What’s the power of tracking your organization’s energy use? Understanding your energy data reduces your operational costs, and helps you assess equipment health and meet regulatory or ESG guidelines.

It’s hard to manage what you can’t measure. In this session, you’ll see how to quickly incorporate energy monitoring into your Ignition projects using free Ignition Exchange resources. Plus, you’ll hear from a State of Indiana representative who created the Energy INsights program that helps Indiana-based manufacturers address energy use while taking steps toward digitally transforming their business operations.

Transcript:

00:00
Rob Huddleston: Hello, I'm Rob Huddleston, and I'm a Technical Trainer here at Inductive Automation, and I'm gonna be your moderator for this session. To start things off, I'd like to introduce our speakers today. Benson Hougland is the Vice President at Opto 22. With 35 years of experience in information technology and industrial automation, Benson drives product strategy for Opto 22 automation and control systems that connect and secure the real world of OT with the systems and networks of IT in the cloud. Benson speaks at trade shows and conferences, including IBM Think, Arc Forum, and ISA. His 2014 TED Talk introduces non-technical people to IoT.

00:38
Rob Huddleston: Becca Gillespie is a Managing Director at Energy Systems Network. Becca joined ESN as a Managing Director in January of 2023. Prior to that, she had worked as a New Products and Services Lead at Duquesne Light Company and was a Sales Director and Product Manager for Unit Energy Technologies. She also worked at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as an Energy Analyst and as a Propulsion Engineer at NASA.

01:07
Benson Hougland: Fantastic. Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. Glad you're here. It's been a long ICC. Well, not a long one, but a great ICC. Everybody enjoying themselves? Had some good sessions and whatnot?

01:21
Benson Hougland: Right on, right on. That's good to hear. Thanks for hanging out all the way to the end to be here. I appreciate that. In the spirit of this year's ICC, of course, which is "Breakthrough," the title of our presentation is "Breakthrough Power and Energy Barriers with Ignition." So again, thank you for attending this afternoon. And thank you to all of you out there on the virtual sessions. Glad you could join us as well. As you guys know, these sessions will be recorded. So, as Rob said, my name is Benson, and I will be your host for this journey from your energy-consuming devices into Ignition. And as Rob said, I'll be joined by Becca Gillepsie. Gillespie. Sorry, Becca. And Becca is a customer of Ignition, of course, and of Opto 22. And she's gonna have a great story to tell you about her project in Indiana.

02:17
Benson Hougland: Now, I've decided to forego the obligatory Opto 22 slide and just... Well, if you don't know Opto, we've been around 50 years. We are a Southern California-based manufacturer of hardware and software. And we've been in business for 50 years. We've got thousands of applications all over the world, including one hopefully you just saw at the Build-a-Thon. So, yeah, we're involved in that as well. So, with introductions out of the way. Oh, not really. I love this drone shot. I got a drone. I thought, oh, this would be fun. So, that is our factory. And, indeed, it's in Temecula, California, about an hour north of San Diego, which makes it about eight hours south of here. And it is where we design, manufacture, support everything. So, indeed, all of the stuff I'm gonna talk to you about today that's relative to Opto is, indeed, made in the USA.

03:12
Benson Hougland: Alright. Now, with introductions out of the way, quick review of today's session. I'm not gonna read that to you. You've probably read it already, and that's why you're either here in person or have joined virtually. But, in short, we're gonna cover why monitoring power and energy in your facility or your organization can be beneficial. So, we're gonna show you how you can quickly start doing that with a pretty simple product and Ignition and get you on your way to doing some interesting things with energy. And then, following that, Becca will come up and discuss her Energy Insights program.

03:50
Benson Hougland: Okay. So the big question. Still got mic? The big question is, why? Why are we gonna monitor energy? Well, probably the obvious reason is, what? Save money? Typically, that's what we see. And there's no question you can actually do so. And there's a couple of reasons why. The big one is, well, there's several big ones, but one is that rising cost of energy. We heard Becca on a panel earlier this week talking about that's some of the things the state of Indiana and all across the country, in fact, across the globe, we are dealing with rising energy costs. The other thing that we're having to deal with is something called dynamic pricing. So now you're getting charged a different value for your energy based on when you use it. And then we have another situation where we have what we call phantom loads or phantom... Basically devices that might be in your plant that are using a lot of energy that you don't even know about and are adding up on your bill. But the big one, this one right here at the top, the demand charge. This is something you're probably not even aware of.

04:53
Benson Hougland: And let's be frank. You're probably not paying the power bill for your plant. Somebody else is. But, indeed, a demand charge is one of the highest parts of your bill. And what is it? A demand charge is when you're pulling energy from the grid into your plant, you're gonna pay for that over time. That's called kWh, right? And so how much you use in a month, you get charged for that. But you also get charged for the largest amount of peak power you use during that billing cycle. And that means when you fire up all of your loads within a facility, you may draw a whole bunch of peak power at one time. They peg that. You get charged for that. We are a manufacturer in the state of California. Energy is expensive here in this state.

05:39
Benson Hougland: And, indeed, when we started doing this, we ate our own dog food in quite a big way. That was the biggest part of our bill. Our demand charge was more than our consumption. So tracking that down is really important. Bottom line, you can't control or monitor your energy costs without actually monitoring your energy in the first place. Now, there are some other reasons why power and energy monitoring might be important. And it has to do with the health of your equipment. Putting an energy monitoring device on your equipment is like putting a stethoscope on there. So we can start getting some really valuable information.

06:15
Benson Hougland: For example, let's say a pump was starting to... You know, the current draw was starting to go up on a pump or a motor or something like that. And we see that happening over time. It may be a reason to call somebody in maintenance or set an alarm or something like that to go take a look at that asset before something damaging occurs to it. So that's a big one in understanding the health of your machines. And then, finally, we have something here called ESG guidelines. What are those? Environmental, social, and governance. Bottom line, it's a sustainability framework for people to monitor or at least track what their sustainability footprint looks like. And for those of you who did attend the keynote with Kat earlier in the week, clearly she made a pretty big point about how important sustainability is. And, in fact, a lot of that keynote was.

07:07
Benson Hougland: So there's a lot of companies that have to address these guidelines or other regulatory compliance goals. And, again, you can't do that if you're not monitoring your energy. Okay. So enough about why. Let's now start talking about what it looks like and how. So what I'm gonna do, I'll start using this thing. We're gonna do something that's an architecture build-out. If you've been to one of my sessions before, you know, I love putting pictures up and going through that flow. Now, don't worry. I'm gonna get into some of the details of each of these steps. But just as a big-picture look, let's take a look. We've got our energy loads. And you can see those up there as, in this case, an air compressor that provides machine tool air because this is what we have in our own facility. And, yes, we are tracking that.

