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.

In this final session of the conference, we'll look forward to what's next. Join Inductive Automation speakers for exciting presentations and an engaging Q&A panel about the road ahead for Ignition's development, the expansion of technical support, and the evolution of Inductive Automation's customer experience.

Transcript:

00:00
Colby Clegg: Well, well, well, well, here we are. Thank you; we made it. We made it to the end, huh? This has been an incredible week. It's so great to see you all here. These are the diehards. And so we are excited to share this last session with you. Over the last few days, we've had so many conversations. We've explored so many ideas, shared stories, reconnected, and really have explored how this community can continue to push the boundaries of automation forward, blending your ingenuity with modern technology, of course, with Ignition as a platform in the middle and binding those together.

00:39
Colby: Okay, but guess what? We're not done yet. In fact, this year, we have something extra special for you, which is why we're doing this closing keynote for the first time. See, over the last couple days, we couldn't pack everything that we wanted into two keynotes, so we've created this story arc concluding this afternoon. If you can remember, way back to two days ago, we introduced you to Ignition 8.3. We talked a lot about the product itself, but we also talked a little bit about the values and philosophies behind it that we continue to try to express through our product.

01:14
Colby: Yesterday, we reviewed the state of the Ignition community and the many, many incredible projects that you are all doing each day. We saw the way that Ignition is being put to use in a very vital way to impact our world. In between, you've seen many incredible sessions, and there've been subjects as diverse as our industry itself. I feel like we've had something for everyone, and I truly hope that every one of you is feeling inspired, invigorated, and ready to go back home and get back to work to create the future today. But how about that word future? We've talked about where we are; we talked about what's going on, but what about where we're going?

01:58
Colby: Well, that's exactly what we're gonna talk about this afternoon in this session entitled, "Where Do We Go From Here?" It's a fitting way to close because after this session, it's gonna be an entire year before we're back together for the first time in a new location. Also, knowing how much all of us leave this conference, so fired up to get out there and do more, we thought it'd be the perfect opportunity, the perfect place to conclude this week's discussions and launch into what comes after today.

02:26
Colby: Now, perhaps you're thinking that that refers to the software, and perhaps you're even thinking, "Now hold on, I just got my mind wrapped around Ignition 8.3, I can't handle anymore." Well, don't worry, Ignition 8.3 is part of it, but it's only a slice. Ignition 8.3, in fact, plays an important step in where we wanna go, and we'll talk about that. But there's a lot more that we want to talk about as well. I hope you've noticed that in everything we present, there's plenty of practical information, but it's built on a foundation of values and principles. And this is so important to us.

03:01
Colby: Steve and Wendi-Lynn Hechtman founded this company to bring their experience as an integration business into the industrial software space that had become transactional and, I guess if I'm gentle about it, just cynical. Now, we, the leaders of Inductive Automation, are committed to carrying those values forward, and we fully recognize the important role we play in improving the industry through our value-oriented approach.

03:28
Colby: We believe that our values make us unique, and they lead us to doing a lot of things in our own way. This has led us to... It's led me to create a little phrase that we've started to use inside of our company called "uniquely inductive." We use this to highlight the things that make us different, the way we do things in a special way, things that lead to an unprecedented user experience, to industry-leading technology, and a dedication to the future. Today, you're gonna hear that phrase probably said a few times, because we're gonna explore some of the unique things that we're doing for the future.

04:06
Colby: First, the software, yes. What Ignition 8.3 represents in the big picture, and most importantly, where we see that picture going. But next, another key product that we offer, support. We've been famous since the beginning for our support and training. And we know that it's a cornerstone of who we are and what we offer to the industry. So I'd like to have our Directors of Support Services come out and talk about some of the important milestones that we have in front of us.

04:33
Colby: Finally, we have a special surprise. I won't say too much about it right now, but I will say that I am extremely excited to finally share it with you because I think that it perfectly represents what I mean by saying that we continue to deliver our values through our products. So that might seem like a lot, but we'll get through it, and we'll make sure to leave some time for everyone's favorite part of ICC, our panel discussion.

05:00
Colby: All of our speakers this afternoon will be here to answer your questions. I don't know if you have any left after all these sessions and conversations we've been having, but we'll see. And it's your opportunity to catch Carl and I on stage together and see what you can throw at us. So we'll see how that goes. With that, let's get into it. Please help me welcome to stage Carl Gould.

05:25
Carl Gould: All right, thanks, Colby. Good afternoon, everybody. Returning attendees of ICC might recognize this as the part of the conference where I get to be on stage and prognosticate about somewhat vague future plans. And I intend to do exactly that. But first, a note about the future of 8.3 itself. So I want everybody to remember that when we release Ignition 8.3, that 8-3-0 will be the first of many 8.3 releases. Just like 8.1, we will continue to release incremental improvements to 8.3 roughly every five weeks using our so-called release train methodology. And these releases are commonly packed with fixes, yes, but also performance improvements, polishes to the UI. And we also use them to continually build the value of the product by adding functionality to the new features we add.

06:21
Carl: So in the case of 8.3, this means things like adding to the Form Component, for example, which has a lot of widgets right out of the box, but there's more widgets we have planned, because in order to make our release deadlines, we have to get pretty strict about defining what is the minimum viable product for release, but then we use the release train releases to expand on that minimum. Take the Power Historian as another example. On the initial release, it's not going to work right out of the box with the redundancy mode, but that is definitely something we plan on adding synchronization for in a point release in 8.3 something.

07:02
Carl: Event Streams is another great example here where we have tons of ideas for new sources and handlers. We've been sitting on a bunch of ideas, kind of waiting for Event Streams to arrive. New ideas for service connectors that will expand the possibilities of connectivity for Ignition. We have plans for an AWS connector that will allow you to connect to AWS, SNS, SQS, and S3 services. We plan on being able to consume OPC UA events and ingest them into Event Streams. I believe we mentioned before that the MongoDB Module is going to be adding support for change stream subscriptions. We're also looking at integrating with technologies like JMS and AMQP. There's all kinds of really compelling ideas to add the functionality for sources and handlers for Event Streams so that you can continue migrating a lot of your applications to be more event-driven and less reliant on polling so that they're more scalable.

08:04
Carl: And looking past 8.3, again, we're going to get back to a faster release cycle, two to three years, we think is probably about the sweet spot for major releases, and we're gonna fix this numbering scheme, but it won't be Ignition XP. I'm gonna hold the line on that one. But hopefully I don't have to ever explain why we skipped a version number again, 'cause that's getting tiresome.

08:28
Carl: Okay, so with that out of the way about how 8.3 is gonna line out, I do wanna get into some ideas of what's in the future for Ignition past 8.3 in the next major version. A disclaimer: just because I'm up on stage here and have a microphone does not mean these are contractual obligations. We may not deliver all these in the next major release, but we're damn sure we are gonna try.

