.

07:17
Colby: In regards to stability, we've been working for the last few years to get to the place where today we're proud to say we have a one-to-one engineer ratio between software engineers and QA engineers. So that means that QA is an equal voice in the entire development lifecycle from inception to release. We also work hand-in-hand with our support division, which is in-house, of course, and the front line of our user experience. So support, test, and dev are all able to work effectively together to really be able to deliver changes in a timely manner.

07:52
Carl: Next up is continuity. Around here, backwards compatibility is always job number one, and we have the 20-year track record to prove it. There are systems in production today running the latest version of Ignition that have been continuously upgraded all the way from the old Factory PMI and Factory SQL versions 1, which was the software we had way before we even came out with Ignition. And we're able to do this because we take special care to manage our technical debt, which means that we can ensure that the platform itself is able to stay modern and doesn't get sort of bogged down by its own baggage. This is actually a huge part of the work that went into the development of Ignition 8.3 that should be mostly invisible. So it's not very flashy, but it really is an important point for creating the conditions necessary for this kind of long-term continuity.

08:44
Colby: Absolutely. And then finally, innovation. It's always been our philosophy to not create solutions in search of a problem. We always try to talk to customers and then create solutions that are practical and pragmatic. We also put special attention on creating features and solutions that have the broadest applicability possible and avoid going too much into vertical solutions. Finally, it's important to note that both the product itself and Inductive Automation as a company are the result of organic growth without a expansion through acquisition mentality. And so that helps the product to be much more cohesive and natively integrated.

09:21
Carl: Yeah, for sure. So we wanted to start our presentation this afternoon for 8.3 by highlighting these four topics because, by focusing on achieving balance with these four forces, our ultimate goal is that through Ignition, we can all help you balance these same four forces that are at play in all of your systems as well. But without further ado, let's get into what's actually new in Ignition 8.3 that should help you do just that. And let's start with the category of applications.

09:48
Colby: Yes, and let's start with perhaps the most obvious visual change as you start up a new Ignition gateway, and that is the complete redesign and recreation of our gateway web interface. So our design team reimagined our gateway configured interface from the ground up. We combined years of user feedback and experience with our own increased sophistication in UI and UX design to create an interface that is intuitive, easier to use, more scalable, and packed with clever features.

10:17
Carl: The navigation section of the gateway has been completely reimagined, resulting in a far more logical and structured layout. So items are easier to find, and configuration and diagnostic data have been combined together so that you don't have to bounce around between different sections any longer to both understand what's going on with your system and then also make configuration changes. This interface is also designed to work far more gracefully at scale, providing a consistently fast UI no matter how many items you've configured in your gateways and allowing for multi-selection, bulk edits, and an integrated search capability throughout the entire UI. So there's a lot of advanced functionality to discuss here, but we'll save some of that for the deep dive as we move on to the next UI-focused feature.

11:05
Colby: Yes, indeed. We're happy to announce that Perspective finally gets its own integrated drawing tools in Ignition 8.3.

11:17
Colby: So we've spent a lot of time, a lot of time, creating a completely bespoke drawing interface and making it really good, built entirely to work with Perspective.

11:28
Carl: Yeah, using the new built-in drawing tools, you can start with the existing symbols, you can import symbols from other systems, or you can just create symbols from scratch, all without leaving the designer at all. And the editor has all the kinds of drawing conveniences you would expect in a vector editing package, like snapping and guides and fill and stroke and path editing, layering, et cetera.

11:53
Colby: Best of all, since it was built from the ground up for Perspective, it has native binding integration, which means that you can connect the visual representations of your drawings to your real-time state throughout your system. We know this was a hotly anticipated feature, but it's not all that we have for Perspective.

12:09
Carl: No, not at all. Let's talk about forms. So, input and edit forms, a pretty commonplace part of any application. I'm sure building forms is something many of you who have application experience, application building experience, have spent a lot of time doing. It's kind of a mundane feature. Doesn't usually get a lot of attention, but we've, over the years, observed some patterns in how forms are built over and over again, and we realized that this was an area that was actually quite ripe for some improvement.

12:41
Colby: Yes. First of all, wiring together a form with labels, inputs, dropdowns, and so on is tedious and repetitive. Then, when you think about what should be done in regards to validation and intuitive user feedback, it gets even more laborious. So, of course, we realized we could save you a lot of time by creating a component that helps you with this. So now all you need to do is configure your form's sections, fields, data types, and validations in a declarative manner, and the component will take care of the hard work of making the UI for you, building the form's internal, the form's layout, internal validation, and client-side validation and feedback rules.

13:16
Carl: Yeah, all that automatic layout and having it be automatically mobile responsive, I'm really excited about this. But perhaps the most important part of the new form component is actually in how it deals with packaging up a data submission and sending it back to the gateway, which brings us to the third feature we have today for Perspective.

13:34
Colby: Yes, over the last five years, you've shown how Perspective can be used to create all sorts of applications. But there is one category of application that you haven't been able to create, and those are applications that have to be able to work without connectivity to the gateway.

13:52
Carl: In 8.3, this is no longer a limitation. So now you can design a Perspective application that is designed and built to work entirely offline. The intended use case here...

14:07
Carl: All right. We're glad you're excited also.

14:09
Colby: Somebody knows the use case.

14:11
Carl: Somebody does. The use case is intended for applications where an operator might need to drive somewhere remote, they have no connectivity whatsoever, and they need to gather some data, maybe fill out a maintenance form or read a meter. And in these kinds of scenarios, you'll be able to mark your Perspective application for offline use, arrive in your off-site location, launch it, fill out your form, and submit the data.

14:41
Colby: Yes. And once submitted, the form's data will be queued up, and when the device is later returned into a field of connectivity, that data will be synchronized behind the scenes automatically to the Ignition gateway that the project is connected to. So as always, when we add an additional feature like this, some fundamental building block that opens up a new category of application that can be built, we get very excited to see what you build with it.

15:06
Carl: Absolutely. Because we all know that Ignition is really all about data, right? Acquiring it, contextualizing it, storing it, building useful applications around it. One of Ignition's biggest strengths is all of the different ways data can be used and manipulated. And Ignition is called many things, depending on the context. A data hub, or an edge data collector, or a data ops platform if you wanna be trendy. It can be all those things because of all the different ways data can be used.

15:46
Colby: These are all data concepts that exist today in the Ignition ecosystem. They're technologies that all of you use each day to wire together data in and out and together in different ways. But as we continue to add more connectors and really look at the ways that data can be made more useful, we realized that we were missing a central unifying concept. And that's what we're introducing today with Event Streams.

16:05
Carl: An event stream is essentially a pipeline that maps event data from a source to a handler. Pretty simple idea. And like so many things in Ignition, that simplicity also relies on incredible power. Because inside of the pipeline, you're able to do all sorts of things with the data. You can coerce it and transform it and filter it, batch it up for efficiency's sake.

16:28
Colby: Yes, and both sources and handlers are extensible, which means that all parts of Ignition and modules can contribute them. So when we launch, we'll have sources and handlers for some of the most important key systems in Ignition.

16:45
Colby: That means that event streams are a bus for data in and out of Ignition, but it's also a bus for data inside of Ignition, and you can now connect together many subsystems in a very easy, powerful, and intuitive manner. That power will only continue to grow as we add new sources and handlers over time.

17:02
Carl: Yeah, the real power of this design is in the decoupled nature of these sources and handlers. So let's look at some examples of how this might be used. You might install the new Kafka Module and subscribe to a Kafka topic. Okay, so now events from Kafka are arriving in your gateway. You might also have the Sequential Function Chart Module installed so that when a new event arrives, it instantiates an instance of an SFC to handle that event using some complex logic. Now, the Kafka Module doesn't know anything about the SFC Module. The SFC Module doesn't even know Kafka exists, and yet here they are working seamlessly together through Event Streams.

17:42
Colby: There are really so many great examples we could give. For example, we came out with the MongoDB Connector a little while ago. Well, MongoDB has a cool feature called Change Streams where you can basically register a query and be notified as data changes. So imagine having a Mongo Change Stream observer coming into Event Streams where you're running a script or performing a calculation, or perhaps writing that data to tags.

18:06
Carl: You could pipe Ignition alarm events to an Amazon simple notification service.

18:12
Colby: You could have a whole chain with UDTs publishing changes to Kafka, which are then consumed by a set of front-end servers, for example.

18:21
Carl: Yeah, you can see we're having fun dreaming up all kinds of fun possibilities because the combinatorics here are really fun to play with. There's just so many possibilities.

18:31
Colby: Ignition has so much power in it now, and we're absolutely thrilled about how Event Streams gives us a new way to magnify that power in such a simple and intuitive manner. This new feature basically leverages all of the incredible features of Ignition to create a robust and capable stream processing engine. On the subject of data, you know what else people like to do with it in Ignition. They like to store it and a lot of it.

18:54
Colby: And so let's talk about our historian system. Our approach to history has always been as controversial as it has been successful. Unlock modern open technology to serve your history needs. Yes, we use SQL databases as our historian. Many people love to argue that SQL databases are not industrial time-series historians, but we found those tend to be the people selling industrial time-series historians.

19:22
Carl: What, it's true. What SQL databases do is enable you to use standard, open, well-understood, IT-supported technologies to store any kind of data. They're very flexible. Now, I'm sure there's more than a few enterprise DBAs spread amongst you that might be a little bit upset with us for the amount of data that ends up showing up in their databases that then they are responsible for maintaining, but you can't deny the fundamental benefits of this approach. Open data, industry standard tools, and technologies that your companies already have a lot of standards and expertise built around.

20:00
Colby: Yes, that said, since the first release of Ignition in 2010, we've been asked over and over again this simple question: When are you gonna build a real historian? Well, today, we're gonna answer that. We're not. Now hold on. I see some of you are trying to unbolt the chairs and throw them at me. Don't worry, I'm mostly trying to rile you up, and I actually do have something new for you shortly. But the point is, the answer is more complex than that.

20:27
Carl: Yeah, you know, in the last few years, there's been a lot of really exciting development in the open technology area when it comes to time series data. And a lot of this innovation has come from the consumer IT space, where concepts like IoT and the way the modern internet tracks every click and every impression hundreds of millions of users are making results in massive streams of time-series data. And so it's led to a proliferation of a lot of really interesting, robust, and open technologies becoming available in that space.

21:01
Colby: Yes, today there are so many incredible technologies available to store, analyze, and manage time-series data. When we look at that technology ecosystem and think the way that we have always thought, it strikes us that we don't wanna create another, some sort of new proprietary historian system. No, instead, we wanna make it possible to leverage all of that technology through Ignition.