07:53
Benson Hougland: And then just another nice image up there of an electrical hydraulic press. And, indeed, what we do is we monitor these devices by connecting RIO EMUs up to them. And I'm gonna get into that detail a little bit more. Once we do that, these RIO EMUs just fit right on the LAN, on your Ethernet LAN. So once they get on the Ethernet LAN, I'll use my PC or workstation, and I'll configure that device. I'll go in there. I'll create an account. These are cyber secure devices, by the way. So they're IT friendly and so on. More details on that in a moment. And then once I've done that, I'll configure the load, basically the size of the load. And then I'll turn on the built-in OPC UA server. And once that configuration occurs, I'm now ready to start configuring Ignition, which we'll get into. We'll configure the OPC UA client here in Ignition to the OPC UA server in the RIO EMU, and we'll start building out our application.

08:50
Benson Hougland: In fact, I'm gonna show you how simple it is to build this application and the reason why. We have Ignition Exchange resources. In fact, if you were at the Build-a-Thon, you saw there was an honorable mention for Alex Marcy's with Corso Systems, that Exchange resource. We're gonna use that to make it really easy to start pulling this data in. Okay. From there, where can you go with this? Well, clearly, I'm a big MQTT fan. I'm also a huge fan of Ignition Cloud Edition, and that's the next logical step.

09:24
Benson Hougland: We can use MQTT to start to get this up into, say, Ignition Cloud Edition or, frankly, to any software that can consume the MQTT data. For example, Snowflake. Maybe I'm gonna start taking some of my energy data and throwing it up there to Snowflake for analytics, for storage, all kinds of stuff. So aside from the fact that you've already got all this power in Ignition for reporting and historical, alarms, and so on, now we can extend that functionality very, very easily. So that's really cool. And, in fact, Becca's application she'll talk about is using a component of Ignition Cloud Edition. And I'd be remiss to not say that, yeah, the real EMUs also support MQTT natively. So we could actually connect directly to the cloud from them, but we're gonna keep this simple. We're just gonna go with this configuration here. Very, very simple EMUs to Ignition. You all on board? Let's see the steps.

10:20
Benson Hougland: There's not a lot of steps, but there's important ones, so let's get going. These are all the steps, and I'll go through these in detail. But the big ones are, as you can see in the bold text, we're gonna identify energy load. We're gonna instrument it. We'll connect and configure. We'll get those resources, import them into our Ignition project, instantiate the UDT, and drag and drop into Perspective views. Once we get past that load side of connecting the load, it's literally five minutes to get this stuff up and running. But first, most important part, what load are we gonna measure? There's a lot of different examples there. A lot of these we use in our own factory, the compressors, HVAC systems, but presses or industrial refrigeration, there's a lot of big loads that you may want to look at, not only for cost savings again, but for load health and reliability.

11:11
Benson Hougland: So pick those loads, but keep in mind when you pick those loads, consider that you wanna look not just at consumption over time, kWh, but you also wanna be looking at what the demand is. So another way to look at it is when you fire up a big load, like say it's a big motor, what you would look at the energy profile for that, you'll see it goes...

11:32
Benson Hougland: Way high when it starts up, and then it tapers off, and then it kind of rides out. That peak part, that's what we wanna pay attention to. So once we've identified our loads, then we're going to sensor or instrument them, and we're gonna use something called CTs, these are current transformers. All they do is take this current that's on a given load, and they take it down to a secondary voltage, in this case, 333 millivolts, making it really safe and easy to work with. We also wanna probably choose clamp-on CTs. Why? Because it makes instrumenting a load much, much easier. We're not gonna have to unwire the load and stick donuts on and all that. We can just clamp it on. The big thing we wanna do here is choose the right CT or sensor for the size of the load. The picture I have up here is a 600-amp sensor, so as long as the load is 600 amps or less, this CT will work, but there's all kinds of ranges that are available everywhere. You can even buy these on Amazon, and they're about $100, $200 each, so pretty straightforward there.

12:38
Benson Hougland: We're gonna use CTs, and then we're gonna connect those CTs directly to the groov RIO, the groov RIO EMU, I should say. More on that in a moment, but we're also gonna tie into the voltage line right into the RIO as well, and the beauty of the RIO EMU is it will accept up to 600 volts AC directly to that unit, which is very cool, so we don't need potential transformers and so on. We have power over Ethernet, or you can use line power, and it supports a number of different load types, so maybe some of you guys are like, okay, what is an EMU? No, it's not an Australian bird. It's an energy monitoring unit, and that's what we're gonna talk about for just a minute. This is not a sales pitch, but to put it in the context of the kind of tool we're using, I'll briefly go over this. 64 channels of data coming out of this device, both power and consumption, so it's actually tracking over time how much energy you're using. 3-phase, single phase, you decide, delta or Wye configurations, PoE or line-powered, cyber secure, out of the box, and IT friendly.

13:51
Benson Hougland: Uses DHCP, it uses DNS, it uses all the tools that IT uses to manage devices on a network, so it's a first-class citizen on any Ethernet network, and it's all browser-based configuration. So there's a web server inside, and all I do is connect the web server, and I start configuring it. There are some other nice features in there, USB for Wi-Fi and so on, but it does support a lot of different protocols, MQTT Sparkplug B, OPC UA, and for those of you who are still clinging on to your Modbus registers, yes, that is supported as well. And again, it's compatible with all kinds of different current transformers. And there's a laundry list of stuff over on the side, again, outside of the scope of this presentation, but know that this has got a lot of cool stuff inside that solves real problems like remote connectivity, and it can even run a control program if you want to do that, but we're gonna keep it simple. We've got the RIO EMU on the LAN. Now we're gonna... Once it's connected to the network, we'll create an admin account. No default passwords, no backdoors, anything like that. We'll set the hostname, set the time, set the certs.

15:03
Benson Hougland: We'll configure the load type and the current and voltage values, and then we'll go and configure the onboard OPC UA server. Now what we're getting from these CTs and the voltage is two things: current measured in amps and voltage measured in volts. Those are the two primary pieces of information you need to start gathering all this information about, again, consumption relative to cost and health and reliability of a given load. Once we have that load type in there, again, it's just the size of the load and its configuration, then we'll configure the onboard OPC UA server so that we can get here into Ignition, and indeed we'll just use the OPC connection page right within Ignition, connect to OPC UA. It goes out, discovers the OPC UA server on the RIO EMU. If we just go through the wizard, couldn't be any simpler. Ignition's done a great job of making it really easy to connect to OPC servers. Once that's done, you give your new OPC connection a name, something unique to that particular load, whatever it might be. It could be a compressor, it could be a press, it could be whatever.