08:55
Carl: So let's start with the platform, as we always do. We spend a lot of time around here obsessing about Ignition as a platform. A huge, huge part of 8.3 was in renovating the platform to make sure it's really well poised and well suited to take advantage of today's architectural deployment approaches. But of course we never finished, so here are some things we wanna continue improving about the Ignition platform, and starting with scripting.

09:18 C
Carl: I was trying to get ahead of this question by putting it on the slides, but I've already answered it at least half a dozen times in the last few days, so oh well. Okay, let's talk about scripting. So we use Python 2 in Ignition, and I get asked all the time about plans to upgrade to Python 3. So a little bit of background for anyone who is not aware. The embedded scripting engine in Ignition is an implementation of Python 2 in Java called Jython. And it is a very powerful and effective approach. You all use scripting to great effect in your applications every day. Python 2 is objectively a great language. If Python 3 didn't exist, I don't think there would be too many complaints about Python 2.

10:05
Carl: The engine itself is very fast, very stable, and interestingly, the way that we've integrated it into Ignition, it allows you to, in your scripts, interact directly with Ignition's object structure because it's using a shared memory, which is pretty interesting and powerful. So if it's so great, why am I even talking about it? What's the motivation in the first place to think about moving to Python 3? I really think that it boils down to two major issues. Number one is that when you go to learn Python, you learn Python 3 by default, 'cause it has been the most recent version of Python for quite some time, and then you come to Ignition, and it's Python 2, and you have some cognitive dissonance there.

10:48
Carl: The other reason, the other motivation, is that you have found some external library for Python and you wanna bring it into Ignition. And these are usually libraries in the statistics or machine learning space, but it could be anything. There's a ton of great open-source libraries out there for Python, and then you bring them into Ignition, doesn't work.

11:09
Carl: So I'm sympathetic to these motivations. I think they are perfectly valid criticisms and... So why don't we just upgrade? Well, there's a few problems. Number one is that Python 3 is just a different language than Python 2, and apparently the Python folks aren't as into continuity as we are because they aren't backwards compatible languages. So if we were to just magically upgrade to Python 3, all your scripts would break, which we think is a bit of a problem. So that's one problem. There's another problem as well, which is that Python is a language, and then there's various runtimes, engines that run that language. And the one we run is Python and Jython. The one that you run externally, what if you were just to go use regular Python, is called CPython. And they're not the same thing. So even if there were a Jython 3 that we upgraded to, those external libraries that you found probably wouldn't work anyways, even though they're both Python 3, because most of those libraries are actually written in C.

12:12
Carl Gould: And then the real reason is that there isn't a version of Jython 3 for us to upgrade to anyhow. So these are all just excuses. But they're good ones.

12:21
Carl Gould: Okay, so how do we move forward? Is this just an impasse forever? No, it's not impasse forever. Here's the plan, so we are going to stick with the current Jython 2 scripting engine in Ignition for the foreseeable future because of backwards compatibility. So we plan on continuing to embed that engine in Ignition so that all your scripts you have now continue to work forever. We have forked this engine; it's an open-source project. We've forked it; we are comfortable maintaining it. It's stable; it's performant. I think it just needs a little bit of a rebranding makeover. We'll call it the Ignition Scripting Language or something.

13:01
Carl: But that's not all. What we wanna do in the next major version is add support for external scripting engines as a new extension point in Ignition. And so what this will allow us and other module authors to do is to gracefully integrate external scripting engines with Ignition, and this will allow us to have multiple scripting engines that could be supported. So, for example, CPython 3, absolutely. That's probably the first one we'll do. It seems like the most natural fit. But also, there's some really interesting other options that we are looking at that could offer some additional capabilities. Node.js might be really attractive. I think R has some really interesting possibilities as well. Rust Go, you can imagine any kind of external scripting language could be possible to integrate. I don't think we're gonna make first-party integrations for all those scripting engines because I think the support department would go mad, but we may pick one or two.

14:01
Carl: There's also some interesting benefits beyond different languages that you may have learned libraries in or expertise in already that offer additional capabilities. One is that by externalizing the scripting engine from the platform's process, we're able to offer, I think, stronger security guarantees. So the whole shared memory concept of our current scripting engine is incredibly powerful and flexible, but it also means that you need to have a lot of trust in the scripts that you run as you do because you write them. But there is some compelling security arguments to be made for the idea that in an externalized scripting engine, we could better sandbox the scripting environment, run it at a lower privileged user, and maybe sandbox its capabilities to access the various computing resources on the host. So that could offer some compelling security guarantees in some sorts of deployments.

15:04
Carl: Also, there is some stability reasons why externalizing the scripting engine might be beneficial. If you write a script that eats up a bunch of CPU or memory in the current system, you're eating up the CPU or memory share that the gateway is trying to use. If we externalize that scripting engine again, that isolation might help the stability of the platform. So that's some compelling reasons for us to consider these ideas, and we'll take those into effect as we implement this idea. So that's the plan for scripting. So I don't have to answer that anymore. Except for next year.

15:50
Carl: Now, if we add a whole bunch of new scripting languages, the development experience in the designer is not gonna get better. It's hard enough to create a compelling development experience for one language, not to mention three or four, right? So what we wanna do here is integrate support for LSP and the designer. LSP is a protocol, language server protocol, that allows for integration between a IDE code editing application and a code execution environment like Ignition of the designer. So the idea would be that you could really gracefully use an external editor like VS Code, which does support LSP for your development experience, write your scripts in VS Code. Some of you do this already today, but if we integrate with LSP, it will be a lot smoother, and that should be really nice.

16:46
Carl: Let's talk real quickly about embedded Java. So Ignition runs on Java. The version of Java that we embed in the gateway is currently Java version 17. Most of you probably don't ever think about this, which is great; that's how we like it. But some of you who write modules or embed Ignition on limited computing resources, embedded devices, might be thinking about this. And so in the next major version, we're looking at upgrading the version of Java to probably Java version 21, maybe version 25, depending on the timing of the release. There are some really exciting cutting-edge performance benefits in these newer versions of Java, like virtual threads that we are very excited about playing with, so we're looking forward to this improvement, and it should result in some improved performance for everybody, so that'll be nice. Okay.

17:36
Carl: Let's move on past the platform and talk a little bit about applications and some, I think, very exciting ideas we have for how applications work with Ignition. So we like to say, we often say that Ignition doesn't really do anything out of the box, right? It's a toolkit that you all use to build amazing industrial applications. And a big part of our strategy has been to make sure that we don't get bogged down by any one vertical industry's specific application needs. We really like to keep Ignition very broadly applicable to many, many different industries. And we definitely plan on staying absolutely true to that philosophy. But I think that once you either build or connect to a contextualized data model, hook up to a UNS, or build one directly in Ignition or a blend of both.