21:26
Carl: But there's not really any kind of standard for all this different technology, like there is for relational data. So in order to help us leverage all these interesting options, we needed to first create a framework for building historian implementations inside Ignition around these technologies, which is what we've done for 8.3. In 8.3, we've totally rethought the approach to time-series history storage. And we've created a new public API that will allow us or any third-party module author to quickly implement new historian implementations and adaptations around these sorts of storage and querying technologies.

22:06
Carl: It has support for bulk storage as well as streaming data collection and the ability to store rich metadata models along with the history, which will help with the contextualization needed to support more advanced querying. It also supports key historian features like data annotations and native in-engine data aggregation and calculations, and many things like that.

22:30
Colby: Yes, so this means that Ignition isn't just a historian; it's a platform for building historians. And that may be a first in this industry. But I told you, we do have something new, and it would be the first implementation of this interface, and it's called the Ignition Power Historian.

22:47
Carl: So the Power Historian, it's an embedded in-process time-series historian that can store your data simply efficiently with minimal configuration. And we wanna be clear about positioning this correctly. So this isn't supposed to be a drop-in replacement for some grand enterprise historian solution. But it'll make a really big difference in what is becoming increasingly a very common architectural use case.

23:12
Colby: Yes, let's look at one very common architecture today. So virtually everyone is storing history into a SQL database. And the system uses store and forward to get the data there. Well, while the data is in store and forward, it's unavailable to the system. So for that reason, combined with local query performance, it's very common now for users to also add a local historian there in that gateway. And then use the Tag History Splitter to send data to both places. That tool, the Tag History Splitter, manages storing to both areas as well as querying based on timeframe.

23:47
Carl: So the new Power Historian really simplifies this architectural picture significantly. It can serve as a high-performance local historian, and it doesn't need the store and forward system in between the source of data and the Power Historian. It can then be used as a source to later synchronize to a remote historian for longer-term storage. So you can see how much efficiency and simplicity we get by adding this piece into the architecture. And real quickly, talking about performance, what do we mean? What are we expecting? So we've got some preliminary benchmarks out, and we have compared the Power Historian to both our local historian option we have as well as to a popular database system. And I just wanna pick out one key benchmark 'cause I think it's emblematic of the way this fits into the architecture, and that's really about the ingest rate capable with this time series system.

24:41
Carl: So this is a chart showing how many millions of data points per second can be ingested into the new Power Historian. And as you can see, it really blows SQLite and MySQL out of the water when it comes to ingest rates, which makes sense when you think about how we're trying to put it into the architecture and not require store and forward anymore because it's capable of keeping up with the data changes, and it's always local, so it doesn't have any network connectivity fragility in between Ignition and the Power Historian.

25:16
Colby: We'll have more benchmarks coming soon, but to summarize here these key high-level points, what we're talking about is a zero-config, self-maintaining time-series historian built into Ignition that is vastly more powerful than what's already available today for those solutions, that can act as a data source for enterprise data roll-up, thus simplifying architectures, that's part of a unified historian platform that supports richer data modeling and enhanced historian features, and by the way, is still open and non-proprietary in its data storage, and of course, is platform-independent just as Ignition is. So with all of that said, I'm sure you're wondering, Colby, that sounds great, but how much does it cost? To which I respond, nothing. We're including it in the Tech Historian Module. That means that everyone who has that module and has that upgrade protection will get this on day one with Ignition 8.3.

26:21
Carl: So again, this historian really shines when you view it from the lens of how it fits into bigger distributed architectures. So let's take a quick look at what the layers of those architectures look like.

26:35
Colby: This is a message we like to reiterate as we talk about these subjects. We really see edge, plant, and cloud, or perhaps you could describe them as edge, site, and enterprise, as a continuum where multiple levels work together in concert. Each of these layers has its own needs and requirements, but together, they form a homogeneous ecosystem. This is what we've been saying for years now and what we've been building, and we're gonna keep building towards this vision because we believe in it now as much as we ever have.

27:06
Carl: Yeah, and that philosophy can be applied to historical data as well. Each of these layers has its own requirements and its own opportunities for utilizing historical data. At the lower levels, you typically want high-resolution data stored for a shorter time frame in a system that is mostly autonomous and self-maintaining. And then, as you go up the stack, you enter into worlds where you might be aggregating and combining data for an entire region or even an entire company. And that demands a different approach. It demands more of an enterprise-grade engineered solution.

27:40
Colby: And this is a place where maximum flexibility and technological choice is vital. It's simply our philosophy that walled gardens are not the answer. Interoperable technology is. And that's what we're offering here with Ignition 8.3, a continuation of that philosophy. We've created an incredible site-level historian that provides immediate benefit. We've also created a framework for leveraging the world's best time-series technology on an enterprise scale.

28:09
Carl: Yeah, going forward, there's really a lot of incredible potential for us to continue building on this foundation and spanning from edge to cloud with this solution. But what we're offering in 8.3 is such a huge step forward for us, and we're really excited to continue to evolve it over the next few years. And now, let's move on to the final subject before we go into those architectural use cases, which is infrastructure.

28:34
Colby: When we talk about infrastructure, we're talking about how and where you run Ignition. But more importantly, we're also talking about the tools available to you to manage those instances and all of the different pieces that come along with it, the resources, the configuration, and so on. When you're building an HMI or a dashboard, you probably don't think a whole lot about infrastructure. But when you're using Ignition to do everything, everywhere, as we hope you all eventually will, infrastructure becomes fundamental.

29:06
Carl: Yeah, the subject of OT/IT convergence has been a topic that we've been talking about in this industry for a long time now, and we like to feel like we played an important role in helping to ignite that discussion because it's really a core part of our origin, why we even exist. Even before that term was in popular use, one of the first modules we came out with for Ignition was the SQL Bridge Module. What was it bridging? It was bridging OT technology in the form of OPC and IT technology in the form of SQL databases.

29:40
Colby: But at that time, it was really about unlocking value and functionality by leveraging the capabilities of IT software in the OT space. But true OT/IT convergence is far more than that. At the end of the day, it's about bringing together these two worlds that have vastly different engineering requirements and bringing them together to try to find a way to compromise those requirements and find an optimal way forward.

30:08
Carl: So what do we mean by that? On the OT side, as we've been saying, stability and continuity are paramount. Nothing should stop production, and the investment that you put into your OT projects has gotta last a lot longer than the average life cycle of an IT project does. But over on the IT side, you need to be able to manage these applications and systems as well-behaved citizens in your technology ecosystem. They can't be rogue agents or isolated islands that are not touchable. And of course, security is paramount because IT's gotta keep these systems patched.

30:46
Colby: Yes, today we're far beyond the idea that security can be achieved through isolation. And I haven't met anyone recently who doesn't believe that IT working closely together with OT is vital to create a better security stance in our industry. That means agility in responding to threats, frequent updates, and the ability to recover quickly should anything happen. Concepts that are typically far more comfortable for IT than for OT.

31:11
Carl: Yeah, our role is really a lot bigger than just letting you use some neat technology to send a ton of data up to HQ. If you want to achieve true convergence between operational and information technology as you're on a Digital Transformation journey, what you need is a platform that perfectly bridges the unique requirements of both sides. A platform for building OT applications on IT infrastructure. And that's what Ignition is. Hashtag, what the heck is Ignition? I finally figured it out, Colby.

31:45
Colby: I think that competition ended six months ago.

31:48
Carl: Too late.

31:49
Colby: Okay, but what does this mean exactly? What traits make Ignition so IT compatible? And more importantly, what does that mean today for Ignition 8.3? Well, first of all, of course, Ignition is platform-independent. This was a big deal when it was first released because at that time, not only was the industry completely dominated by Windows, far worse, it had become very, very sensitive to OS requirements. In fact, I just heard a story a few weeks ago about a plant that's still running a Windows Server 2003 machine in the corner because they can't upgrade it right.

32:22
Carl: I feel like we all have stories like this in this industry. They're far too common. But it's really not about Windows or Linux anymore. It's really just about being platform agnostic in the first place so that you can just conform to whatever technologies and platforms your IT department can happily keep patched and up to date, which again is vital for security. But Ignition's always been platform-independent. That's not new. So what's new today? Well, today, the discussion about deployment infrastructure has moved far beyond operating systems at all.

32:55
Colby: Yes, today's enterprises are managing resources on an incredible scale. And the technologies to help them manage those resources have really advanced in the last few years. Today, concepts like containerization, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and source control are no longer cutting edge. They're just standard tools of a modern IT infrastructure.

33:16
Carl: And there's plenty of ways to leverage these kinds of tools with all kinds of software, but it really works best when that software has native support for these techniques. And we've long been proud of how well Ignition works with these types of technologies, but that support hasn't really been complete in our minds until now.

33:35
Colby: Yes, with Ignition 8.3, we're completing the vision that we had years ago of building the world's most advanced and most IT-friendly SCADA system. So let's start at the lowest level and work our way up to see exactly what that means.

33:48
Carl: Yes, 8.3 really does complete the themes we started and set out within 8.0. So now, all of your configuration is stored in simple text-based configuration files, which means that everything in Ignition is compatible with source control systems.

34:11
Colby: Yes, in 8.3, we've eliminated the internal database, which means that all configurations, settings, project resources, even tags, are in simple and clean JSON, which means that they can be versioned, tracked, and managed with source control tools. Now, when we talk about source control tools, of course, those are very useful for engineering and the development lifecycle, but they also really help with standardization and resource reuse, because that means that all of these resources can be stored and managed and deployed using that tooling system.

34:42
Carl: Remember that shiny new web UI we looked at 20 minutes ago? Well, that web UI is completely powered by a new and modern RESTful web API. That means that everything you can do in that web API, all of that configuration management and diagnostic work, you could now do through an external agent. Furthermore, this API is totally self-documenting, and the documentation is embedded right in the product.

35:07
Colby: This means that Ignition instances can be programmatically configured and managed using standard IT technologies. We almost feel a little bad that we made the UI look so good because the most advanced companies may actually never see that configuration UI.

35:21
Carl: Sad but true. Moving on to what is often one of the trickiest, fiddliest pieces of infrastructure design, which is managing the build, test, and deployment cycle. So one of Ignition's most celebrated attributes is how quickly you can get in there and make changes. The designer's included, you can launch it, change things, hit that save button, and deploy a ton of changes right to production. But pretty quickly, as your project stabilizes and starts being critical in production, and as the teams who are collaborating in a single gateway grow and need to negotiate for resources, you wanna start developing a bit more governance around that deploy, test, develop cycle.

36:10
Colby: In an ideal picture, you would have developers making changes. Those changes would get sent over to a testing system where they'd be validated. Only after that would those validated changes be rolled out to a production gateway. The issue here is that your gateways depend on many, many external resources. And many of those resources may need to be different for each of these stages.