16:16
Benson Hougland: Once I have that done, now I'm ready to start making the job easier. Now, yes, you can just right from here start building your tag, dragging over OPC tags, your tag provider, blah, blah, blah. But we made it really easy for you. What we've done is we've created... I've worked with Corso Systems and Alex Marcy to develop these UDTs and Perspective templates that are freely available from the Exchange. Log in, download these, get them onto your computer. Once you've done that, we're gonna go ahead and import those into Ignition. First, what we're gonna do is import the UDTs. Pretty simple. I go for import, go where the file you placed on your PC, and boom, just hit that single step. I now have my UDT definition already ready to go in Ignition. So while I'm here in an import phase of my project, I'm gonna go ahead and import... Oh, yeah, I think it was already going down to that.

17:14
Benson Hougland: Let's go back to here. Once I get that, I'm gonna import my templates. So pretty simple there. All your templates and styles will come right in, and look at that. Under the Perspective folder, RIO EMU Template. We named it specifically so that it wouldn't overwrite perhaps some other styles or templates you might be using. Okay, we're in good shape there. Let's move on. Next thing, instantiate the UDT. We have the UDT definition. Now we're actually going to create the device in a tag folder. So we go new tag, data type instance, the UDT itself, and I fill out a set of parameters. Now this is cool because what we're doing here, look at these parameters. You're actually modeling the load with this parameter dialog. So I can give the load a name. I can give it its location, its install date, what the load phases are. I'm literally modeling my load. So I'm not just looking at volts and amps, right? I'm looking at a load, and it's configured all within that UDT.

18:16
Benson Hougland: So that makes it real simple to start moving the data up with context. Super important. So here we are. I'm pulling in this load, and I did pull in the compressor from Opto 22, so these are all real numbers. Yes, that compressor draws 39 kW when it's running, providing tool error to our manufacturing plant. Cool, huh? Next up, we're going to literally create a new view. I just choose the defaults here, and I'm gonna click on the UDT, and I'm gonna drag it to the canvas. And boom, there it is, all done. All I've got to do is resize it. It's fully responsive, so you can change its size around and do whatever you want. I've got it. I'm gonna save my project. Here we go. I'm gonna go load it up and launch Perspective in the URL or in the browser. Voila, how cool is that, right?

19:09
Benson Hougland: It's so simple. It's so simple. Now, these are free Exchange resources, so you can do whatever you want to them. You don't like the Opto red at the top? Hey, I won't take it personally. No worries. All of that is available, and as you saw, I can click through different tabs. I can see all the phase information. I can see all the totals, and I can see what? The modeling information. That's a Sullair LS-10. It is indeed on our manufacturing first floor, and the load type is 300 volt RMS wye instead of a delta. So, there's my completed application. Here, all I did was bring on two loads and the same thing, and I used the Perspective default template to put it in there, and now, within, again, just a few minutes, I now can see what my energy is doing for any given load. I can do the whole building. I can choose different loads, whatever you want, but it's really cool, and I did it all with this little guy. So, while Becca's getting up, 'cause that's who's up next, I'm gonna pass this little RIO around. So, it has my name on it, so yes, I'd like it back.

20:16
Audience Member 1: So it's signed.

20:17
Benson Hougland: Yeah, it is signed. It's autographed. And I do have an Apple tag in it, so don't try to walk away with it. So there you go.

20:35
Benson Hougland: Got mic. Test one.

20:39
Becca Gillespie: Is mine working now? Not yet. Okay. Oh, now it is. Great. Alright. Thank you, everyone. So, yes, I would like to share with you a little bit about how we use this architecture in the Energy INsights Program in Indiana. So the Energy INsights Program is a state-sponsored program meant to provide free deployments of pilot projects for small-to-medium manufacturers in the state of Indiana and show them something about their energy consumption and get them started on their digital journey. It's paid for by the IEDC, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Oftentimes, EDCs are seen as just whale hunters getting that next chip factory or battery factory, but they also, at least in Indiana, try to keep existing manufacturers competitive, it's a lesser known mission of theirs. But it's important, and keeping them competitive is what they're after in this program.

21:42
Becca Gillespie: Our program would be nothing without our integrator partners, because I'm just one person at ESN. I don't implement each of these pilot projects, and we work with Axiom, LHP, recently Brugh, Blue Ridge, who's here today, TensorIoT, MartinCSI, and NineTwelve. We would also be nothing without our vendor partners, Benson, of course, at Opto 22, and Inductive Automation, and then we have some channel partners who are also in the space of helping people begin their digital journey.

22:19
Becca Gillespie: Great, so Benson did a great job of explaining why energy is important, and Energy INsights in particular has these dual goals of helping them start on their digital journey and help them reduce their energy costs. But just to reiterate, one thing is, we want every small-to-medium manufacturer to understand and reduce their energy costs, and we think that it's a good pilot project because everyone pays for energy. It's something every manufacturer is paying for, and everyone is using, and so in that way it's easier for that to be a shared and make shared resources that are applicable to everyone. And they're also rising energy costs, as Benson mentioned. Another thing is they're not competitive, so can create a better space for collaboration, because one person reducing their energy cost, even if they're in the exact same field, really doesn't impact directly someone else's reducing their energy costs, so people can work together. You just both are paying the utility less, which is, you know, good, even though I used to work for one.

23:24
Becca Gillespie: And then there's all the other uses of energy data, which Benson mentioned, but also I've seen some really cool presentations here about how interesting amp data is because, you know what? It is the heartbeat of your machine. So, yeah, I don't love when people use it for that, but that is really cool, and I love to see how people are figuring out the health of their machine with amps. And then the GHG requirements.

23:50
Becca Gillespie: Essentially, just to describe the program at a high level, as if you were small-to-medium manufacturers in Indiana, which I know most of you are not, but just so you understand, essentially half of the grant goes towards the hardware and the software package we give. That's, as I mentioned, Opto 22 and Inductive Automation, and a little bit of extra money for the current transducers and the boxes and the other things that they may need to get it started, and about half the money goes to time spent with an integrator to deploy, integrate, work through all those IT/OT challenges I've heard so much about, and then also, hopefully, once all that's done, help them develop a real custom use case with their energy data or with their other data in their plant that kind of meets their needs where they are at that moment. We also have a pretty light training program, just meant to help people understand how to use their starter kit, what is energy data, why might they want to look at it, what are the things they're seeing there, what is their energy bill.