18:33
Carl: I believe that we can start offering some directly usable application functionality right out of the box in Ignition. So, I'm tentatively calling this idea Zero Development Applications. It seems to be catching on. We'll see if it makes it to the final marketing of these things, but consider this a whatever codename for now. What does this mean? So, in addition to the ability for you to create your own custom applications, which is totally our bread and butter, that's not going anywhere. We also want to add some pre-made applications that you could choose to add to Ignition. And they would give you some application functionality that would work right out of the box with no development beyond creating or connecting to a data model. So we have three of these ZDAs currently identified, and I wanna briefly introduce them to you today. Number one is an ad hoc dashboarding application. So, of course, you can build custom dashboarding applications in Perspective. Many of you do that all the time.

19:31
Carl: But we wanna have a different kind of dashboarding application available. One where all of the functionality is completely pre-made. All of the widgets are pre-designed by us. All of the data handling and data binding logic is built into the product, as well as all of the logic for end users to be able to build their own and save custom real-time dashboards. So again, once you have a tag model, we really have all the information we need to be able to do this, and so you could install this module and have a dashboarding application up with absolutely no development.

20:09
Carl: The second ZDA is an alarm analysis application. So using Ignition's alarm status data model as well as the alarm journal data model, we plan on building an alarm analysis application that can offer status views as well as historical views and analytic reporting. So these are things like analysis of alarming KPIs, like root cause analysis and flood rates, and top-end alarms, finding chattering alarms, those sorts of things. And the last ZDA that we have planned to build in the next major version is a historian explorer. So this would be an advanced charting interface that has ad hoc charting, statistical charting, multivariate analysis, as well as things like time-over-time comparison charts. And the interesting thing about this historian-explorer idea is that it would be totally engine-agnostic. So it would be agnostic as to the storage engine of the history. Remember all the discussion about the the new tag history API that's in 8.3? Well, part of that design is to support this idea so this user interface could be laid on top of any type of historian backend. So how do these applications fit inside of Ignition? They will be their own modules. So they can be used standalone with Ignition, but they could be purchased à la carte and won't have dependencies on the Perspective or the Vision module, for example. They'll be their own standalone application module.

21:46
Carl: And they'll have their own login and session management, and navigation infrastructure. So they'll sort of create their own new application surface area. And if you have more than one ZDA installed on the same gateway, they'll sort of zipper together into their own little navigation structure. So if you had the alarm analysis ZDA and the historian explorer, you would be able to log into one application and have both of those bits of functionality in perhaps a TAV navigation structure or something like that. So I started off by talking about how this ZDA idea will be different from the applications that you build in the designer and that they stand on their own. But you can also use them inside of your application. So perhaps this is, I think, the most interesting part of this idea is that if you also have Perspective and are building your own application inside of Perspective, these ZDA modules will also expose their functionality as components in Perspective so that you can embed them directly in your applications and use them that way if that's a better fit for what you're doing.

23:00
Carl: So we're pretty excited about that idea. Of course, the thing we're focused on right now is actually getting 8.3 out the door. But we do have a lot of exciting plans, including the ones I just shared with you right now. So a little glimpse into the future, and we're pretty excited about it. And I'm sure some of you are excited as well. And with that, I'm gonna now pass it back to Colby, and we'll keep on going.

23:31
Colby: Carl and I have been doing this for a long time, literally since the beginning. So while I sometimes think that my memory is getting a little fuzzy these days, I do know for a fact that he and I have discussed every major idea, release, and strategy over that 21-year time period. And so I say that because I wanna say this, which is that I really have never been more excited for where we are than I am right now. He barely scratched the surface of some of the ideas that we have post 8.3. I think with the emphasis on getting 8.3 out, we don't dare to dream too much about presenting them, but it's a very exciting time. So whether you've been with us for those entire 20 years or you just learned about Ignition here this week, this is a very exciting time to be part of this community. Okay, so making software is great, but do you know where the real magic happens? In getting people to use it. So, if magic is performed by magicians, that makes our Support Services division the veritable Hogwarts of automation.

24:34
Colby: From conjuring up incredible solutions to exercising the demons of performance issues trans-mutating raw engineers into world-class Ignition experts, our Support Services division does that every day. Still, we know that we can continue to expand the level of service we offer, and we work constantly to try to find new ways to improve. To talk more about how we're doing that right now, I would like to have you help me welcome to the stage our Co-Directors of Support Services, the real wizards of Inductive Place, James Hunt and Marcus Bellamy.

25:20
Marcus Bellamy: Thank you for that very generous introduction, Colby. Good afternoon, everyone. As Colby mentioned, we're here to invite you into the dark arts of troubleshooting, the mysteries of Ignition, and to really get down to why that Perspective worker thread is showing a script transform 300 times in my thread dump. But all jokes aside, everyone, providing high-quality tech support is a very demanding job and necessitates a huge team of dedicated professionals. So today what James and I wanna do is invite you into our world, into support services, highlight our collaborative workflows, our reimagined onboarding process, technical development initiatives, and of course expanded access across many different channels. All of this, as you'll soon come to realize, is really about one mission, and that's to make sure that we're providing the best support experience to you no matter where you're at in your Ignition journey.

26:23
James Hunt: This really boils down to meaning that what we're about in terms of support services is constantly refining our ticket workflows to drive down response times.

26:31
Marcus: As well as finding ways to make more information accessible to more people across multiple communications channels.

26:37
James: We're constantly striving to break through any obstacles that stand between the success of your project.

26:43
Marcus: And to sum this all up, Support Services has your back, no matter the project, no matter the challenge.

26:51
James: One of the things that really defines support services and makes us uniquely inductive is our close relationship with development. And the vital aspect of that relationship is bringing the customer perspective to Ignition development. With 8.3 just around the corner and plans already forming with the next generation of what Ignition will be, this is where Support Services really shines. We're your advocate in that Ignition development lifecycle.

27:16
Marcus: That being said, we work very closely with development's product teams from the genesis of an idea to its creation and ultimately its public release that's made all available for you all. We have a bevy of senior software support services staff, and they come from software support, they come from training, they come from documentation, applications engineering, and that's just to name a few. They collaborate deeply with the product teams to make sure that we're giving all of you a best-in-class product experience.

27:48
James: Our work doesn't stop there. We're constantly contributing to basically the greater review process throughout release cycles by providing feedback and analysis at every stage of that release. To give you a peek under the hood of how we do what we do, I think we really need to start with what the defect analysis team is. And basically, their primary function is doing in-depth root cause analysis for bugs and many more issues. And they basically support and back-end our software support engineers, providing basically that ability to help you and basically doing that analysis, replicating an issue, and finding a solution for you every day.

28:26
Marcus: And then concurrent with that process, we also have an internal applications engineering team who's taking the insights that we derive from those interactions of DAs, support engineers, support engineers back to DAs, and they're making more robust internal diagnostics tools for our software support team. And when we have interactions with you, it streamlines our troubleshooting process greatly.

28:42
James: And this kind of leads into another key aspect of what we do is working closely with development. Our documentation team basically assesses how best to harness all of that technical knowledge and information that we have and basically deliver that to you through various resources like the User Manual, knowledge-based articles, Inductive University videos, and many more things. And then all of that kind of goes into really helping us upskill our teams internally and enhancing your learning experience.