36:32
Carl: Yeah, so in dev, maybe you're using simulators, right? You don't wanna connect to the production assets from development, might be dangerous. Maybe in your staging environment, you have a replica database, not the actual database. There's always little differences between the environments, and that makes the deployment phase pretty challenging, reconciling those differences. And that's always been a challenge in Ignition, something that many of you have come up with a bunch of ingenious techniques to manage in different ways.

37:01
Colby: Yes, well, in Ignition 8.3, Deployment Modes are now a first-class feature. With Deployment Modes, the gateway is aware of which environment it's running in, called the deployment mode. So for example, dev, staging, or production. It's able to automatically change its configuration so that it can load the correct settings based on the defined mode for that gateway.

37:24
Carl: So the way this works is actually pretty simple. So as you configure different resources in your gateway, like database connections or devices, you can define different settings for different modes, and then the gateway will automatically load the correct settings based on which mode it's running in. So for example, if you have a database connection, and you wanna use one IP address in production and a different IP address in staging, you can do that. Those are just different settings for the same resource, active automatically in different modes. The gateway handles this all completely automatically, and to the rest of the system, it's one logical database connection that other systems depend on. So it's really a pretty simple idea, but again, once applied to the entire configuration system, it offers tremendous flexibility in your ability to build a sophisticated environmental deployment process.

38:17
Colby: I think I saw on the schedule that there was a table talk about this subject earlier. So if you weren't talking about this new 8.3 feature, well, this conversation will get easier now. So anyhow, we've just quickly covered a lot of very powerful new tools. Each one of these solves existing pain points and unlocks new potential. But to explore that concept a little more, the potential behind them, and then perhaps introduce even more, a few more new features, we'd like to welcome out here two people who know Ignition use cases probably better than anyone else in the world. No offense. That's okay. With that, please help me welcome to the stage Travis Cox and Kevin McCluskey.

39:02
Travis Cox: Hey everybody, I'm Travis Cox.

39:02
Kevin McCluskey: And hello everyone, I'm Kevin McCluskey.

39:04
Travis: You know, Kevin and I have been working together for years and I think at this point, we know each other well enough to finish each other's...

39:11
Kevin: Lunches?

39:11
Travis: Kevin, I said sentences, come on, man.

39:14
Kevin: Sorry.

39:17
Travis: Well, even though we work together a lot, we both play very different roles. In my role as Chief Technology Evangelist, I focus on spreading the word of success people are having with Ignition.

39:28
Kevin: And in my role as Chief Technology Architect, I get to work with Ignition users and our teams here at IA to ensure that our technology continues to meet the architectural needs of our customers.

39:38
Travis: So in other words, I help people dream it and to see the art of the possible.

39:43
Kevin: And I help them take the ideas that they have and do it in the best way possible for their businesses. And one of the reasons that we both wanted to talk to you about 8.3 is that we're both really excited about the possibilities that 8.3 open up for you, for your architectures today, and going into the future. We know that each of you is at a different step inside your Digital Transformation journey. And no matter where you are in the process, this release has something for you.

40:10
Travis: Absolutely, that's right. Ignition 8.3 is advanced enough for where you are right now and for where you wanna go into the future. Whether you're an Ignition newbie or you have many years of experience working with Ignition, 8.3 is gonna help bring the level and the power of your systems up to a whole new height.

40:29
Kevin: From the beginning, we've always wanted to leverage the latest and the greatest technologies. We're technologists, we absolutely love this, and you know, the whole company is, right? And we've wanted to expand Ignition's tool set so that you can up your game. 8.3 is a great example of that. Take advantage of what makes sense for you.

40:51
Travis: Yeah, Ignition always has been around answering questions like, can Ignition do this? Or can it connect to that? And these types of questions have evolved over the years. Now people are asking more questions around IT technologies than ever before. And the idea is to be able to answer the questions that are important to you. And the questions that people need answers to depends, though, on the level of sophistication they have with their systems. Now, when I say sophistication, I'm not talking about complexity. It's more about your Digital Transformation journey, and what part of that journey you're at right now. We've broken down Ignition 8.3, and this new release, into four different categories. And that is projects, data processing, system management, and IT. And today what we wanna do is talk to you about how the features of Ignition 8.3 help accomplishing your goals in each of these categories much easier.

41:41
Kevin: The first level is that of your typical SCADA application. If you've created a project that uses Perspective, Tag Historian, SQL Bridge, and you're doing very sophisticated things inside a single Ignition gateway or redundant pair, what you see here might represent you. In this example, it's advanced project design doing a lot of really cool things with this relatively simple architecture and without wider, company-wide data flows. If you're doing an IIOT system or using Ignition communication layers like MQTT or more Ignition gateways in a scale-out architecture or multi-site architecture, your complexity might look a little bit more like this. And if you're doing a full enterprise system with hundreds of locations, multiple connections, advanced deployments supported by orchestration and supported by IT departments, your sophistication level might look a little bit more something like this, where it's high across every category.

42:37
Kevin: Everyone's at a different stage inside their sophistication level and inside their journey overall. So to help understand how 8.3 can make things easier, no matter where you are on this journey, we're going to show you which of the features that Carl and Colby just talked about are going to be the most useful at each of these levels of sophistication, starting with projects.

43:01
Travis: Right, so the first area is project sophistication. And these are tools that help you build better projects, especially around SCADA. So let's say you're a brand new user to Ignition. Building a complete SCADA system is easier than ever with the new Power Historian. You can simply deploy a single Ignition server and everything's up and running. You can connect to all your devices, you can log all that data to the Power Historian, you can build up your applications and launch clients very quickly. There is no need to install any separate software.

43:35
Kevin: Yeah, so a lot of folks are used to having Ignition with a SQL Database right alongside it, even for simple applications. You can still do that, of course, and we do encourage it for more complex systems. But if you're just dipping your toes in the water of Ignition, so to speak, and you wanna spin something up really quickly, having a Historian built in along with charts and graphs and the other visualization tools all inside Ignition, that new Power Historian makes it really easy for new users to roll that type of thing out.

44:07
Travis: Yeah, and now let's say that you're an existing user and you already have a system up and running. 8.3 adds the ability to connect to more devices with the addition of the Siemens S7+ Driver. Siemens PLCs are becoming way more popular and we're seeing them used for a lot of new projects that are out there. We wanna make sure that Ignition has the relevant drivers for you to do your job.

44:30
Kevin: That's right. With a lot of folks who are using the newer Siemens processors, this is a really big deal because it allows you, if you're connecting to those processors, basically, you understood and been using symbolic addressing and you've been using some of the optimized block addressing and probably, I don't know, 20, 30% of folks inside here have struggled with that in the past, right? With the new driver, you don't have to worry about using third-party drivers or manually configuring tags from a spreadsheet or connecting to and reprogramming and changing some of those options inside the existing Siemens PLCs. This new driver just connects immediately, allows browsing, and really speeds up the time to deploying Siemens-based projects.

45:17
Kevin: And another thing that's really easy to connect to in Ignition 8.3 is Twilio Voice and WhatsApp. With native integrations to these two services, you can send out notifications to the people the way that they want them.

45:30
Kevin: Ignition's existing notification system can already send things out to SMS, email, voice over SIP or voice over hardware, get one of those boxes and go through that. We've got the Grandstream and a couple others that we recommend there. These new notification options expand out on that more to give you more services, which really gives folks a lot of great additional options here. IT loves these for a couple of reasons. They're simple, and they also reduce that need for physical hardware. It reduces or eliminates that footprint on-premise.

46:05
Travis: I'm really excited about these features, but I gotta tell you, I'm really excited that we can, for the first time, actually draw a circle in Perspective.

46:16
Kevin: Travis. Ah. What is it that they say? Sometimes the simplest things are the ones that matter the most. Seriously, though. Perspective Drawing Tools, not Perspective Circles. We know people have been asking for this for a long time. We're really happy that we're providing this first-class, state-of-the-art drawing tools that you saw earlier directly inside Perspective.

46:42
Travis: For sure, and this feature's really gonna get us to get people the confidence and the speed to build full HMIs with Perspective to really take advantage of the most amazing, the most advanced visualization system on the market today. So, like Carl said earlier, Perspective, there's a lot of new tools that are coming in there. And in addition to drawing tools, Perspective's also taking forms to that next level. There are a lot of customers out there that need to collect data in remote locations that have very limited or no connectivity at all. And this makes it really challenging to collect inventory or sample data and get that information back into Ignition. And we've all had to do this before by building custom-built solutions. That is very difficult to maintain over time. This new form component and offline capability, it gives you the ability to do that so easily. It's gonna be a game-changer for data collection possibilities inside of Ignition.

47:33
Kevin: I've built a lot of forms in Ignition over the years, as I know a lot of you have as well. And I can tell you that there's a substantial amount of time that goes into building good forms. 8.3 is going to make that so much faster and easier for folks to build forms. And when you combine that with the forms offline mode, it's going to be a really nice experience for building projects, especially things that are replacing clipboard entry or some of the traditional types of forms that people would be walking around and filling out. You can do that inside Ignition in a way that is quick, economical, easy to implement. We have a bit of an internal mantra. It's "First make it possible, then make it easy." This is a perfect example of doing just that, where form applications inside Ignition were possible before, and they were good. But with these new features, we think they're really gonna be great going forward.

48:31
Travis: And I think we could expand that mantra to a lot of the features that 8.3 is bringing. So all of these tools here, they really help you in building better SCADA systems, and they give you more tools inside of Ignition that you can take advantage of to accomplish your project goals. Now let's move on to the second area of sophistication here, and that is with data processing. So everybody's level of sophistication with data processing is changing all of the time, right? Customers wanna make the most of their data, especially with getting data to the business. Well, with more devices we wanna connect to, more systems we wanna integrate with, and of course, more places we want that data to actually go, 8.3 is gonna help people up their game in data processing. First off, in 8.3, OPC UA is getting some updates. Now you can actually securely share specific tag data to specific places or clients.

49:26
Kevin: Yeah, with tag sharing, it's really nice. You can pull in a set of tags for a specific system to share them with a third-party OPC UA client. This allows other systems to get data that they need from Ignition without sharing more tags than you want to. We're also updating the OPC UA stack to the latest Eclipse Milo version, supporting OPC UA 105, and additionally, we're going to be adding OPC UA events to Event Streams so we can easily handle events coming from OPC UA.

49:54
Travis: And of course, that brings us to Event Streams, which I personally think is gonna be a huge game-changer. It's gonna really accelerate the movement of data from OT systems into business systems than ever before. We're gonna be able to leverage the full power of all the connectivity options that are in Ignition, from OPC UA, MQTT, SQL, of course with the new Kafka connection, and a lot more. Now speaking of Kafka, that is the standard enterprise message bus for almost every large company in the world.