24:52
Becca Gillespie: We help them... We do a short training on upskilling and where to go next after this, and another training on scaling. So a lot of the whole purpose of this product is that they can grow with it, it can grow with them, so we do a training with them on that. But what do we hope that they walk away with? For one, we want them to have actual measurable insights. We want to measure a KPI of dollars saved, and we want them to really walk away with that knowledge so that they can chart their own course through the Industry 4.0 landscape. So if at the end of the program, no offense, Benson, it hasn't happened yet, but if they threw the starter kit in the trash, and they said, "But I know what I do want," that would still be a success for Indiana. And luckily, like I said, that doesn't happen, people really end up liking this starter kit. And of course, understanding energy data.

25:50
Becca Gillespie: So why energy data? What is so exciting about energy data? As Benson mentioned... Well, for starters, I mean, saving energy is a big project. There's a lot of things that a small-to-medium manufacturer can do that an energy auditor can help them do. An energy auditor walks through your plant and tells you everything that's going on at a single point in time. So I always recommend manufacturers who are in the energy space and want to save energy, do that too. Getting everything at once, but at a single point in time is really important. But data over time helps you in a really different way. One of the key ways that data over time can help you is with that demand charge reduction, as Benson said. Reducing one's demand charge, it's more of an art than a science.

26:34
Becca Gillespie: Your demand charge happens whenever all your loads are firing at the same time. And you can't really... You have to almost play with sometimes the startup sequencing, which is basically the corrective action to startup sequencing often, or the, sort of finding of natural storage. Natural storage would be like your building can stay cool. It has a thermal capacity. So you could pre-cool your building so that your AC's not on when you're also firing your big equipment, finding natural storage opportunities. But sort of flattening that peak, taking... Maybe you're using the exact, oops... I don't know how to... Oops. Maybe you have the exact same energy, you know, the integral under that curve hasn't changed, but now it's flatter, and you save a whole bunch of money on your energy bill. The other is energy efficiency. Some of the examples... And examples from the program of demand charge reduction have been just that, startup sequencing. We have someone who's working on changing the way they process things with respect to when their solar's online, and figuring out ways to flatten their demand curve.

27:40
Becca Gillespie: And one that just came on that also wants to sort of optimize when multiple pumps are running at the same time, because they have some flexibility, so that they don't have as big of a demand charge. The next is energy efficiency. For that, some of the... Again, that's where, you're actually measuring that area under the curve, the amount of water you drink, if you sort of think of the water analogy. It's energy efficiency. And so for this one, how does data help? Well, yeah, it is good for you to have that energy audit. They walk in, they say like that there's a leak in your compressor system, or there's, that motor's way too old, and if you bought a new one, it would pay for itself in three months. Great information. But the leak in the compressor system is also something you could discover with data over time. So if you're monitoring your energy every day, it's going up, and up, and up, you know something's wrong. Now you're using more energy than you were a month ago, probably there's a leak in there. Another one has been, that's been used for a lot in Energy Insights is justifying an investment. So some people compare like an old line to a new line, figure out how much energy they save on the new line, and then they can justify some investments or upgrades to their old line.

28:58
Becca Gillespie: And in one particular case, a customer was able to save 20% off their energy bill by figuring out how much a VFD would save them, and then watching that change, and then installing VFDs throughout all of their fans and their system, and running it at a low. It's essentially running it at an optimized speed instead of just a fixed speed, which is what AC motors do. But yeah, again, most people wanna use it for other, the other category, which as I mentioned, you've heard a lot about today, we had one group work with this to do sort of an OEE, a very rough OEE of their equipment, how often was it running above a certain kilowatts, to get a sense of how often that equipment was on. Another one of our base dashboards does a part counter, which again, it just looks for those humps in the amps, or actually in power, because we wouldn't just use amps, because we're using Opto 22.

29:54
Becca Gillespie: So it looks for those humps and says how many times did it go above this many kilowatts, and then you can also measure sort of kilowatt hours per bump, so you can get that sort of production real time, how much energy was per part, if these are parts. Now often we're testing these things on Benson's data, so I'm counting cycles on a compressor instead of actual parts, but one of our customers is using it now for their part counting. And then, so monitoring, just the most simple one of monitoring when equipment is on or off. So this is the architecture. We are very similar to the one you just saw, and I learned a new word this morning, so I'm excited to say I think our UDTs are referencing, they're referencing Benson's UDTs, and we take that same information that he gave, the raw data coming out, and do some information with it.

30:57
Becca Gillespie: You have to plug in someone's demand charge, dollars per kilowatt, you have to have all these dashboard features, and where it's located, what the temperature is there, things like that. So we have all of our dashboard-related analytics and configurations referencing the UDT that Benson made, and then we have a base dashboard set that helps these people get started. I actually forgot to mention this one, production, that's actually an old version of it, but production is just kind of on or off. I guess I don't have one with the part counter. Anyway, but yeah, essentially energy, power, and so on. But yeah, essentially the program gives people three points in their plant, so we often advise them to do something that looks like it will be an interesting study, or the three biggest loads, and then we do allow for the on-the-cloud version, but because so many small-to-medium manufacturers are not yet ready for that, we also have an on-prem version as well.

32:00
Becca Gillespie: But that's pretty much it, what makes Indiana unique. I went into this a bit yesterday, but there really aren't a lot of other states that say the best way to digitize is through helping people pilot it. Often there's just the workforce development aspect, but I think that this is a really unique program because of that. It wants to... It doesn't just train the people who are working on it, and trust me, our training is not training them, it just points them to Benson's many YouTube videos, and Inductive University, and gets them very barely started, but getting their hands dirty is a really great way to learn. But also it trains the CEOs, it gets them used to it, it gets them comfortable with it, it gets them thinking about smart manufacturing differently. So I think pilot programs are a great way to do it. But yeah, that's pretty much what makes Indiana unique. So I think that's all my time, any questions?

33:03
Rob Huddleston: Okay, well thank you Benson and Becca, let's give them both a great big hand.

33:10
Rob Huddleston: So we do have some time for questions. Please raise your hand, and please wait for a microphone, the streaming people can't hear if you just ask.