29:17
Marcus: Many of you have been on the phone with us, have been through email with us, and you're on the call and we're referencing; I've got to ask back-end. I've got to ask front-end. So to round out this big picture that James is putting to you, we also have internal dedicated Slack channels where our support engineers can interact with product experts in real time while working with you so that we can suss out these really heavy troubleshooting issues. And I think that that collaboration, those collaborative workflows, really lend to the high-quality support that we're always trying to drive.

29:50
James: And this really plays into what we're trying to do in terms of trying to provide a responsive support experience. To assist you when you reach out to us. And this is really part of the greater picture in terms of us refining our onboarding process for old users and new. And really kind of bringing new ways to bring you into the Ignition ecosystem, which I think is fundamental in terms of really enhancing your skill levels and bringing everybody up to speed in terms of what's out, latest and greatest with Ignition. And I think this all kind of plays into what our one of our bigger goals is really kind of like... support services wants to put you in the driver's seat of your development.

30:28
Marcus: With that, you've got to know that we take your learning of Ignition very, very seriously, and where that comes from is because if we know that we can communicate how to use Ignition to you but then also layer that onto how to make you be more effective with Ignition, two things happen. One, you're freer to innovate, and two, you can dramatically enhance the operations of your plant, of your industry, whatever it may be.

30:58
James: Exactly. This all boils down to us really placing a high importance on empowering our customers. That's you guys. We want you guys to have a top-notch, omni-channel experience with us. And speaking of channels, we'd be remiss if we didn't say Inductive University is turning a big 10 this year.

31:17
Marcus: Happy birthday IU, happy birthday IU. So if you're like me, you're wondering what's next for IU. And I've got the big secret. In a big way, we're putting you all at the forefront of IU's next development phase. Our documentation team under Paul Scott is poised to bring IU into the future by addressing the needs of our diverse user base. What we're gonna be doing to achieve that is creating learning paths that are actually correspondent to skill level. And what this means is that users that are being newly onboarded to Ignition, as well as you veterans out there that have a lot of accumulated experience, will have a more personalized way to derive maximum benefit from the platform each and every day.

32:06
James: Also playing into that, expect to see a course that is really devoted to our newer users, basically helping bringing you into the Ignition ecosystem. On top of that, we're dedicating a track to really kind of focus on our intermediate users in terms of helping them upskill their knowledge in Ignition. And all of this centered around, I want you guys to know, don't worry, the existing content that we have is still gonna be there. We're still gonna have materials that cater to a broader audience. That's fundamental to what we do, but what we are doing is updating that library and really bringing it up, basically modernizing everything that we have there so it's current with the times, and we're expanding that course catalog so you can expect to see over 70 new videos in 2025.

32:52
Marcus: Thank you. You'll also note that we're gonna be putting a really hefty premium on the hands-on aspect of learning. By renovating existing courses with what we're now calling learning labs, those are gonna be tangible examples that you can learn alongside with. We believe that by providing that more hands-on experience, even more users are gonna be propelled into more and more advanced levels of proficiency with Ignition. So we're very proud of that new development and so proud that we feel empowered to be preparing for IU's 20th birthday before we've even finished celebrating the 10th, and it kind of feels parenting at this point with all of this advanced planning.

33:38
James: Yes, yes indeed. All right, at the end of the day, what our primary goal is, is we're always aiming to bring the best support experience possible in the business. That's fundamentally what defines this, but I think there's also some additional opportunities for us with our training system. I think this is an area that we can really maximize the potential in terms of building up your skill set with Ignition. And so, based on trends and customer feedback over the years, our training team overseen by Bobby McKenzie is in the midst of a grand rejuvenation of our courses. Fundamentally, what this consists of is we're doing some significant updates to our existing courses, and we're really emphasizing a focus on Perspective, as well as we're planning to grow our course catalog with four new classes on topics such as CSS and Perspective, advanced scripting, containerized deployments, and Git. Expect to see these new offerings towards the end of 2025. And really, the goal of these classes is to allow you to take Ignition to that next level. Remember, these are advanced courses. So this doesn't; our existing courses will be still there. The classic offerings will be available. Really, our goal with these new courses is basically next-level development for you to really kind of take you where you wanna go with Ignition. So please stay tuned.

35:01
Marcus: Now I know some of you out there have been in a phase where you have a new technology that you wanna integrate with Ignition. You want the thing to talk to Ignition. And you feel it's the best opportunity to call us right then. And so after that first hour of the call, you get to the second hour of the call, you get to the third hour of the call. And at about the three hour and 45 minute mark, you say to yourself, I stumped him again. I got him with this new technology that nobody in support has ever heard of, and I've got to find the manual on the wayback machine somewhere or something like that. Now technology is changing all the time, and we recognize that, so with a constantly evolving technical horizon, the software support team that we have those that you communicate with over phone and email traditionally we realize that we have to put a big premium on learning and embracing the things that you all are learning about to try and stay in step in the times with you all. So we wanna diversify the range of topics that we're studying internally just to keep up. We realize that this is gonna take an awareness of what you all are learning and to try to develop some level of expertise of the technologies that you're leveraging every day. Because at our base, what we wanna do is provide support to you no matter where your project takes you or whatever technical challenge that you confront.

36:30
James: In conjunction to that, we are in the process of implementing basically three key initiatives. They're really big focus areas for us in support services. The first one is building our own in-house PLC training lab. The goal really around that is to make those resources more easily accessible to our team and really help them to better understand the ins and outs of the devices you guys use every day. Coupled with that, we're also working on creating basically a much more dynamic and scalable testing architectures for our teams to use in the DA and software support group. And basically the goal of those new architectures is basically giving us the flexibility to replicate and test systems in a multitude of environments. And this is coupled with an additional initiative, which is basically.

37:13
James: We're constructing challenge gateways. These instances are basically different gateways and things that we've run into while supporting all of you that have been challenging. And so it produces an interesting, unique knowledge set. And so now we can actually take those things and have our team work in those environments, honing their troubleshooting skills and really building out their knowledge in various Ignition subsystems and beyond.

37:39
Marcus: And as you can all recognize, the picture that we're trying to paint with all of these initiatives is to fulfill a goal that we've had ever since I've been here and probably even since before. And that's to be able to continue to empower our user base to embrace and confront the technical challenges of today and tomorrow. And I think that our commitment to training and knowledge development is only gonna help us bring a more senior type of role within the software support role and provide a path for our engineers who are very excited about Ignition, excited about the technologies that you're using to ascend within the ranks to higher and higher levels of troubleshooting. And when we have that in place, we can continue to provide a larger range of support services for you all. And with the complexity that you present to us as far as your projects, we can speak to that and be really, really effective partners with you today and tomorrow.