50:25
Travis: They use it to talk to ERP systems, scheduling systems, and a lot more. And with Event Streams, Ignition's collection with Kafka is gonna be first class. Event Streams allows you to move data in unique ways without writing a single line of code.

50:39
Kevin: I'm really excited about Event Streams. This is one of the features that I've been talking to everybody at Inductive about for quite a while here. I think it's going to be a really significant feature, and I'm seeing it in two different ways, right? That it's useful for two different types of folks inside an organization. One would be the folks who use Kafka or other IT message-oriented platforms. It's gonna make Ignition really easy, as you saw earlier, and Carl and Colby were talking about, really easy to bridge that IT/OT gap with the right tools built into Ignition. The other category is folks who are using Ignition for tag change scripts, using Ignition in other places, and they wanna manage changes or events that are happening centrally in a way that everyone who's designing inside Ignition has access to. An event happens; could be a tag change, an alarm change, something in the database triggers it, and you wanna respond to that event inside the SCADA system directly. Event Streams are gonna be a fantastic way to do that directly inside Ignition.

51:40
Travis: With all of these tools, Ignition continues to accelerate building UNS architectures. You know, you hear a lot about UNS today from groups like 4.0 Solutions and Sesame. Ignition allows you to provide a single source of truth of your operational data that is clean and contextualized.

51:58
Kevin: You can easily contribute to a UNS of your choice, Unified Namespace, right, whether that's a pub/sub system like MQTT or Kafka, storing that data at a warehouse or anywhere, really, with context. Not only that, Ignition can also easily access data from a UNS system, providing dashboarding and visualization to anyone.

52:22
Travis: So in 8.3, there's a lot of new connectivity options and tools to help users accomplish their data processing goals. Now, of course, systems are getting a lot larger, and with larger and bigger systems comes a need to have better management. And there are a lot of great tools in 8.3 that are gonna do just that, and let's start with the deployment modes that Carl mentioned earlier. A lot of people are developing on a single production server, and they've started out with that; they've built a small system, and over time, they've built that up, and it's scaled up to be a very big system.

52:55
Travis: That became a critical system for that company. And at that point, making changes to a production environment is risky, right, and it's not the best practice. So really, it's about adding a development environment, and doing that now with 8.3 is easier than ever with this new deployment mode.

53:11
Kevin: The idea is that you have separate environments, Carl and Colby; if you were paying attention earlier, this looks very familiar, of course, but just to go over it again, right, the idea is to have these separate environments that you have different changes, and you might develop new changes that have differences between production, between your development system, between your QA system. And that production environment might have real PLCs, the development environment might have simulator PLCs instead of real ones; different SQL databases; more things like that.

53:39
Kevin: This feature allows us to define the configuration for all the different environments inside that single Ignition server. It means we can deploy one backup containing everything to multiple different environments. You don't have to worry about merging your changes from one environment to another, plus you can define the deployment modes that you want.

54:04
Travis: So now you can actually have a true development environment where you can build all the configuration for everything, you can test it out in a safe way, and you can deploy, of course, when you're ready.

54:11
Kevin: To deploy, you can simply take a backup from the development server and restore that to the production system manually, or if you wanna use source control, you can push changes from a repository and pull them into production when you're ready.

54:26
Travis: Exactly, and change tracking is incredibly important. In Ignition 8.0, we dipped our toes into that, right? We started making this easier when we moved the projects into the file system, but it was just the projects, not the rest of the configuration. But people wanna track everything, right? And with 8.3, all the configurations in the file system, and this is a big deal to make change tracking very simple. So now you can do it in a first-class way using systems like Git, which is really the most popular system around and the one that folks are trying to use and getting information about with us.

55:00
Kevin: If you've ever tried to use source control systems with the SCADA system, you'll know that some things get tracked and others don't, and others end up in binary formats that might be hard to work with. Sometimes it's kind of terrible. So, but you know, honestly, with the way things are set up with 8.3, it's amazing now. So behind the scenes, the changes, for moving everything to disk, having everything stored in configuration, that's JSON files, the internal database going away, and switching that all out, you can track everything. So if you're taking a look at project versions, you can see what changed, when it changed, what system it changed on. And Travis mentioned Git. A lot of folks use Git, but you can use other systems as well, since everything is file-based. So anything that plays with a file-based storage system is going to play well with Ignition.

55:50
Kevin: Now, if we combine source control with deployment modes, like we were taking a look at just a minute ago, it's easier than ever to track your changes and have that true environmental separation at the same time.

56:05
Travis: So with things like deployment modes and change tracking, handling more sophisticated levels of system management is easier than ever with 8.3. Another thing that's gonna be easier is working with IT departments. Increasingly, we're seeing OT and IT teams working together, especially to better manage OT systems. And IT wants to be able to help, not only by helping with system management but also by integrating with IT tools to help enhance a system and follow established best practices. So at this next level, we're gonna talk about the IT tools that 8.3 can easily integrate with, and the first one is with Secrets Management.

56:43
Travis: So Secrets Management is where you can pull out all of the secrets from within Ignition. These are the passwords, the credentials, and put it into a secrets vault that can easily be managed. And it can also handle encryption keys and certificates. Now, this has several major security advantages.

56:58
Kevin: Yeah, so for example, say IT sets up a Microsoft SQL Server database and gives you a service-level account to it. You know, a few months later, maybe they come and they want to change the password. Oh, without Secrets Management, it could be a daunting task.

57:14
Kevin: I think we've all been there, right? I certainly have, and you know, a lot of folks simply push back and might actually win that battle and not do it and have that password just stay the same because they don't wanna change a production system. You know, that could also be a potential security risk if that password ever gets compromised. By putting passwords inside a secret spot, they become much easier to manage; auto-rotation becomes something that can be automatically done, and it mitigates a lot of that risk. However, the biggest advantage here, in addition to that, really, is taking secrets out of Ignition's configuration. So let's go back to that example of setting up, you know, IT setting up that database.

57:58
Kevin: If they give you credentials to that database and you put the credentials into Ignition, then one day you need to send that gateway backup to us for support or you start working with a new systems integrator. Those credentials are included in the backup. If you're using secrets management and externalization instead, that won't happen because the credentials live in the secret manager that's outside of Ignition and they're simply used by Ignition.

58:21
Travis: Another area that IT can help is with deployments. You know, recently we've seen an increase in the number of devices that Ignition's being deployed to on the plant floor, right, with the proliferation of the edge. And as a result, we've seen the use of containerization grow incredibly fast. I wanna bring up a couple of other updates here about containerization. First is that we're actually bringing Ignition Cloud Edition to the container marketplace. So, on AWS, so Amazon ECS will now be available to spin up Ignition Cloud Edition instances.

58:52
Travis: And we're working with partners like CradlePoint and Digi and others who have orchestration platforms of their own, allowing Ignition to be deployed simply with one click using their marketplaces.

59:04
Kevin: This makes it really easy to get containers deployed on-premise and in the cloud because you're not having to install software anywhere. Basically, so, as you know, we've always said that Ignition has a three-minute install. It's one of those other mantras that we have, which it still does when you're installing in the traditional way. But with containerization, Ignition is a 30-second install, and that's with a full system, with configuration, with connections, all of that. It's just built in. Containerization is pretty incredible and enables a lot of things that we'll see in the next couple of slides here as well.

59:40
Travis: So now, when it comes to being able to deploy a lot of Ignition systems and then send out fleets of configuration changes or being able to manage it from third-party tools, the new REST API is gonna be another game-changer. I think I'm saying that a lot here today. But with tools like, using tools like Ansible to be able to access status and configuration or any other third-party tool that IT has, they can use the tools that they're comfortable with, they can get information from Ignition, they can create their own alerts, and they can manage Ignition the way that they want to.

1:00:11
Kevin: As you can tell, we're going up in sophistication level here, and not everyone's going to end up using this feature, and that's okay. But for those of you who are familiar with REST and web services, this is gonna be a really nice feature. And if you're not at that level yet but you want to get there, this is gonna be here to help you and make it easier when you're ready. The REST API will also help with wide-scale deployments and orchestration, which is the next feature we'll talk about.

1:00:36
Travis: Yes, so we talked about containerization and being able to deploy a Docker container. But there's a lot of IT departments that are setting up Kubernetes clusters both on-premise and in the cloud, and they want to deploy Ignition through that. And with Ignition 8.3, we're doing something that's pretty unique here, Kevin. So what the helm are Helm charts?

1:00:57
Kevin: I see what you did there. So Helm charts, I'll reset for a second. Helm charts are these fantastic configuration files. If anyone's ever worked with AWS CloudFormation scripts or other systems that fall under that wide catch-all phrase of infrastructure-as-code with scripts that set up architecture, Helm charts are another example of that. They're not only some basic configuration scripts, but they can go pretty advanced, and they also are fully cross-platform. So they're not specific to any specific cloud provider or set of infrastructure.

1:01:33
Kevin: Helm charts are for this system called Kubernetes that probably most folks have heard of. It's the most popular orchestration system that's out there, and it can really help with these large deployments.

1:01:44
Travis: So for example, if you wanna spin up several Ignition gateways, or you wanna spin up a scaled architecture or any other deployment that you'd usually install Ignition on a number of different places, and of course connect them all up together, these Helm charts are gonna make that incredibly simple.

1:02:03
Kevin: And we're releasing many of these. We'll have a lot of Helm charts and Helm chart options that are built into the Helm charts that'll allow for a lot of different configurations and going to make it really easy for folks to use Kubernetes to quickly spin things up, spin things down, move them around, orchestrate things in a way that requires less work. We're releasing them with 8.3, so when 8.3 is released, all of these Helm charts are going to be released along with it.

1:02:31
Travis: So as you can see, no matter what the sophistication level of your system is, Ignition 8.3 has answers to questions that you are facing. And the next question you might be asking is, okay, Travis and Kevin, when can I start doing this stuff? When can I start getting access to 8.3? So let's talk about that.

1:02:50
Kevin: I'm glad you asked, Travis. So happy to announce the beta's gonna be available soon. We're looking at a December release, so we're targeting that. Look at the forums if you wanna participate. You can go there; there's information there, and there's also going to be feedback that's going back and forth through the forums. Some of you asked about a private beta, and we have a list of folks who are interested in that as well. And what we decided to do is basically take a look at the release, and when it's good enough for a private beta, we're instead going to make that a public beta for everyone. So everyone's going to be able to get access to that.