33:27
Audience Member 2: Alright, I'll be green. Becca, are those smart dashboards available on the Exchange?

33:32
Becca Gillespie: You know, they aren't right now. I'm learning about the Exchange right now. I think when they're mature... I mean, they're pretty mature. But they're not there yet.

33:41
Audience Member 2: The quicker you give it to us, the more than we can play with them.

33:43
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, I mean, yes, I think I can make them available on the Exchange, and the reference UDTs. I think, not knowing that word, I had a hard time explaining it to people, but it sounds like that would be meaningful to you. If I told you what a reference UDT was, you'd all get that, it sounds like.

34:01
Benson Hougland: A reference tag to the UDT. So that's...

34:03
Becca Gillespie: So it's like...

34:04
Benson Hougland: The references.

34:06
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, I can't say...

34:07
Benson Hougland: The engine tags that are coming.

34:09
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, I didn't know how to explain that before.

34:11
Benson Hougland: And just so you know, Becca and the state put this program together, they also paid for the development of these dashboards. And indeed, she's been willing to share. So Becca did share with us these dashboards, and we just launched a pilot project for McDonald's stores in Southern California. So they're using the same templates that Becca's team put together. So indeed, I think that's our next step. Let's get these guys on the Exchange as well.

34:48
Audience Member 3: While we're getting that figured out I can ask my question. When we talk about historizing data, have you found like a sweet spot for how quickly to save energy data so that you can aggregate it into like a total monthly usage?

35:10
Becca Gillespie: How quickly? So I usually take Benson's raw data, which comes out once a second. His 64 data points come out once a second. By the way, he's actually can get harmonics off of his, Opto 22. He's measuring at 4,000 hertz, and then turning it into many data points, including harmonics, real and reactive power, all of these things. But I take that once a second and use it... We've only basically compressed it with dead bands as opposed to compressing it further. But it is a little bit cumbersome sometimes to access the long data for monthly reporting. So actually, they take a lot of load. So if you guys have suggestions on that.

35:52
Benson Hougland: Yeah, we offer both kW and kWh. And I think that's important because the kW, of course, is real-time power at a given moment in time. Great for dashboarding real-time values. But the devices are also capable of storing the data, the kWh, which can be remotely reset, say at the end of the shift, at the end of the day, at the end of the month. So now you can start collecting that data too. But when you get it into historization, yes, you're probably grabbing those sample data and store them in a historical database. But I think...

36:22
Becca Gillespie: I should add, yeah, for the peak power, actually when you need to aggregate the kilowatt number, it doesn't actually make sense to do anything more refined than what your utility is using. And 99.9% of all utilities use a 15-minute data window for their peak power calculation. Now you might not hit the exact same 15 minutes as they're hitting. And so you might get it off. But we do collect 15 minute, we have a separate data point that's just on the 15-minute data. So that's a good way to get the peak over the course of the month. And then, like I said, for the... Like Benson was saying, for over the course of a month, you can look at the end energy and the beginning and subtract them. And that's a pretty good way to do it. He collects that every 30 seconds.

37:08
Benson Hougland: Yeah. And that UDT, when you download it, you can get into the UDT and we're actually doing the calculation for the interval data in the UDT. So we're getting that 15-minute kW and it's at the top quarter, half past the hour, set on the time of course of the gateway. And also kWh, 15-minute interval. So you know how much you consumed over that time.

37:32
Audience Member 4: Okay. So you mentioned you were at FERC. So you probably know what an ISO is.

37:37
Becca Gillespie: Yes.

37:37
Audience Member 4: ISO, that's the world I deal in at the grid level.

37:41
Becca Gillespie: Oh, great. Yeah. Love that.

37:43
Audience Member 4: Okay. So my question in this program is you're talking about peak demand, which is a utility chart...

37:48
Becca Gillespie: Yes. Yeah.

37:49
Audience Member 4: But are you anything with like 5CP or are you're... Not yet? Oh, good. We're...

37:54
Becca Gillespie: No, we're not. I wish we were. I'm so excited that you asked that.

37:57
Audience Member 4: I'll help you do that because that's a revenue stream...

38:02
Becca Gillespie: I know.

38:02
Audience Member 3: That they could tap into. 'Cause are these customers using wholesale or retail?

38:07
Becca Gillespie: So most of them are retail. They often do have access to demand-response programs. I literally don't wanna use the word "demand" to describe two things. Like when I say demand charge and they're just learning about that for the first time.

38:18
Audience Member 4: Right. I don't wanna confuse you.

38:19
Becca Gillespie: And then I go here demand response. This is a totally different thing about the hottest day of the year. So I haven't breached it that much, but I like would so love it. In fact, we had a utility tell us.

38:30
Audience Member 4: We do that as a company.

38:31
Becca Gillespie: Love that. Yes. I would love to talk more...

38:32
Audience Member 4: I'll talk to you after this because we have... We actually, I think, knew about you guys...

38:38
Becca Gillespie: Oh, cool.

38:38
Audience Member 4: Doing this and I'll talk to you afterwards about helping you with the peak demand, that kind of stuff.

38:42
Becca Gillespie: That's really great.

38:43
Benson Hougland: Yeah. We've been involved in DR programs at NYSERDA, at MISO, at CAISO for dozens of years. We're on our own DR program at Opto. Oh, perfect. Yeah. PJM. That's another one we did.

38:56
Becca Gillespie: One of our partners actually told me one of the reasons that they have a hard time implementing DR at manufacturers is because the utility cannot tell them in a real time what they're consuming. And so when they say, go down to one megawatt from three, they can't say if they've succeeded or not. And that has been a huge hurdle for them. So they said, why don't we put all these Energy INsights programs in those? But you know how utility... I mean, I used to work for one, so I can bad mouth them. But yeah. So, you know, they can't really work with you very effectively. So typical. No. But I would love that. I would love that. Yeah.

39:42
Audience Member 5: So I was just gonna answer some questions that were asked. Brandon from Blue Ridge. So the integrators are working together right now to put together things for the Exchange. We're mainly working on converting ICE to on-premise. So that helps answer that question. Once we have it all packaged and vetted out, we'll get those out there. And then as far as seeing the historical data and how we can aggregate that, we ran into some issues with Power Charts and the way they were working. So we're working on building custom components to show the aggregated data better, if that helps answer that question.

40:12
Becca Gillespie: Yeah. Thank you, Brandon. Yes.

40:14
Benson Hougland: Yeah, that's exactly...

40:15
Becca Gillespie: One of our beloved integrators.