38:36
James: In many different ways. One of our primary goals is making support services available to more users. That's fundamental. It's like, how can we cut down the barrier to getting access to us? And one of those examples is really centered around Core certification. Over the past year, basically, we were working towards streamlining and making that process much more accessible. And so, basically, what that means is that Core certification test is now available on our website. You guys can purchase it any time of day, start working on it, and submit it. And the cool part is, is when you submit it, it's graded immediately, and you get that grade back. So basically we're cutting down the amount of time for you to get those, basically that feedback on what you've learned. And we're tremendously proud of that project. I would also like to say thank you to all the community members that have given us feedback while we're refining that process and helping it make the product that it is today. We appreciate that.

39:32
Marcus: Another example of this expanded accessibility. This expanded access really relies with our software support offerings. What we're trying to do is take what you love about the support that you're receiving and expand it, and in this case, across continents. So as we wind things down, I wanna let everybody in on a big announcement. What we're doing locally, as always, is continuing to bring more support engineers to our Folsom offices here in the United States. And also, what we're doing in Australia is not only growing but having a really close collaborative training environment with our Australian colleagues. And so starting in Q1 of 2025, what this is going to mean for you all is a 50% increase of availability for support. Now what does that mean in real-time terms? I think most of, if not all of you know, that right now you can call or email in, and between the hours of 6:00 AM and 5:00 PM Pacific time, interact with us. So with this 50% increase, you're going to be able to do that same thing, but from 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM Pacific time, starting all in Q1 of 2025.

41:00
James: In closing. I just wanna make it clear: Support Services is firmly committed to unlocking value for all of you. And through everything we do, we strive to help you learn, leverage, and harness Ignition with the least amount of friction possible. Through dev support workflow processes, the onboarding experience, technical development of our team, and expanded support hours, it's all in service to our larger goal, which is fundamentally propelling all of you into the future of automation through the power of Ignition. Thank you.

41:38
Colby: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, James and Marcus, for everything that you and your team do every day for this Ignition community. You know when the leaders of this company get together and we talk about values, there is one word that comes up over and over again. You've heard it many times already this week. I heard Marcus just emphasize it himself, and that is empowerment. Support Services is obviously a key part to empowering a part of empowering our users every day. But at the end of the day, our goal is to empower you across everything to do, as we keep saying, to dream it, do it. So that core value of empowerment goes all the way back to the beginning. But I think back then we used to say it in a slightly simpler way to get out of your way. It was a very simple idea, but it turned out to be amazingly innovative for this industry. The idea that you should be able to access, learn, and develop everything you need on your own without any hindrance or need to talk to us unless you really wanted to. Think about it. You can download the software right now in minutes and install it very quickly.

42:44
Marcus: You can reset the demo as many times as you want. You can read the user manual, go through Inductive University, participate in the forms, learn everything you need to develop your project. And along the way, you'll know exactly what it's gonna cost you in the end because the prices are right there on the website. It was all designed to get out of your way. It was important to us then, and it's just as important to us now. But that doesn't mean we're perfect. Far from it. We know we can do better. And that's exactly what we're doing. So to tell you how, I'd like to introduce you to Nick Barfuss, the product manager on our project that's very special that he would like to tell you about.

43:30
Nick Barfuss: Thanks, Colby. We know that's you, real people who use Ignition to create our amazing projects. And that's why we've always supported you on your Ignition journey. We believe that it's access to these self-service tools that are a part of what makes the barrier of entry so easy for Ignition. And one way we've provided this access is through a free Inductive Automation account. With this account, new and existing users have access to free training through Inductive University, a free Maker Edition licenses to use on your personal projects. And as James and Marcus highlighted, access to knowledge via the forms, robust Ignition documentation, and, when needed, phone and web support. But what about the companies that you work for and the businesses that you work with? How can we put more self-service options in your organization's hands to empower your businesses to be even more self-driven? Let's quickly look at some easily identifiable organizations in our ecosystem and some of the issues that you all face. End users. You work with integrators and local distributors to make your projects reality, and you approach these external organizations with urgent questions, big ideas, and a desire to collaborate.

44:51
Nick: You use Ignition in various locations and lines and configurations, and you need access to information for auditing, budgeting, or reporting purposes. Currently, getting this information is difficult and usually results in a phone call to Inductive Automation. Integrators, you aren't just working for the customer; you're collaborating with them to build some really innovative and complex solutions. Whether during the design phase or the development or the deployment of your project, you often need to receive or pass the baton. You need tools to streamline license transfers and ownerships while maintaining the ability to access important information all along the way. Currently, this usually results in calling Inductive Automation and talking to a support or sales representative. Distributors, you understand the unique needs of your market. You are building a business culture with your customers and discovering pain points, solving issues with the same quality of service and support that Inductive Automation provides and that customers expect. You sell Ignition all over the world, and we think these sales should be able to be made 24/7 and in local currency. And of course, we are very mindful of our strategic solutions and alliance partner organizations. We want to continue removing obstacles to keep our relationships strong.

46:16
Nick: Your needs are varied. And while person-to-person communication is essential, we believe we can do a better job of putting data in your hands and metrics in the forefront. We wanna take a moment to let you all know that we see you. We are aware of the pain points and obstacles that are in your way. And in fact, we've spent the last several years researching, gathering feedback, and identifying many of these key issues that all of you face. And we've noticed a few things in common. Organizations need 24/7 real-time access to your information. Organizations are comprised of passionate people who, as Colby said, work best when we get out of the way. And organizations work together to make amazing things happen when they can connect. We've put a huge effort of providing self service access for individuals, and we wanna take the same approach for all of the organizations. This is why we're excited to announce the Inductive Automation Workspaces. This is our solution to provide self-service tools for your organization and the people in it, allowing even more collaboration in unprecedented ways. Think of it this way. If the IA account is designed for you, the individual, then the IA Workspace is designed for your organization.

47:41
Nick: Let's look at some of the features that our workspace will offer. With the Workspace, you'll be able to structure your organizations in a way that makes sense to you. Whether you're a complex organization or a single location business, you can create organizational units that can house a collection of people, licenses, and support plan information. We think this will allow your organization to become more autonomous and self-organized. And as your organization grows, you can continue to invite staff and assign them access to information they need. For example, you can create engineering roles to provide plant managers and developers the ability to access critical license information where they can diagnose problems without the need of having to contact support. Or you can create purchasing roles to empower trusted people in your organization the ability to upgrade, purchase, or renew support plans and licenses. So when we talk about purchasing, we're really excited to provide a wide range of features. Your organization can browse our entire product selection, from modules to support plans, to create any solution you can imagine. You'll be able to create estimates, quotes, turn those into orders, and share them with anyone. This could be finance or approval teams within your organization or even the customers that you're collaborating with.