1:03:28
Kevin: That's happening in December, and so stay tuned for that. Also, during the beta period, we'd like to ask you, please keep the feedback contained to the forums. So please don't call into tech support with your 8.3-specific troubleshooting steps quite yet. The forums, the folks on the forums are the actual developers who built the 8.3 features, and so they're really best equipped to be able to help you.

1:03:53
Travis: And once it's released, we'll be back to our regular five-week coordinated minor release cadence. That's our release train that we have. Expect releases of 8.1, though, to slow down significantly, as we only plan on releasing patches for security, vulnerabilities, or critical bug fixes that we find.

1:04:18
Kevin: As far as support goes, as mentioned earlier, 8.3 is a long-term support release. That means active support for five years from the release date and two years of limited support following that. In case you're not aware, active support is support from our development team. It covers additional features, bug fixes, and security updates for the lifecycle. It also covers support from our technical support team via email and phone. Limited support is a two-year period right after that, where our development team is no longer providing updates for the software. Because of that, we always recommend upgrading before this window. But if you miss the date, that limited support, it provides limited email and phone support. You can see in the diagram that there's a great overlap window between the two, right? We're giving two years between 8.1 and 8.3, so there's plenty of time to plan an upgrade.

1:05:10
Travis: Right, which brings us to upgrades. So let's talk about upgrading to 8.3. The reality is that 8.3 brings a lot of amazing new features everybody wants to take advantage of, and they're gonna wanna upgrade as soon as it's ready. Now, of course, 8.3 is perfect for a brand new projects. So any new project out there, go ahead, start using that. Now, if you're already on Ignition 8.1 and you wanna upgrade to 8.3, the upgrade's gonna be seamless, right? Carl talked about that we want the backwards compatibility to be there all the way. That is certainly true with this release. And you can simply follow our upgrade guide when it is released. Now, I've got a lot of confidence in our release process, but of course, a trust but verify approach is always prudent for upgrading existing production systems.

1:05:53
Kevin: And if you're upgrading to 8.3 from an older version, you'll need to upgrade to 8.1 in order to upgrade to 8.3, go through a two-step cycle there. So if you have 7.9 or any other earlier system, 8.1 or even before 7.9, now's the time to upgrade them to 8.1. So 8.0, 7.9, 7.8, whatever it happens to be, you'll wanna hit 8.1 so that you're ready to do the upgrade when 8.3 comes out.

1:06:20
Travis: Now, individual system upgrades should be seamless. Full system upgrades with multiple Ignition gateways are also seamless, with the notable exception of the gateway network connectivity. 8.3 will communicate with 8.1 gateways, but not prior. So this is because of our updates to our encoding formats that we use to help improve our security posture.

1:06:46
Kevin: Good news, if you are purchasing today, anyone who purchases a license with any support plan from us, basic care, priority care, total care, it doesn't matter; you're covered for 8.3; it's guaranteed that that license is going to work for 8.3. If you have licenses today that aren't under support, you can add support right now, and you'll be ready for 8.3 when it comes out. And if you have, for example, end-of-year budgets that you're looking to spend or a project that's gonna be happening soon, now is really a great time to get lined up with that 8.3 guarantee. Just make sure you include the support plan when purchasing.

1:07:21
Kevin: So we've covered a lot this morning. Incredible new tools like the Power Historian, Event Streams, Perspective Drawing Tools, rapid form building, offline data collection, along with a slew of connectivity features and enterprise tools for customers who can use them. I am really excited about 8.3, and I can see that a number of you are as well. I know you are too, Travis.

1:07:44
Travis: I am unbelievably excited. I'm like a kid in a candy store.

1:07:49
Kevin: There's so much packed in here.

1:07:50
Travis: For sure. So we really hope that during our presentation today that you've heard something about 8.3 that inspired you for your next breakthrough idea. And we have some more to share with you later today. After this keynote, we're gonna have two breakout sessions this afternoon, which will go into deeper dives in 8.3 for the platform and the features. So if you wanna learn more, please make sure to stay here on stage one throughout the rest of today.

1:08:17
Kevin: Digital Transformation is a journey, and every journey is traveled one step at a time. I hope that you see that whatever and whenever the next step is for you, Ignition will be there along with you to make that next step easier. Wherever you wanna go, Ignition is the foundation for the future. And wherever you are now, there is something to get excited about with Ignition 8.3. And as always, we're really excited to see the projects that you build with this amazing new technology. Thank you so much for coming. Have a great time at ICC. Thank you.

The global community of Ignition users includes large multinational enterprises, government and professional organizations, small companies, and individuals. While each uses the software differently, they all use Ignition to harness the power of automation to accomplish their own mission of making something better. In this keynote, we'll explore how Inductive Automation is supporting the efforts of the Ignition Community and the incredible impact their work has on the future and improving people's lives on a regional and local level.

Transcript:

00:06
Kat Jeschke: Good morning. Welcome back to day two of the Ignition Community Conference. Who here had a great day yesterday? Good. We did too. This year, we have three keynotes for you. Yesterday's [Technical] Keynote focused on the software. This morning's [Main] Keynote will focus on you, the Ignition community, and tomorrow's Closing Keynote will focus on what's next for Inductive Automation. I'm so excited to be here this morning to talk to you about what's most near and dear to my heart, which is all the people of the Ignition community. Yesterday, you saw the incredible work our teams have been doing on [Ignition] 8.3. Our software is made by people, supported by people, and used by people. The whole reason we exist as a company is to make people's lives easier and better. My passion is to empower people and to keep this community strong. This morning, you are going to see some amazing examples of the impact this community's having on people's lives. I'm so proud of all the work you've been doing. We're gonna show you some amazing companies and community members who are making a difference across the world.

01:27
Kat Jeschke: Since we started hosting this conference 12 years ago, we've been amazed and inspired by this community's tremendous impact on the industrial automation space. We'll examine those positive impacts this morning by looking at the award-winning projects in this year's Discover Gallery. We'll also look at how Ignition is being used to make meaningful impacts in local communities. After that, I'll be back on stage to discuss what Inductive Automation is doing to continue supporting the success of this community. So to kick things off, I can't think of anyone better to talk about this community than Inductive Automation's Chief Technology Evangelist, Travis Cox.

02:19
Travis Cox: Good morning everybody. Hey, I'm so excited to be back here. Had a great day yesterday and I'm excited to be back on stage here today to talk about what this amazing community is doing today. So in my job, I work with all kinds of professionals. I speak with people who have been using Ignition for years, and those who are brand new to it. I work with people who use Ignition at big companies, and I work with people who are using Ignition on their home automation systems. One thing they all have in common is that they are using the power of automation to improve something. The old definition of automation is about using technology to replace human labor. But automation isn't about replacing people, it's about empowering them. Automation is a force multiplier that empowers a single person to make a huge impact. It enables people to tackle the world's biggest challenges on a massive scale.

03:13
Travis Cox: And all of our lives have improved because of this. Automation has helped improve our living standards by supplying billions of people with food, water, energy, and medications. It's opened up the use of new technologies to more people, enabling millions to access new forms of computing and communication. The benefits of automation have vastly impacted lives of every single person inside this room and beyond its walls. And all of these benefits are made possible when a single great idea is multiplied by the power of automation. At Inductive Automation, we always believed in the power of that idea, and that's why our motto is Dream It. Do It. A person's idea can be a fleeting thought that never gets the chance to be realized without taking action. Or it can be an idea that changes people's lives. The difference between those two possibilities is people's power to turn their ideas into reality.

04:17
Travis Cox: So for us, Dream It. Do It, isn't just a catchy phrase, it's a fundamental part of our philosophy. We believe it's the doers who make things happen, and that's because the people who are willing to take the first step into the unknown are also the ones who discover a better way forward. When our founders started down this path over 20 years ago, our product, company, and this Ignition community were a little more than a dream that would never have been realized without taking action. In our early days, many in the industry laughed at us. They couldn't imagine that we could break through a software category with entrenched competition, but here we are.

05:03
Travis Cox: What they didn't realize or understand was the frustration of so many people, integrators and engineers, who wanted to do more with their automation systems but couldn't because the limitations of the software tools back then. Many of the pain points of using old SCADA software were about limiting access, making things closed, proprietary, confusing, expensive, locked down. We believe that these limitations kill ideas and limit the good that automation can do. With Ignition, we've always strived to open up the benefits of automation to more people, and that's why it's cross-platform. That's why it's based on open standards. That's why it has a flexible, modular architecture. And of course, an unlimited licensing model. And that's why a few years ago, we launched a new release of Ignition, the Maker Edition, so that people can use it for non-commercial use, allowing more people to use Ignition at home or to learn it at university. That's also why we created the Inductive University. I can't believe that it's been 10 years since we launched the university right here on this stage. And I gotta tell you what, they're never gonna let me live it down.

06:31
Travis Cox: But we created IU with the goal of allowing anyone to learn Ignition at their own pace and of course, for free. And that's exactly what it's accomplished. And let me tell you, the results have been staggering. Since its launch in 2014, there have been over 10 million views of IU videos. It has almost 8 million challenges that have been taken. There have also been over a 100,000 new users accounts created, and 30,000 credentials that have been earned. Can you believe that? It's amazing what this tool can do for the community. That's hundreds of thousands of people who have gained access to new knowledge to help them turn their ideas into reality. We've always believed that the best way to help people is to empower them with the tools and knowledge that they need to do what's right for their customers, their companies, and of course their communities.

07:29
Travis Cox: At Inductive Automation, our mission is to help you accomplish your mission. And there are thousands of companies in over 140 countries worldwide who are doing just that today. Ignition is used in every major industry. It's used for SCADA, HMI, MES, IIoT, and much more. It's used for massive enterprise systems with millions of tags and small implementations at the edge. Ignition is being used to help people enjoy the benefits of automation, more benefits than ever before. Using Ignition, thousands of end users are improving their processes and people's lives in meaningful ways, but none of that is possible without this community here. Fueled by your ideas, Ignition is an enablement platform for harnessing the full power of automation. And this year, we've seen this community using Ignition to accomplish some incredible things. And the best place to see that is right here in the Discover Gallery that we have with the conference.

08:35
Travis Cox: The gallery showcases real Ignition projects from around the world, and every year, we ask users to submit their best projects to be featured in the gallery here at the conference. If you haven't had a chance to check it out in the black box, I encourage you all to go and look at all the projects. They're also available on the the website for the Ignition Community Conference. Now, we're gonna look this morning at several of these Discover Gallery projects, but know that for every project that we talk about here in this presentation, there are many more brilliant projects that you have to go and check out. So please make sure to go and do that. But it was really amazing, this year, we had a record number of projects that were submitted. There were over 80 projects that were submitted from all of you, and that covered a range of industries and different use cases. We saw projects in automotive, pharmaceutical, agriculture, government, utility, water, energy, and a lot more. And every year, we recognize the companies that submit the best projects with a Firebrand Award. Now, this year, the six organizations who are receiving a Firebrand Award are NeoMatrix, CertainTeed, Deloitte, Madkour Group, IDOM, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Let's give all of these award winners a round of applause.