40:16
Benson Hougland: Yeah. And Blue Ridge did a fantastic job on some of this early templating and the Perspective styles and templates and styles. And that's another reason why I'm really excited about 8.3 and the new Power Historian. So I think we're gonna see some really cool things there in terms of storing this kind of energy data using the new Power Historian.

40:46
Audience Member 6: How would an Indiana small business get involved or an Indiana integrator get involved in this?

40:53
Becca Gillespie: Great. Yeah. Great question. For the small businesses, we have a website. It's energyinsights.tech. I probably should have plugged that here at the end.

41:01
Benson Hougland: Yeah, I just never thought about myself.

41:03
Becca Gillespie: I'm the worst. So but yeah, and then essentially that contact form goes to me and that would be a way to get involved. We don't really have a process for growing our integrator base. We're kind of just doing it as the program grows. So we have just grown to include Brugh recently and we haven't necessarily expanded beyond that. But certainly we're looking for additional sustainable funding options. We're looking at other states for sustainable program opportunities. The DOE just released a grant that was for basically exactly at this intersection of smart manufacturing and energy. So as those grow, we can open that capability again. But as we are, we're just working with this group to try to continue to churn through the projects.

41:47
Rob Huddleston: One more question.

42:02
Audience Member 7: Thank you. This was pretty good. Are you seeing this... And you did mention this briefly, we're going out to other states or other countries, this process that you worked out, which is government-funded support to small-and-medium sized manufacturers?

42:19
Becca Gillespie: Yeah. So there is, like I mentioned, there is this DOE grant, but we didn't necessarily have other states submitting on our behalf for that. That was due on Monday, sadly. But maybe your state submitted it and it is, I can send you the link if you come up after and you can see if your state went after it. And then there's SESAME, it kind of works in that same intersection as well. They do pilot projects in the intersection of energy and...

42:51
Benson Hougland: Smart factory.

42:51
Becca Gillespie: Smart factory. They're not as so prescriptive as this. This is kind of a unique... It's a little bit prescriptive for some people's tastes, which I understand, but it's also a way to get started. You know, pros and cons. But they're less prescriptive. They're more of a, like, choose-your-own-adventure pilot. And then Purdue is starting a ManuFuture program. And it's manufuture.net. And they may work with us to continue to pilot these programs. But no, I think we'd still be open to sharing it with more states and countries. It just hasn't happened yet.

43:28
Rob Huddleston: Alright. Well, thank you again.

43:30
Becca Gillespie: Thanks.

43:30
Benson Hougland: Thank you, everyone.

We have even more exciting Ignition 8.3 features to show you! Join us in the second of two sessions as we continue to share what’s new with 8.3. This time, we’re looking at some project-level resources and other features available through the designer, including new Perspective features, changes to the Tag Historian Module, and the brand-new Event Streams resource.

Transcript:

00:13
Reese Tyson: Hi, welcome to the second session of 8.3 Deep Dives. Honestly, we're super thrilled to be sharing some of the newest features of Ignition that will make... Honestly, this is going to be the best version yet. So, we're super excited about all these features. As you heard from some of these previous presentations, obviously there's a lot of great things coming out. And so, we're just excited to see how these features and dive into these features and see how they can really expand the platform, make them super dynamic and scalable, and honestly, the most flexible platform yet. I'm Reese Tyson. I'm a Sales Engineer here at Inductive Automation.

00:52
Matthew Abran: And I'm Matthew Abran, Sales Engineering Manager. And you might be wondering, what the heck is this giant chameleon for? What does it have to do with Ignition? And if you weren't here in the previous session, if you didn't have the right context, you know that's a valid question. So, yeah. We're doing a deep dive, essentially, into all the features of 8.3. In the previous session, we talked a lot about the platform features and some various things that Carl and Drew went over. So, now we're going to talk about all these next incredible features that Ignition, it's gonna take Ignition to the next level. But so we're not done yet. Let's go ahead. Let's bring out that whole basket of features.

01:40
Reese: Yeah, Paul. Paul doing the heavy lifting over here. All these features in here. All right. Well, so let's get into it. So, right, we're diving into some of these features. So, the first feature that we have here is actually going to be associated with these crayons. So, I am a father of a two-year-old. I'm very familiar with crayons, right? My daughter, she makes some beautiful drawings. Whether the drawing stays on the piece of paper or whether it gets onto the wall sometimes is another question. But these crayons represent the first feature that we'll be talking about in this session, and that is drawing tools. So, drawing tools, of course, allows you to create incredible visuals inside of Ignition. It's a first class, fully embedded SVG editor for Perspective inside the designer. For anyone who's been paying attention, this has certainly been a long time coming, right? So, this is the most requested feature on the ideas page, as you can see. You all asked, right, our community, we listened, and 8.3 we delivered. And it turns out that building a fully featured SVG editor is not really an easy task.

03:04
Reese: There's only a handful of folks that have actually done this out in the wild. And then, marrying the fact that we also wanted to make this really seamless to integrate with the designer and this SVG editor. And so, you can imagine there might be a little bit larger task than what you might expect. But, as you can see here, Drawing Tools is a way that you can create shapes, lines, merge objects, specify design details, and so much more. In fact, for those of you that have used Inkscape, I know a lot of folks have been creating visuals in Inkscape. For those of you that have been using Inkscape, this will look familiar to you, right? It's a similar experience. You'll be pleasantly surprised because we actually used Inkscape as kind of our inspiration for this new feature. So, let's dive into the details of what this really actually looks like inside the designer, right? As you can see on the right-hand side here, we have a brand new Perspective component. This is called the Drawing component. And so, you drag that onto the screen, just like you typically do with Perspective components, and it gives you a brand new, a blank SVG that you can, of course, build from scratch, anything that you want, right?

04:28
Reese: But you also might be asking, "Well, Reese, I have a whole host of other SVGs that maybe are existing or that I want to bring in a motor faceplate" or those types of things, and you might be asking, "Well, can I use those as well?" And the answer is, of course, yes. We can import SVGs into the designer as well, and then it's as simple as going to that SVG and right-clicking on it and converting that to a drawing. And so, this example here actually shows a motor, and so any SVG-based components inside a Perspective also have this capability, right? So, whether it's an SVG that you bring in and import or if it's an existing SVG component, we can convert both of those to a drawing component. Once it's a Drawing component, then you can just simply right-click on that component here and edit the drawing.