49:02
Nick: And we're really excited to announce that you will be able to buy in your local currency directly from your distributor or integrator and gain instant access with payment integrations that will allow you to purchase with credit card or to set up a billing profile. We know getting real-time information about your licenses is critical. With a Workspace, you can inspect, organize, share, move, and report on the licenses that you own. You'll be able to name and tag the licenses so that your organization can easily find them and search for them and discover properties like module configuration, activation history, and support options. And just like licenses, you'll have even more clarity and visibility into the support plans than ever before. Wondering when your support plan is up for renewal or if you can take advantage of priority or total couch support? A workspace will help you manage your plans without the need of having to call Inductive Automation or track billing cycles in clunky ways. These are just some of the features that we're building, but we have many more planned, like a dashboard where you'll have access to contextual insights to inform your organization of what's changing and certification tracking features that will provide you visibility into the credential and certification journey of the people in your organization.

50:19
Nick: We can't wait to build upon this framework and provide you more tools and services. So now that you know about the features of the Workspace, let's look at the way we've been currently operating. We'll call this mode of operations Managed Service. Our sales teams consist of amazing people, and they've built a great relationship with you. But they aren't always available to help you get the information you need. Time zones, asynchronous delays, and other factors can slow you down. And for the most part, you don't have direct access to much of the information that you want access to. Now let's compare this with the self-service mode. With a Workspace, organizations can rely less on Inductive Automation sales or support staff when the need to keep moving is paramount. People in your organization can sign in at their convenience to find and update information, diagnose and analyze problems, and collaborate with anyone that you're doing business with. The real beauty of a Workspace is that your sales and support staff aren't going away. In fact, they'll both be able to assist you better than ever before. With assisted service, your sales contacts can provide more clarity, efficiency, and transparency to the purchasing process. You'll be able to work together to share quotes with others in your organization and bring your ideas from solutions to reality. The mission for Workspace is to get out of your way, put data in your hands, and help you connect.

51:46
Nick: And here are three ways that we wanna do that. We want to unify. A Workspace offers a simple, unified, browser-based interface for your organizations to consistently access and manage your information. We strive to empower. A Workspace empowers organizations to independently analyze and control their data via self-service or assisted service modes, and we aim to be scalable. Our Workspace sets our ecosystem on the path to growth by redesigning old architectures, restructuring our legacy models, and rebuilding these interfaces to align with the evolving and modern needs of organizations all across the globe. So when can you access a Workspace? Well, in the coming weeks you're going to be noticing changes to the way you sign into your Inductive Automation account, offering you much more security. And then later in the year you'll see improvement to your Inductive Automation account interface experience. And then in 2025, we'll continue our work, and we'll be sure to let you know when you can create your organization and join a Workspace. In closing, I would like to recap on a few points. And to do this, I want to use a little inspiration from past ICC themes. A Workspace is a browser-based interface designed to help you build a synergistic ecosystem.

53:13
Nick: A Workspace will elevate the entire Ignition experience by providing ways for you to manage your licenses, support plans, people, organizational structures, and more in ways that are unique to each and every one of your businesses. And our Workspace will transform the selling and purchasing process, allowing your organization to create estimates, share quotes, and order products when you want to and in your local currency. And just like your IA account, an IA Workspace will be free, allowing your organization to break through any obstacles that keep you currently from achieving. We can't wait for you to start using Workspaces, and we look forward to offering this for you next year. Thank you.

54:07
Colby: Pretty incredible, huh? Once again, our vision is to get out of your way to empower you to do what you need on your own terms. And I think that Workspaces is gonna go a long way to continuing that. So you remember my phrase from a little bit ago, uniquely inductive? Well, to me, Workspaces is uniquely inductive. We could have built a simple online store, but instead we're building an entire e-commerce platform to perfectly serve the needs of this community and the future that we wanna build. Just like we could have put training videos up on YouTube, but instead we created Inductive University, which is still regarded as one of the finest training resources available. Our dedication to support, the fact that all of our staff are in our offices here and in Australia, with direct access to all of the relevant systems and people that they need to solve your problems, that is uniquely inductive. Our approach to software, to pushing the boundaries for this automation industry to be innovative, but also in a way that's secure, consistent, and stable that leverages open technology and open standards, but while making them easy to use and reliable for the future. That is uniquely inductive. And finally, perhaps the most important unique trait of all, this community. Our ability to gather here together each year, collaborate, share ideas, and imagine, and then keep that spirit going throughout the rest of the year.

55:29
Colby: Well, I just don't think it gets any more uniquely inductive than that. So I just wanted to mention all that because I think what we have going on is incredibly unique. And I am convinced that working together, we can keep it going for a long time to come. So now, without further ado or philosophical stalling, let's get to the final portion of our day. Something that's always been pretty darn unique about ICC, our live Q&A. So please help me to welcome back to the stage all of our speakers. Okay, we've talked about so much over the last few days. And possibly with all the conversations and the sessions and whatnot, you have absolutely no questions at all. That would be great. We'd get out of here. But perhaps with all the content we just showed, something will come to mind. We have mic runners. Feel free to raise your hands. This is your opportunity to ask us whatever you want before we wrap this up. Don't hold back. If things get too wild, I have a car in back. I can run out there. It's no problem.

56:36
Audience Member 1: Hey guys, quick question. So we have different roles for different servers. So we have like, for example, the primary server, the backup server, IO servers. Is there any plans in the future to have a role basis on development server versus production server in an easy migration or promotion method bill to the architecture?

57:01
James: Different than the deployment modes we talked about in 8.3? Like.

57:06
Audience Member 1: Yeah, like a role-based.

57:11
James: I mean, I would say the purpose of deployment modes is to define various roles. So I guess that was our plan, and we did it.

57:21
Audience Member 1: Alright. Looking forward to it.

57:25
Colby: Are you asking about breaking gateways apart perhaps, or?

57:28
Audience Member 1: I'm sorry.

57:29
Colby: Do you mean like breaking gateways apart, breaking up functionality?

57:31
Audience Member 1: Yes.

57:33
Colby: The resource system will help with that, I think a lot.

57:36
Nick : I agree. I also think that's part of the idea behind the modular architecture is to be able to split up functionality by module.

57:48
Audience Member 1: And promoting like the, from the development mode to the...

57:50
Nick : Oh, you mean the actual deployment from one place to another.

57:54
Audience Member 1: Yes, sir.

57:55
Nick: There's a bunch of ways to do that. I do think that Colby, I think, answered it already, which is that by having the configuration entirely housed in the file system, it helps a lot. Now, that doesn't mean it's a feature of the software itself, it just allows you to integrate...

58:10
Audience Member 1: It's like a manual kind of process. But I was just wondering if there was gonna be any kind of architectural change or role-based kind of features for that architecture.

58:20
Nick: Possibly. I think EAM would probably be the right place for that to live.

58:26
Audience Member 1: Awesome.

58:28
Nick: All right. Front.

58:36
Audience Member 2: So there was talk about changes to the Core certification that were made this year. Are there any plans to update the Gold certification exam process and along with the new training that's coming out at the end of next year? Is there gonna be a higher than Gold certification to go with that?

59:00
Marcus: Well, currently the, yes, there are plans to renovate the Gold certification process. Training is hard at work on that. As far as new levels though, we did not have that planned. I think it's an idea that I definitely would like to explore with you; maybe after the panel, see exactly what you're looking for and like what needs that would address. But yeah, we are at work also trying to renovate the Gold cert process.