10:00
Travis Cox: So one aspect of this year's Firebrand projects that inspired us is how each of these end user organizations is working to make a positive impact on the world by improving people's lives and sustainability. And this morning, we're gonna examine how the work of this community is impacting both of these areas, starting with creating a more sustainable future. The future doesn't just happen. We need to create it. What we do today will pave the way for tomorrow. For those people like us who work in industrial space, we recognize this fact more than most. Today's raw materials can be transformed into amazing solutions that we're gonna need tomorrow. But there's a lot of hard work that needs to go into it. When working on the industrial automation processes, we always have to start with the projects with the end in mind and think about the result that we want.

10:52
Travis Cox: The process of getting to that end product is critical, and of course, an inefficient process will result in waste, loss of productivity, and ultimately a poor outcome. But to get better results, we need to improve our processes, and that's what sustainability is about. To create a better future, we have to be thoughtful, responsible, and effective with our processes today. And we see this community here making a huge impact in a more sustainable future. And this year's Firebrand Award-winning projects provide three great examples. To explore these further, please help me welcome Inductive Automation Director of Sales Engineering, Kent Melville.

11:39
Kent Melville: Well, hey everybody. As Travis said, I am the Director of Sales Engineering here at Inductive Automation, but I have another title as well that I take very seriously, and that is the title of dad. I've got two little girls at home as well as one on the way. And my wife is actually here in the audience today and she's 37 weeks along. And so if you hear a shout, the fastest way out of here for me is probably crowd surfing. So you in the front row, be aware. Coming at you. But no, I have a family. And as such I'm very focused on taking care of both their daily needs as well as focusing on building them a better future. And because of that, I am so excited that in my day job, I get to work with some people who use Ignition in some really impactful ways, especially in terms of sustainability.

12:32
Kent Melville: Improving sustainability is one of the most impactful actions that we can take to safeguard our future. So why sustainability? Well, conserving resources reduces waste, helps the environment, and ensures that the generations after us have a world to enjoy that we can leave behind. And it has other benefits too. In an interview with CNBC on the topic, Jim Fitterling said, who's the CEO of Dow Inc., "Embracing sustainability isn't just good for the planet, it's also good for business. By focusing on sustainable innovation, we can drive growth, reduce costs, and create long-term value." So improving sustainability has some significant benefits, but there's some major challenges as well. Consider this. Changing existing processes can not only be expensive, but can also be disruptive. So how do companies get there? How do they go from their existing processes to more sustainable ones? Well, in this year's Firebrand Award-winning projects, there are companies who are accomplishing this, both by creating sustainable products and by reducing the waste and improving the efficiency of their processes.

13:55
Kent Melville: So how are they doing it? They're doing it by making the most of their data processes and raw materials to help accomplish their missions to improve sustainability. In this project from CertainTeed, we see how Ignition can help optimize existing processes through the power of Digital Transformation.

14:13
Kent Melville: A little background for you. Since 1904, CertainTeed has helped shape the building products industry. Founded as the General Roofing Manufacturing company, it has evolved into North America's leading brand of exterior and interior building products. Now, CertainTeed is a subsidiary of Saint-Gobain, one of the world's largest and oldest building products companies. Between CertainTeed and its affiliates, they have more than 6,300 employees and more than 60 manufacturing plants throughout the United States and Canada. As a longstanding company, many of CertainTeed systems were aging. The company faced a Digital Transformation challenge that Digital Manufacturing Director, David Halpren and Industry 4.0 Program Manager Tarek Rahman faced head on. Many of its plants were using legacy MES systems and paper to track their data. As a result, they weren't operating as efficiently as was needed. To fix the problem, they called on Aaron Murdock for development and Murugavel Ramasamy to define an enterprise architecture to implement Ignition in their plants.

15:21
Kent Melville: Now they're able to pull in production orders directly from SAP and operators and managers can see a line's 24-hour performance at any given point with uptime and downtime, maintenance status, and real-time KPIs easily visible at a glance. One exciting new feature is that roaming operators can now use a mobile device to record scrap quantities and assign reason codes for captured downtime events. The new system has enabled the company to update its processes, improve efficiency, and foster closer collaboration between the IT, operational, and business teams. And the popularity of its user-friendly UI and scalable architecture have allowed CertainTeed to expand its use to multiple sites.

16:06
Kent Melville: It's currently being used at 15 plants, with many more on the roadmap. With Ignition's help, CertainTeed is successfully continuing its Digital Transformation journey as it strives to accomplish its mission of transforming the world into a better, more sustainable home. Of course, the key to the success of any mission about improving sustainability is to make the most of the raw materials you have. This last project I wanted to share with you is an example of reducing waste by implementing a new recipe management system, and all the while, making sure not to disrupt production. Goodman Fielder is a leading global food company committed to making everyday food better for everyone by improving its taste, nutrition, affordability, accessibility, and, of course, sustainability. They employ over 5,000 people in Australia and the Pacific Islands and have over 40 plants in the region. From there, they deliver food products to over 30,000 outlets daily. One of Goodman Fielder's main divisions is baking, and they have three of the largest bakeries in Australia, which were facing production challenges stemming from outdated data management practices.

17:25
Kent Melville: The daily operations team relied on managing production using a combination of basic machine HMIs and printed Excel sheets with no integration into other production or business systems. Now, like many of you, I'm a big fan of Excel. In fact, I may have missed my calling of being an accountant. But it's not just spreadsheets here that are the problem, but printed spreadsheets broke my heart a little bit. And we can do better, and that is exactly what Goodman Fielder did. To continue their commitment of providing sustainable food products, they needed to update their processes with modern technology while also ensuring that production kept running so their products could continue to be delivered fresh daily. People need their bread. So David Hermann, the Engineering Lead at Goodman Fielder, collaborated with Gordon Cornish to find a solution. Gordon works for integration company EfficientIA, which is now Deloitte Smart Factories in Australia. Working with other team members, they used the Ignition platform to implement a new Industry 4.0 system, solving two main issues.

18:32
Kent Melville: First, operators were storing recipes directly on the mixing equipment, making it difficult for changing recipes across the plant. To solve this, they used Ignition's capability to connect all their data and devices together so they could track production in real time instead of using paper. Once connected, equipment controls were automated so they could update recipes dynamically across the plant. The second issue was that mixing schedules were communicated to the operations team through a printed SAP information data sheet and then manually entered into the equipment, which as you can imagine, introduced errors and slowed production. With the new system, technical baking staff can create, edit, and delete recipes directly based on the bill of materials pulled dynamically from their SAP software, which then in turn is automatically communicated to the PLCs. Goodman Fielder's operators now have more visibility than ever. They've reduced material variance, downtime, and waste. And most importantly, this was all done without ever stopping production so they could continue delivering high-quality food products to their customers without interruption.

19:47
Kent Melville: You got to love a happy ending. Now, one thing I want to point out about these projects is their use of solutions provided by technology partners in the Ignition ecosystem. Solutions from Sepasoft, Cirrus Link, and other companies we partner with are used in many of the great projects in this year's Discover Gallery. We feel honored to have such a great ecosystem of technology partners specializing in various solutions from software, hardware, cloud services, and more. And we're happy to announce the ecosystem continues to grow. This year, we added several more companies to our partner programs and continue to offer Ignition users more ways to enhance and expand their systems. In fact, many of these partners are actually exhibiting at this very conference. So if you haven't had a chance to check them out, please make some time to say hi to them over the next few days. You may just find a cool new way to improve your systems. So, although the challenges of improving an industrial process can be difficult, Ignition has the tools to make it easier. Whether it's pulling data together from the whole company, giving access to everyone or managing raw materials, Ignition can help companies make the most of the resources they have.

21:00
Kent Melville: It really is awesome to see these companies accomplishing their sustainability missions. And there are many other members in this community who are working to improve people's lives. To show some more examples of how this community is doing that, I'm gonna hand it over to Inductive Automation's Chief Technology Architect, Kevin McClusky.

21:25
Kevin McClusky: It is good to be here. It is good to see everybody here. I am so excited to be partway through the conference. Is everybody having a good time? Thanks a lot to Kent for sharing those last few. Over the years I've had the opportunity to be on the review board for these projects that we're looking at here. As Travis mentioned, we had 80 different projects that were submitted this year, which is a record. It's the most that we've ever had, and there's so many good projects, right? We see fantastic projects every year. This year was really no exception to that. One of the things that really struck me about the projects that we reviewed this time around is how this community is using Ignition to improve people's lives on a massive scale.

22:09
Kevin McClusky: Travis talked earlier about how automation is a force multiplier. It can give single organizations, or even a single person, the power to help improve the lives of millions of others. And the next three Firebrand projects that we're gonna be highlighting are great examples of how this community is using Ignition to do just that. Let's start by taking a look at the work that Gold-certified Integrator company, the Madkour Group, is doing over in Egypt. Madkour is working with the Egyptian government as part of a massive effort to revitalize agriculture in the region. The goal of the project is, and I quote, "To turn Egypt's desert into a green paradise by reclaiming and cultivating three million acres of desert across the country." They're taking previously barren land and creating farmland to help feed the people. Standing at the edge of the project, it's farmland as far as the eye can see. The first phase is 750,000 acres. Managing 750,000 acres isn't an easy task. The Madkour Group was brought in to help build a system to bring visualization and control over that farmland and the supporting systems spread across the vast desert region of the New Valley in Toshka.

23:29
Kevin McClusky: The Egyptian government has had the engineering project underway for decades, starting with a barren area, adding pump stations, sprinkler privets, but initially with no single unified control ability for monitoring the massive engineering project. Madkour's challenge was to help build an automated irrigation system with centralized control that could be up and running quickly and scaled over time. It was a huge challenge, and they chose Ignition to help them get the job done. Using Ignition, Madkour built dynamic templates to give them the ability to build and deploy the extensive system quickly. With the Ignition platform's ease of connectivity, they empowered the operators to monitor and control all elements of the irrigation system. That includes more than 200 irrigation pump stations, five main lifting stations, 20 voltage switch gears, transformers, electrical panels, and more than 2,000 individual sprinkler privets. The new system also provides the operations team with analytics and reporting tools to help provide that real-time insight and improve the decision-making. A new alarm system was also implemented in Ignition to help them take quick corrective action to ensure the system keeps working properly.