04:28
Reese: It's that simple. It's that easy to access the drawing editor there. So, here's a quick snapshot of some of the different functionality within the drawing editor. So, just to kind give you a lay of the land here, across the top you have, of course, your undo, your redo, your merge, your bring to front, all those common things you'd expect out of an SVG editor. On the left-hand side, we have the pointer tool, the line. You can create different types of shapes, triangles, rectangles, those types of things, text boxes, and then on the right-hand side, right, you have the ability to tweak these components and change how they look, whether that's the width or the height, the color, the stroke, all these types of things.

06:11
Reese: So, you can really dial the components down into exactly what you want to craft and how exactly you want that to look. One of my favorite features, and this was highlighted briefly in the tech keynote there, but one of my favorite features here is actually the bindings and how they interact between the designer and the drawing editor. So, you can see here, I just created a basic binding inside of the drawing editor, and then as you click through the elements of this SVG, it's showing up there inside of the designer, and this actually works both ways, right? If you make a binding on or inside the designer, it's going to be copied over and available for visual in the drawing editor. And so, this kind of goes back to we wanted to make this experience as seamless as possible. But really, that's just one of the features, right? There are so many different features that are available. We definitely don't have time to go into all of them, but some honorable mentions here: rename elements, browsing the elements, bringing icons and components from front to back, and so forth using the gradient tool, right? A lot of things that you would expect out of an SVG editor. And then just one more example here of things that are capable within the platform, right?

07:32
Reese: I was able to spin an image of this, of the Drawing Tools up here, and I wanted to just create a windmill, see how it worked and how easy it was. It took me about just a few minutes here to create a windmill that looks like this inside the Drawing Tools and just kind of duplicate and replicate that across your project. So, there you have it, folks. Drawing Tools, it really gives you a way to make custom visuals all within Ignition inside the designer. All right. Well, let's see what we have next in here.

08:18
Matthew: Yeah, let's stick with the Perspective thing. Okay. How about that? Yeah, that triplicate paper.

08:22
Reese: Triplicate paper.

08:24
Matthew: What is this for? What could this form be used for here? So, of course, we're talking about the Perspective Form component. So, yeah. So, for anyone that saw in the keynote, you saw a little bit of that there, and we're gonna do a deep dive into what is the Form component. Before we do that, let's kind of backtrack. Can't we already do that in Perspective? Well, of course, as mentioned, we certainly can. You can build forms. You can build really nice forms. They can be very complex.

08:52
Matthew: They can handle validation. You can submit data to all kinds of different processes. But the way they're built today is it's a little bit more cumbersome. You have to manually place all of your elements. Usually they're nested inside multiple different containers. Your views component tree looks a little bit like this. And then if you need to go back through and maybe make some changes, that could end up possibly breaking some paths, which is important when you start looking at how you have to deal with validation and submitting this data to whatever end point that you're looking for. So, of course, this very simple example doesn't even cover 80% of what you might typically do here. But you can imagine if any one of those paths changed, you'd have to go back and redo that, kind of rethink that. So this new component is really built specifically for forms of codes. That is the Form component. But it has all of those concepts in mind. So instead of specifying one individual element as part of the normal component tree, you actually specify just rows and columns and different widgets from a list of standard input fields. And then it also includes, just by design, it's used as CSS Flex. So that means it's already responsive. So you don't have to go back through and figure out that styling.

10:18
Matthew: It just does it for you. But you can also go through, of course, and customize it. You can do customized styling. So let's go ahead and take a quick look at the basics here. So we drag out a Form component just like that. You can see in the component tree on the left, it is just that one component. So it simplifies that part. It's also similar to maybe dragging out like a Menu Tree component. You drag it out, and then you can configure the items in it as a property in Perspective's property tree over there on the right side. So new fields are just simply added in different rows, different columns, and you select which widget that you want for that. It also works, of course, with standard styles, as I mentioned, and it uses a standard GUI for that. So you can go in here and you can see we can change the style pretty easily, just as you would expect, but we can even apply it, say, to the entire form pretty easily. So overall, it definitely simplifies the design aspect, but not only does it simplify that visual design part, it also simplifies the functional side.

11:19
Matthew: So validation support is included and has many different field types just automatically included that help with that. It also can populate fields and even hide or disable fields automatically just based on a little bit of configuration, which we'll go through as well. So you can see here, here's an email. It is incorrectly formatted. We can immediately see what is wrong with it. As an end user using this form, I can clearly see that something is typed in wrong, and we didn't have to create this style and create this feedback. At the same time, you can see that submit action is already disabled. So it's very clear, and that was just all part of the Form component. So to configure that, it's really just a set of standard properties, like I was saying. It gives you the control but keeps it simple. So we can go and just enable some sort of maybe pattern or a range. It can't be above a certain number. It can't be below a certain number. It all depends on the field type that you're using, the input type. But again, it is all just configuration, and so it is rather simple. So let's take another look at some more of the example fields here. This isn't even all of them, but it has all the expected ones that you would think of.

12:43
Matthew: So text, email, URL, phone numbers, passwords, telephone, radio buttons, check boxes, everything that you would typically throw into a form, and it can certainly do even more than what's listed here. And as just a quick note, I was playing around with this form to create this demo, and I had originally created it as one single column, and I decided it doesn't fit quite right. So all I had to do was right-click, copy a section of the property tree, paste it in a new location, and now I have the two columns. So I didn't have to redo anything, change any of the validation. It's all ID-based, so it worked out pretty well. And here's an example of showing that that same Form component, that Form component that I configured, is just automatically responsive. If I shrink down the screen, you can just see that the fields shrink down, but also radio buttons, check boxes, everything wraps. So I didn't have to do anything extra, anything special. It just handled it right away for me. Another cool feature of this that makes it really powerful is that the data can be populated ahead of time through the properties.

13:49
Matthew: You can see a data property on the right side; various ID-based kind of input components are listed there. So those actually go all the way back into the property tree that reference some sort of field, some input field that you have specified, and it's all ID-based, so even if you move things around, it will show up in the right place. So I can go in, play around with it in the preview mode, make sure it's set up the way I want by default, and then that's it. So it doesn't matter if you move things around. Data is just collected in one place, which makes it a lot easier to work with. The other feature I was talking about earlier, about the disabling and hiding different properties here, that's, again, just configuration. So you can see all I have to do is specify that. When do I want this field to be enabled? Well, when a certain other field is in a certain state. So if this toggle is off, then I want these disabled. So the checkbox and radio buttons are disabled. If I turn that toggle back on, then it's all enabled again. And a quick thing to point out here as well is a lot of this is just all clients, all browser side.