59:23
Audience Member 2: Thank you.

59:24
Audience Member 3: In relation to the increased training online, do you guys have any intent to add more in-person training resources for the certification? I know you guys have that on your own path, but at times there, it's difficult to get people to in-person training or scheduled training 'cause they're delayed by months. Is there any idea or thought process to increase the training abilities?

59:49
James: Well, I can say this is, we're constantly growing the training team. So, I mean, was there a particular class that you wanted to have in person? I guess maybe I'm trying to understand is: what's the key aspect of the in-person training that you find most valuable?

1:00:07
Audience Member 3: It's a little bit more formal training, right? In-person, right? So instead of having someone kind of go at their pace and then you have to really, I don't know, manage time a little bit better. The structured courses you guys offer give a lot better, more in-depth time, time to ask an expert really be there? So I guess it fast tracks training a little bit.

1:00:26
Colby: Are you asking about like increased capacity for that? So like...

1:00:30
Audience Member 3: Yeah, so we have people that we try to send through training, and sometimes there's three-month wait time to get someone signed up.

1:00:35
Colby: Yeah. They can blame me because I have a request for like multiple training hires I've been stalling on. But we'll get on that.

1:00:45
James: I mean, while true...

1:00:48
Colby: They're not used to this, but I am.

1:00:50
James: I mean another fundamental, like, catalyst for that is really demand, and a lot of times, the in-person training classes take longer to fill than our virtual. So that does kind of affect the cadence. But we are trying to expand that.

1:01:04
Audience Member 4: Will Workspace replace the integrator tools we have now? Like the license portal?

1:01:18
Colby: Yes.

1:01:22
Marcus: So the license portal, yes. This is really just a continuation and expansion of the license portal to make it more accessible to your organization. And then some of the, in other integrator tools that you have access to, like the integrator portal, where you're probably managing some of the information, the idea is really to have a unified experience to do that. So none of that stuff is going away. It's actually just all gonna be enhanced and unified into a better, more cohesive experience.

1:01:46
Audience Member 5: So I guess a bit of a two-part question. One was the LSP and the editor. I think personally I've had a few issues with, functionality of the editor versus say your favorite IDE. Is that one sort of a recognition that there won't be that much more development for the designer editor and to just sort of offload that to, like JetBrains or something like that, that the LSP would leverage? And second is with the scripting engine; I think like an insane proposition you just put forward, 'cause I just think of all the possibilities. Is it something that like only you guys could introduce a new language to? Or is it more like a something that has like a transpiler or a virtual machine that you could like potentially without IA needing to do it port, my favorite pet language to, because I want to, I'm insane, and I just hate future support, and I have my own custom language in there.

1:02:56
Nick: Gotcha. So part one of the question was, does integration with LSP mean we're gonna abandon the DevX experience of the designer? No. I don't want having an external editor to become a requirement. So I do think it's on us to still make our best effort to always improve the developer experience of our first party tools. But can we compete with JetBrains for developed editor experience in all languages? Of course we can't. And why would we try? So there's a balance there. And the second part was, could a third party integrate their own engine? Absolutely. So I use the word extension point, which I realize is sort of inside baseball. But modules, the way modules add functionality into Ignition is through this concept called extension points. And so it would require a module to be written, but that will be part of the public API.

1:04:01
Audience Member 6: Hi. Piggybacking on the first question, well, at least in my head, talking about the development and pushing into a production environment, have you ever considered a development license? For example, I would like to have an on-prem, not in the cloud, and resetting the trial version every two hours. It's cumbersome. So at one point, I did ask my sales engineer about that or sales rep. Sorry. But yeah, what about a dev license? It's because purchasing a fully full fledged license might be sometimes well, a considerable investment. So what about a dev license?

1:04:48
Colby: What did your sales engineer say?

1:04:51
Audience Member 6: Well, he's retired, so probably I can say...

1:05:00
Audience Member 6: Alright, well, the answer I got is just purchase another...

1:05:04
Colby: Ah, yeah, I can't see your shirt. So are you an integrator or an end user?

1:05:08
Audience Member 6: I'm an end user.

1:05:09
Colby: End user. Too bad. If you're not aware, integrators in the IA account right now can go in and request dev licenses. So just, that's why I mentioned that. Did you have something you wanted...

1:05:21
Carl: No, I mean, the question was, have we ever considered it? Yeah, it's something we actually, we do. It's a conversation to be had.

1:05:30
Colby: Dev licenses are one thing, but let's perhaps pivot off that to talk about the licensing. I know it's not finalized, but some might... We do envision some sort of a licensing link between these different deployment modes. It's a little earlier, but...

1:05:40
Carl: It's a whiteboard idea, but it... Yeah, I do think there's a... So this would be a similar idea where if you, one because logical system that has three separate environments is at just three X, the license cost, probably not what we want to do. We've toyed around with ideas of having something similar to the way we do redundancy where the redundant node is priced at 50% of the primary node or something like that. Maybe we do something similar for dev and staging licenses, but we don't have any formalized approach to that. But it's something we talked about.

1:06:18
Colby: Yeah, I wanted to touch on though, because I hear in the question that if you're thinking about these multi-stage environments, what's it gonna cost? So we're thinking about that. Alright, how about on here?

1:06:29
Audience Member 7: Yeah, I have one really weird question and then one sort of not weird. The first one is the in 8.3, like in 8.1, the scripting engine on the non-master or non-active node is kind of dumb. It doesn't run. In 8.3, is there gonna be any way to have event scripts or some kind of thing run on the inactive node to maybe do some cleanup after a failover or do certain things that only would be done on the inactive node? That's question number one. And to question number two, I'm a registered professional engineer, and I have to do a continuing education. I would love to not have to go out to a company and spend several thousand dollars for absolutely worthless training material just so I can keep my license up to date. I'd like to go to Inductive Automation University and is...

1:07:30
Siri: That's not nice.

1:07:36
Audience Member 8: Siri Just said that was not nice that I said that about those training people. This is my life. Anyway, so my question is, is there any... I have no idea. From a training perspective, you guys are the professionals. Is there any way to get some of your training materials certified for professional societies to use? Like I'm just like, Cisco has training stuff and network training, network security. There are certain things you can do that is applicable everywhere. Is that any possibility?

1:08:12
Carl: I guess that's definitely further out, but there's a lot of things that we're considering in terms of, like what it means to really provide training resource and materials versus just like explicitly a class. You know? And I mean obviously, a lot of that's done with, like, Inductive University through the videos, user manual. Like there's those things, but I see what you mean in terms of like actually having almost like a course that you could just purchase the course and then go facilitate that. That is definitely on the books. But in the future, we're working that out.

1:08:50
Colby: That's a great question, actually. And I haven't heard the subject of trying to get our courses accredited in that way brought up. So we'll certainly go research that. I think that's great.

1:08:58
Carl: The first part of the question was about redundancy.