24:42
Kevin McClusky: The project's first phase has been a big success. It's helped the Egyptian government work toward its final three million acre goal of creating new farmland to improve agriculture in the country, setting the stage for an improved food supply in the entire region, even beyond Egypt's borders in the near future. The additional food this effort could supply will help many people, and I'm proud that the Madkour Group is using Ignition on such an ambitious project and with the ability to impact so many lives. Coming to our next project, this next Firebrand Award winner shows a different way another Ignition Community member is helping people by improving health. Cinfa is the leading pharmaceutical brand in Spanish homes. Its mission is to provide high-quality healthcare treatments to everyone. Their product line covers everything from well-known and common treatments, such as ibuprofen, to highly specialized medicines to support transplants and to fight cancer. Cinfa's pharmaceutical plants in Spain manufacture over 126 million treatments yearly, which are supplied to over 100 countries. Recently, they were having a challenge at one of their newest facilities. The facility had a high degree of automation, and a multitude of isolated systems managed all the production and logistics operations.

26:08
Kevin McClusky: This included more than a dozen legacy applications for ERP, LIMS, RFID, and many more. The challenge was creating a hub where all of the applications could interface without replacing the applications or changing their native communication protocols. The system also had to monitor and dispatch messages according to their production plan. The solution envisioned by Cinfa was not a simple communication middleware, but an orchestrator of all the messages at each step of the production that were required at a specific moment based on the overall status of the plant. When Cinfa realized that without such a system, they could not run their new plant in the way that they wanted to, it was less than a year before the launch date of their first batch of products, which, given the size of the operation, regulatory landscape, it wasn't much time at all. Producing pharmaceutical products to help people isn't an easy business to be in, and introducing a new system that late in the game of a greenfield startup can be really challenging, especially in the life sciences industry. Cinfa chose Ignition as their platform because of its ability to connect to other systems and data, create flexible architectures, rapidly design new applications, and its ability to build a system compliant with 21 CFR Part 11 regulations.

27:28
Kevin McClusky: Cinfa's Industrial Systems Manager, José Esteban González, worked with production teams to bring in the best technology to meet the plant's needs. He worked with Marco Busatto, the Director of Industry 4.0, at Gold-certified integration company IDOM. They chose to use Ignition because of its ability to connect to data through various protocols, including web APIs, RESTful communication, OPC UA, and Modbus TCP, so they could connect and interface with all the plant's multiple applications and devices. Supported by Ignition's UDTs, the team created a Unified Namespace for all data exchanged across the plant, independent of connectivity protocols. It's created a centralized, non-hierarchical structure for the plant's data to be exchanged across IT and OT systems. And by adding visualization, they were able to use that data to create a new factory management system to orchestrate whole plant automation. With the new system, visibility has been increasing, human error has been reduced, productivity is up, compliance regulations have been met, and Cinfa continues to fulfill its mission to help improve the health of people around the world.

28:42
Kevin McClusky: It's pretty special to me to think of the good that Cinfa is doing every day, and I feel privileged that Ignition is a part of that. So far, I've talked about how this community is using Ignition to help improve people's lives through revitalizing agriculture and improving health. The organization showcased in the next project also enhances people's lives, but in a much different way, through the power of the universe. Welcome to Fermilab, one of the nation's top quantum physics particle accelerators. Since 1967, Fermilab has run experiments to try to discover answers to some of life's greatest mysteries, such as what we're made of and how the universe began. As the United States premier particle physics laboratory, they work with some of the nation's and the world's most advanced particle accelerator experiments to dig down to the smallest building blocks of matter and uncover their secrets. Fermilab is located on more than 6,000 acres in Illinois, but its organization extends far beyond that. It has thousands of scientists that are spread across the world and collaborating with more than 50 countries on physics experiments based in the United States and elsewhere. The main focus of Fermilabs experimentation is neutrinos.

30:02
Kevin McClusky: If you don't know, neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe and can help us understand many aspects of it, including its structure, evolution, and the universe's origins. Neutrinos have virtually no mass, so they rarely interact with other matter. In fact, trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies each second without leaving a trace. It just happened to you. It just happened again. The incredibly small size of these neutrinos really makes them hard to detect, which is why scientists use advanced cryogenic systems inside their experiments. The lab's newest experiment, the Short Baseline Neutrino Program, or SBNP for short, basically it works by taking a look at everything, and before those neutrinos are detected, particles are accelerated over a long distance before smashing into each other, creating a beam of neutrinos. The SBNP monitors that beam using a large-volume detector filled with 112 tons of liquid-cooled argon. The atomic nuclei of the liquid argon are so dense that some of the neutrinos, a few of them, from the particle beam interact with the argon.

31:13
Kevin McClusky: They leave traces of their movements through that argon. These movement trails, as they're called, can then be analyzed, giving Fermilab scientists important information about the neutrinos properties. However, to keep that argon in a liquid state, it must be cooled to extremely low temperatures, so around -200 degrees Fahrenheit, or -130 Celsius. This is done through an elaborate cryogenic system, which uses numerous pressure sensors, control valves, and other devices. The lab's old system required that all of these devices be manually configured, and alarm management had to be handled in the PLC. If you ever tried to do that, you know how hard it can be to make that maintainable. It resulted, for them, in a hard-coded set of alarms that was risky and labor-intensive to change. Inspired by solutions that were sitting in other laboratories around the world, Controls Engineer Trevor Nichols set out to create a modern system for Fermi that could automate the monitoring and control of these devices.

32:15
Kevin McClusky: He worked with Lead Cryogenics Engineer Michael Geynisman to implement a new solution using Ignition. Trevor used Ignition to create a library of standardized objects, and with this new framework, adding sensors, valves, and other devices really is a breeze, without any manual tag configuration needed at all. Alarm management was also moved out of the PLC and into Ignition. With Ignition, personnel are instantly alerted when problems occur so they can quickly make necessary changes to keep the system working. The new Ignition system has been a big success. With it, the team at Fermi are able to keep the experiment running efficiently with minimum effort.

32:53
Kevin McClusky: There are also plans to expand the system's use in the future. Fermilabs is working with other scientific organizations to build one of the world's largest accelerator projects, underground. The project is called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE for short. It's an ambitious project that will take years to complete, and Ignition will be a critical part of the system's operation when it's completed later this decade. So, I've got to tell you, I've always been fascinated with physics, and for me personally, the fact that Ignition's being used to help engineers run experiments like this is incredible. The future breakthroughs that Fermilab is going to create and the scientists could find could have the potential to shape our future and help us understand the very fabric of the universe. It's so exciting to me that this community is part of all that. As you can see... Sure, you can clap.

33:58
Kevin McClusky: As you can see from all the Firebrand projects that we've shared with you this morning, this Ignition community is making a big impact around the world. But you don't have to work for a world-class laboratory or a multinational company or a government agency to make a difference. Some individual members of the community have already made a difference. Some individual members of this community are using the platform to make a big impact in the local cities where they live. For more about that, please welcome to the stage Inductive Automation's Industry and Education Engagement Manager, David Grussenmeyer.

34:38
David Grussenmeyer: Thank you, Kevin. We just saw some incredible examples from this year's Firebrand projects of how Ignition users are making positive impacts on our future and in the lives of millions of people. When it comes to making an impact, one of the most meaningful ways to do that is by making a difference in the communities we live in. As part of my job, I get to work with people who are using Ignition to help improve their local communities by leveraging the power of automation. They're doing this through efforts to improve access to life-saving medical supplies, food, community centers and more.

35:13
David Grussenmeyer: And I'm excited to share those stories with you this morning. Last year we were inspired by the volunteer work that many of you did. Hundreds of community members donated their time to help build a new Ignition system for Room In The Inn, an organization dedicated to helping those struggling with homelessness in middle Tennessee. It's an amazing project that won a Firebrand Award last year and it inspired us to launch our own Community Impact Program. The program allows for individuals to apply for a free Ignition license in order to create a non-commercial project that benefits their community. So we launched this program last September, and many community members have applied for their project to be part of the program. And one of the first projects that we approved was for the charity organization SERV Kent. The SERV in SERV Kent stands for Service by Emergency Response Volunteers.

36:07
David Grussenmeyer: They're nonprofit organization that provides emergency courier services for transporting vital medical supplies such as blood donations, test samples, and medication for the major hospitals in Kent, England. The charity typically makes over 6,000 transportations a year and has made around 50,000 deliveries since its founding. There are approximately 250 volunteers in the organization who cover all of their own expenses so that SERV Kent can provide its critical service free of charge. And that saves the hospitals a lot of money, which then they can use to improve patient care. In 2019, the UK-based Premier integration company BIJC got involved with SERV Kent by donating their services to the charity. They worked to develop a cloud-based management system using Ignition. With the system, the charity's 250 volunteers can now manage their own work schedule by adding or removing themselves for the days that they're available. Managers can also track their volunteers locations and display them on a map, which helps protect lone workers and allows for coordinators to make real-time decisions.

37:15
David Grussenmeyer: The project has played a critical role in helping the charity fulfill its mission to help save lives in the area. And in order to keep that project funded, BIJC's founder Chris Taylor applied to the Community Impact Program. Now, Chris sits on the board of SERV Kent and was the one who volunteered the support of BIJC. Not only has BIJC built the new system for the charity, but they've also covered the licensing costs to keep it running. As part of the program, Inductive Automation is proud to support this project by providing free upgrades for Ignition, including the upcoming release of 8.3. This will help BIJC engineers maintain the charity's volunteer management system free of software costs for years to come.

38:00
David Grussenmeyer: Now, through his work on SERV Kent, Chris Taylor has greatly impacted his local community. Chris has also been a pillar of our own Ignition community for over a decade. In fact, Chris was one of the first community members to take the long flight over the Atlantic Ocean to join us for our first community conference. Chris has been an outspoken advocate for Ignition. He has worked on hundreds of projects over the years, and shares his knowledge with many people. He's appeared at multiple events and participated in numerous presentations and discussions. In fact, you may have caught one of his presentations yesterday on stage three. Through his work, Chris has brought many new people into the Ignition community and helped thousands more people improve their processes with the software. For his passion for helping people with Ignition, both in his local community and in our user community, we're happy to recognize Chris Taylor with a special Firebrand Award for community involvement. Chris, can you stand up real quick?

39:12
David Grussenmeyer: Truly, thank you from Inductive Automation, for being an amazing member of the Ignition Community. Now, we have some great community members doing some really impactful work in their local area. Another person using Ignition to help their community is Taylor Daming, who's using it to help fight food insecurity in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Taylor and his neighbors discovered that many people in their community struggle to get access to fresh food 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The local food pantries in the area do wonderful work, but they typically are, they're only open during normal business hours and often only once per week. During the pandemic, many communities across the country developed innovative solutions to address this challenge, one of which was setting up community refrigerators. These fridges provide access to fresh food throughout the day and year round. The neighbors started by finding a good location to set up a community fridge.

40:09
David Grussenmeyer: They met with the local police chief and got permission to put the first fridge on the front steps of the community policing center, not only securing a location, but also a power source for the fridge. They worked with a local granting organization to get some startup funds. And when they got their first donation of $2,000, they were able to buy a new refrigerator and materials to build a shelter to protect against the cold weather. Next, they partnered with two local grocery stores to rescue their unsold food that they can in turn stock their community fridge with. Food waste is a significant problem in the United States with estimates of 30-40% of the food supply goes uneaten. With projects like the community fridge, a portion of the food can go to hungry people instead of landfills, and that's what this project's all about.

40:59
David Grussenmeyer: Thanks to the donations of participating stores and many other generous volunteers, they've been able to keep their community fridges stocked full of food donations 24/7, for free. To ensure that the food stays cool and fresh, they use Ignition Edge and MQTT to monitor the refrigeration energy usage, temperature, and when the doors are opened and closed. They also use Ignition to get automated reports for the fridge's activity, and alarms for when they need to take action. So for example, if the doors to the fridge were left open for an extended period of time, they can dispatch a volunteer to the fridge before any of the food is spoiled. Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Taylor and his neighbors, the community fridge has been a great success and they've even expanded by opening another location in the area, thanks to a very sizable grant from the Green Bay Packers. We're happy to donate the software to this project, and we are looking forward to continuing to support the efforts of Taylor and his neighbors as they expand to supply more community fridges throughout Green Bay.

42:04
David Grussenmeyer: Now another example of an Ignition user trying to help their local community is Andrew Tait. Andrew is a new Ignition user. While earning his Ignition credential through Inductive University, Andrew had an idea of how to help the village where he lives. Andrew lives on the Shetland Islands, a group of clustered islands located about 130 miles north of Scotland's mainland. With a population of only a few thousand people spread out across 500 square miles, it's pretty sparsely populated, which can make connecting with your neighbors a little difficult. One place that makes it just a little easier in the village of Bixter is their community center.

42:44
David Grussenmeyer: The Bixter Hall has served as the village's local hub for 96 years. Over that time, that's hosted craft fairs, weddings, funerals, parties, dance lessons, and the occasional yoga class. They don't have much in the way of entertainment or venues in Shetland, so the Bixter Hall is local getaway where community members can meet, talk, and build stronger bonds, but it's facing a big challenge. The war in Ukraine combined with government regulations has steadily increased the cost of energy. It's gone up over 360% in recent years. This is a nationwide crisis in Scotland, which has led many businesses and households to make sacrifices with their energy usage. With Bixter Hall, they've had to turn off heating completely, remove the internet, and even remove the bar's alcohol license to cut costs. All of this has meant that the hall is barely being used and without a better way to manage its energy uses, it's hard to see that changing.

43:45
David Grussenmeyer: That's where Andrew's idea came in. Although he was still learning Ignition, he wanted to use it to build an automation system to help keep the hall's energy costs down. He continued or he's currently working on an application to make it easy to book the venue, and then he wants to use Ignition to automate the hall's heating system so that when... So that it turns on only when events are scheduled and then turns off when they're over. These changes could dramatically reduce energy costs, allowing Bixter Hall to remain a hub for fostering strong community ties. Andrew's work is ongoing, and we're happy to support the effort to keep the hall open. The thing I love about this story is that it shows that you don't have to be part of a huge company or an Ignition expert to make a difference. You just have to have an idea and a drive to make it real. Dream It. Do It.

44:40
David Grussenmeyer: At Inductive Automation, we strive to support people like Andrew in realizing their vision. We do it with our software and we also do it through education with things like Inductive University and our Educational Engagement Program. Recently, we've had a lot of interest from teachers and students in using Ignition within their learning. In the last year, 65 more schools have joined our Educational Engagement Program, and now over 200 schools in the US and other countries are participating. We hope that number will grow even more in the new year as the schools start using the new course materials we recently released. This month, we published a five-part lab series that teachers can add to their curriculum. These labs help students learn about SCADA using an interactive Ignition project. Dozens have already received the materials and plan to start using them this next semester. We're excited to see how teachers use the new educational content to help teach even more students about SCADA and Ignition.

45:43
David Grussenmeyer: Helping more students through the Educational Engagement Program to learn about the benefits of automation can open up new possibilities for them and their communities, and one example of that is the Volt Institute. The Volt Institute is a vocational school located in Modesto, California. For years, manufacturing in the region suffered a skills gap crisis with hundreds of jobs going unfulfilled each year due to a lack of qualified workers. The Volt Institute's mission is to close that gap by training high-quality candidates to enter the workforce with the skills that local industrial businesses need. They partner with local businesses for mentorships, so that students can get hands-on training from active industry professionals who know exactly what it takes to succeed.

46:30
David Grussenmeyer: By working with government programs, the institute can also offer grants and scholarships to in-need students, which has been life-changing. One beneficiary of this was a local community member struggling financially and living out of their car. Through a granting program, this person enrolled at the Volt Institute for free and got valuable training. With this new knowledge, they were hired by a local manufacturing company for a good paying job. Now they can afford a place to live, and they also have a promising career ahead of them. We proudly sponsored the Volt Institute by offering full Ignition licensing for their classes. The institute's efforts are another excellent example of how members of this Ignition community use the power of automation and education to improve the lives of people in their local communities.

47:18
David Grussenmeyer: For every one of these examples I shared with you today, I know there are many more stories just like this, and I encourage you to share them with us. Our Community Impact and Educational Engagement Program are open and accepting applications year round. If you have an idea for an Ignition project to benefit your local community, or if you work for a school that wants to help more students learn about automation, I urge you to come find me. Sit down with me and my team and let's talk about it. Let's explore your ideas. Inductive Automation is here to support your efforts. Again, whether those are academic or looking to improve a community that's close to your heart, Inductive Automation is here to help you. The Community Impact and Educational Engagement Program are just two ways to do that, and there are many more efforts our company is working on to support Ignition users everywhere. To talk more about that, please welcome back to the stage Inductive Automation's Chief Operating Officer, Kat Jeschke.

48:16
Kat Jeschke: Thanks, Dave. Aren't those some incredible stories? I'm absolutely blown away by the amazing impacts this community has made using Ignition. These impacts are what inspire us all. In those examples, you saw the impact Ignition is having on this community and in the world, but behind the scenes of that, there's many groups of people who work tirelessly to enable those solutions. For example, there's the Inductive Automation team, there's our integrators, our distributors, our partners, and our customers. I'd like to highlight some of those teams for you. Many of the amazing examples you just saw were thanks to our integrators. We were born out of integration roots, and it's thanks to our Integrator Program that Inductive Automation is the best SCADA company out there. We could not do what we do without our integrators. It's been a tradition at this keynote to announce our new Premier Integrators. Our Premiers are leading the way for Ignition adoption in the industry. Reaching Premier status means that these companies have reached an expertise and experience level with Ignition that makes them the best of the best. There's five integration companies who have elevated their program status to Premier. Those are Jsat Automation, SL Controls, Mac Engineering, EOSYS, and Deloitte Australia Smart Manufacturing. Let's give them a round of applause.

50:00
Kat Jeschke: Another team I'd like to highlight is Inductive Automation Australia sitting right over there. At last year's conference, we announced the opening of our new office in Australia. Since that time, there's been a great growth down there led by Francisco [Carrión] and Jamila [Auret]. As the team has grown, they've needed more space. So earlier this year, we moved into a beautiful new office in downtown Brisbane. I was able to attend the open house, and the appreciation and enthusiasm from the Australian customers was palpable. To help drive even more interest in the region, our team also spent some time on the road. In July, they visited the cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, and Perth, and hosted a series of Ignition Discover Day events. Each event featured an Inductive Automation speaker and an end user case study. It was geared to help grow our integration community in the country. The road shows were a big success and each city was at capacity.

51:08
Kat Jeschke: The next team I'd like to highlight is the Inductive Automation team. I wanted to take a moment here to share with you what I think is one of the most important factors in the success of Inductive Automation, and that is the care that each one of our team members has. We now have over 300 employees, and the main differentiating factor in our success is that we hire people who truly are passionate about what they do and care about others. The focus of this keynote is on the people and the heart and soul of Inductive Automation is exactly that. All the amazing individuals who make up each division of our company. It's thanks to them and their work that we're successful and our success is measured by how much we're helping this community grow. Our mission is your mission, and that is what our entire team works on day in, day out. Every division, department, and individual plays an important role in helping you accomplish your mission. From Software Engineering to Support, to Training, to PR, Sales, Marketing, IT, Cyber, Finance, Legal, it takes the entire team.

52:29
Kat Jeschke: I started out today by saying how much I care about this community and all the people in it. For the last 12 years, this community has come together at this conference to celebrate and build. Every year, we get asked, when are you gonna expand this conference? We've been hesitant. We love this venue. We have so many great memories here. From the announcement of Inductive University, to the unveiling of Ignition 8, and when Travis and Kevin faced up on the first Build-a-Thon, all those moments happened right here on stage one of the Harris Center. The Harris Center has been the home of ICC. It has served as the ideal location for us to grow this conference, and we've gotten amazing support from the venue staff over the years. But as everyone who's aware, we are at full capacity at this venue, and for the past few years, the demand to attend this conference has exceeded our capacity to host it here at the Harris Center. So in order to expand the reach of ICC, I'm so excited to share with you that starting next September, ICC will move to a new venue in downtown Sacramento.

54:02
Kat Jeschke: We will be hosting it at the convention center, which has been fully remodeled. It's now a state-of-the-art venue with expansive exhibit halls, open-air patios, meeting rooms, and over 200,000 square feet of space for this community to network, share, and learn for years to come. It's also surrounded by hotels and restaurants, so you can experience some of the best hospitality Sacramento has to offer, all within walking distance from the convention center. We can't wait to make new memories with you next year, so we hope you'll join us in 2025 for the next chapter of growth for the Ignition community.

54:43
Kat Jeschke: And that brings us to a close of today's Keynote. We hope you've enjoyed exploring the different ways that this Ignition community is making a positive impact in the world. To all the community members highlighted today, and to all the others who are doing great work around the world, thank you for trusting our software with your ideas. Ignition is a great toolkit, but it's what you build with it that really makes an impact. And we saw the incredible impacts you're having today, both big and small, in the lives of others. Inductive Automation is proud to support you in your missions, and we promise to continue to do everything we can to help turn your ideas into reality. So from me and all the teams at Inductive Automation, thank you for your trust and support. It means the world to us. Thank you.

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, 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.