1:08:58
Colby: Oh yeah, redundancy. There's...

1:09:01
Carl: So having some logic that runs on the redundant node it's certainly something that we could consider doing. We would have to do it on purpose, as in the whole point of the redundancy setup is that you are supposed to only think about one cohesive set of functionality that then is the configuration is synchronized and then only becomes active when needed. So it's not that the scripting engine is dumb; it's that we're just intentionally not duplicating your configuration and running it twice, right? So in order to do something like that, we would have to add some sort of scripting resource that is intentionally trying to run on the backup, which could play into like the warm, cold, hot modes or something. So it's a neat idea. I don't; I haven't heard that one before, but...

1:09:49
Marcus: Yeah, no, I haven't either. And I was gonna say, it doesn't; to me, that's not a question that depends on the version. You could request that today. Now, I'm not saying we'll get around to it before that timeline. We're kind of busy, but as Carl said, it would be a purposeful thing, and it makes sense. So. Alright, in the top perhaps.

1:10:07
Rafy: Up here. Rafy from Kenard Engineering. With the extended hours of support coming through later, is there a plan to take it to 24 hours a day later sometime?

1:10:21
Marcus: Yes. It's either really cold or I'm nervous about that question.

1:10:27
Colby: Will you come to the conference next year? And...

1:10:30
Marcus: But...

1:10:33
Rafy: Yes.

1:10:37
Marcus: As far as plans go, as we've articulated, we're definitely committed to expanding access. As far as the concrete timeline that we could give you and the different things that we need to get together on our side, it's multiple pieces, but definitely believe that we have been having that discussion, and it's definitely hot on our mind. So I can't give any more concrete details than that; except for that, we are definitely planning for a future where we are fully accessible to you all.

1:11:04
Colby: Yeah.

1:11:16
Audience Member 9: Hi. As far as the work space and comparing to the existing integrator dashboard, is there gonna be a way to manage who within the organization have access to change stuff on Workspace and...

1:11:32
Colby: Absolutely. Oh, sorry.

1:11:35
Audience Member 9: Yeah. And also, for right now, there is no correlation between the Inductive University users and the Workspace. So is there any way to manage who can get from there to there, and also, when somebody from the organization leaves, how we can manage that to make sure that they don't have access to these kind of stuff?

1:11:58
Nick: Okay. So, okay, I'll kind of go backwards. So one kind of crucial part of this is your certification belongs to you, right? Like as you get certified and maybe you move on, we want that certification belong to you and not the organization. So your organization is comprised of a bunch of certified individuals. So absolutely, that certification will stick with your IA account and progress with you; let's say you move on. You'll be able to track your employees or all of your staff's certifications. Like I mentioned, that's one of our future things that we're gonna be doing, but very, very hot on our minds of is being able to expose all of your individual's certifications, right? You want to be able to see who in your organization is certified at what level.

1:12:42
Nick: So you can track that in a lot more clear way. Maybe you wanna build groups so you can see different departments and different structures of where those people are organized. So there's a lot of organization or features for that certification journey there. And then, as far as the roles go, yeah, like this is gonna be fully role-based systems. So you'll be able to assign roles to managers. Let's say managers might have access to see all those people with their certifications. You can even divide that within your organization into a bunch of different structures. Maybe you create a finance department or you have a certain line or a location you wanna assign people to. You'll be able to apply, assign roles to, has access to say even see licenses, be able to make orders, be able to fully access all parts of your organization. So yeah, fully robust roles and permission system on Workspaces

1:13:31
Audience Member 9: Thank you.

1:13:32
Colby: To go even further. That's actually the organizational structure is one of the places we've put the most work, and why it's kind of such a unique product, right? There's so many unique relationships in our community. You have integrators that have a relationship with end users, but that comes and goes or evolves over time. End users come in as a location, and they grow. And so you have different business units, different areas of your enterprise. So we've put so much work into modeling that for this use case.

1:14:01
Audience Member 10: Yeah. By offering this external IDE, is that one way we can get sort of the dark mode?

1:14:23
Colby: I am sure you'll be able to get it in the external IDE.

1:14:34
Brennan Jewett: Hey folks. Brennan Jewett with Flexware Innovation here. I have a question pertaining to support. I'm really excited that we're gonna have these extended hours and following up on the earlier question about 24-hour support. I'm curious if you have thought about maybe leveraging external resources. So, I heard you know that there's some integrators that have been helping you guys with awesome instruction for the certification courses. I think back to last year, there were some integrators walking around here with shirts that said, Hey, ask me about 24/7 support. So my question is, have you considered maybe offering different tiers of support where maybe integrators who are doing this kind of work every day could potentially help out with some of those initial kind of questions or support calls and maybe leverage a wider network to get that 24 hour support? And then if someone gets stumped, maybe that goes on to tier two, 'cause when I think back to learning Ignition seven years ago, I had silly little questions that could be answered in 20 minutes, and then I had questions that might take three hours, or I have to get on the phone the next day with you guys when somebody comes back in the office. So just curious if that's something you've thought about, and if not, I hope that you maybe consider it.

1:15:51
James: I mean, we've definitely thought about that. I mean, just to kinda put this in context, I mean, we average, I mean, what is it? Like 3,500 tickets a month we're average working on. I mean, so in terms of like our workload, it's always a pretty hectic environment in terms of what we're looking, working on. So considering, like, how best to serve all of you and give you guys access to resources and making that something that basically lowers the barrier of access. I mean, yeah, we've definitely considered those things. There would be a lot of different pieces that we'd have to figure out to even implement something like that. So while it makes a lot of sense, there's definitely some concerns around quality control and then consistency in terms of what information is communicated and stuff like that. So, not to say that it's off the table, but there's definitely a lot of consideration in terms of how we would implement something like that to ensure that people are getting the help we would expect.

1:16:49
Marcus: Yeah, because the customer's experience is really key. And to the extent that we can have an influence on our brand of hospitality and our brand of care, that's been instilled through like the generations of support, we want to stay really close to that to make sure that the people on the other end, though they might not be seeing us, they definitely feel like it's our touch that's been added there. Not to say that any other support couldn't add its own, but we're very, very protective of the customer experience and want to make sure that it stays not only consistent, but that it actually accelerates and evolves and even gets better. We have a lot of lessons to learn. So if in the future, that plan could make for some partnership or some evolution of a higher-level customer experience. Who knows. But for now, we're sticking as close to it as possible.

1:17:49
Colby: So unfortunately, we are at the end of our time. And so I think I was gonna say one more question, but this could go on all day. So unfortunately, I do think we should probably wrap it up. I wanna thank everyone up here for being here.

1:18:13
Colby: Thank you for your wonderful questions, and above all, thank you all for coming this year. It's been so incredible. We can't wait for our new location next year to welcome you all back and many more. And so until then, thanks again. Have a great trip home, and we'll see you next time.

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

Webinar Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01:11:08
Colby Clegg: Ignition 8.

01:11:14
Carl Gould: Ignition Perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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