15:01
Matthew: So that's why it works well overall is because it's not firing a lot of different bindings that you have to control. It's all browser-side. It helps remove kind of that isolation of the individual components that you would normally have to configure. So it all goes into one place, which does make it easier to handle that submission action, which you can certainly do through standard actions like you'd expect. So if you originally were building forms and you put a submit button on there or a cancel button and you do an action event for that, you can still do that. You have an on submit, an on cancel as well. And so you can just take that data from one place and be able to write your script around that. If you have to make changes later, you don't have to worry about differences in locations and paths. But besides that, there's another option for the Form component. So you can actually specify that you want it sent through the submission event system. So there's a process flow that will go through. It will queue up that event and actually send it. And if you are offline temporarily, it'll queue up. Once you're back online, it can send it.

16:17
Matthew: And there's even more to that as well. And all this really does is end up in a session event handler like you would expect. And it provides the parameters that you would need to get the context around what happened here. And a lot of this is very important for the offline mode. So the form component certainly works with Perspective's new offline mode. So let's see if we have something else here in the basket.

16:37
Reese: Got another item? All right, well, looks like we got a mangled Ethernet cable that we've scrounged around from the IT department.

16:48
Matthew: Yeah, certainly. So, yeah, with the offline mode here, sometimes you're not always hardwired. You might be wireless. You might even be in a remote location. So what happens if you're in a situation where you need to open up your Perspective app to input some data and you have no connection at all? Well, that's where the offline mode comes in. So it's a new mode for Perspective projects. You can make a project actually launchable inside or in this offline mode. So not many people know this, but certain features of Perspective will still continue to work while you're offline if you already have the app up and running. But if you did not have that, then you can't get back into Perspective.

17:35
Matthew: So you can imagine some different scenarios where this would be quite useful. And so it actually just downloads the resources to your device, keeps them up to date, and that's how the form component also still works. It works because it works off of a lot of browser side and through those resources. So that means if you create certain views in your project and you enable it for offline mode, you can still go through, and just like this example here, be able to access those pages. So maybe you need to pull up a diagram or something that you're looking at, and you don't have an Internet connection or a connection to the gateway at least, and you can still do that. Maybe pull up a static line diagram for a piece of equipment that you're looking at. And so it's pretty useful for doing this kind of somewhat offline remote data entry, those kinds of scenarios.

18:32
Matthew: It does require the Perspective mobile app, so it works on Android and iOS. It's an opt-in type of model for a project, so not all projects are automatically exposed for this offline mode. You can, as the developer, decide what project goes into offline mode. And then users on their side, they get an option to go and download it, and then it will download it and keep it in sync, as long as they stay connected. And so there's an indicator provided to provide feedback there. So just like what we're showing here, I'd go in, find the project I want, click Make Available Offline, and then I'm good to go. So what we can look at here is kind of what's the use case? What's the user story around this? And I kind of alluded to it earlier. If you're driving out some remote location, maybe there's no network at all, no cellular, nothing, and you still need to be able to take advantage of Perspective and go through that Form component, especially, input your data, and then just keep going. You're not slowed down. You don't have to make notes in paper and then come back to the gateway and do it later. It's all done, and it's all right there. And so it makes it far more easier. So, yeah, I think, Reese, it's time to bring out the next item.

19:56
Reese: The next item? Well, honestly, I've been looking at this, and I'm not sure what this is or how it made it in here, but how this is... Before your applause happens, this is actually not a part of 8.3. It was completely a joke. So, we're just getting ahead of it, right? We knew you were gonna ask, so we're just, like, addressing it here in the keynote, all right? The next feature is actually an atomic model. So this is atomic model, of course, is represented by a nucleus and electrons and protons and how they revolve around one central place, right? How they all interact with each other. And so this next feature actually is Event Streams. So Event Streams gives us a way to receive events, filter them, and transform them out of the platform. So it's a brand-new module in 8.3 that allows you to do this functionality. So you might be saying, "Well, Ignition is already a place where I manage all my data. It's a central place to manage the data," right? So, yeah, that's absolutely correct, right? In fact, our first module, our first product, Factory SQL, did exactly that. And used Ignition as the hub to push that data to the database.

21:25
Reese: And so over the years, right, that has grown to include the different items that you see up here. Modbus, Omron, these different devices, DMP3, polling data from a SQL database, bringing in data from web services via Git requests, right, MQTT, alarm notifications, tag event chain scripts. There's a lot that goes on inside of the platform. And so it's become a little bit tricky, right? Especially if you're brand-new to a project, you're getting your feet wet. It's kind of hard to tell where these events originate and how they flow through the Ignition gateway. And so that's the first thing that Event Stream solves is a centralized event management within Ignition. The second thing is getting event data via subscription and not polling. You might look at these devices or at these different ways we get data into the platform and see that we're polling data out of the devices, bringing them into Ignition via tags. We're polling the SQL databases via SQL queries, web services with Git requests, right? But it's all these different polling ways of bringing that data into Ignition. And it hasn't really been until OPC UA and MQTT protocols that we start to get into subscribing to that. For example, with MQTT, you're publishing to a broker, and then we're subscribing to that to bring the data into Ignition.

22:56
Reese: And so that's great, but that was always external to the platform. Event Streams is a way that we can do this internal in the platform as well. And the third thing here is gaining flexibility in how the data is actually used, right? We know that folks out here are using enterprise message busses like Azure Service Bus and Amazon SNS to subscribe to data around their whole enterprise. And we know if we can just get the data up to those layers, then they can do the IT folks, and cloud folks can really do whatever they want with that in a familiar environment. And so just zooming into Event Streams a little bit more here, right, there really are four main parts to Event Streams. So the first is the sources, right, where the events originate. Second would be filtering, where we can filter the events that are processed through this event stream. And then the transform stage is where we can augment that data and provide more context. And then the handler would be where we stream that data out of the platform. So an 8.3.0, the initial release of 8.3, these are the three sources that will be available.

24:26
Reese: Event Listener, which is essentially a way that we can create a script and send events to this Event Stream all around the whole gateway, or around the designer and in the gateway. HTTP, which is a way that we can basically create this event stream as an endpoint that other systems can hit, and then we can process that information. And then finally, Kafka. And I'm gonna get a little bit more into Kafka for those of you that aren't familiar. Essentially, it's a large-scale enterprise messaging kind of platform that allows you to publish and subscribe to data. So that's the sources. So the second stage is the filter, where we can, of course, like I mentioned, filter the events that are coming through this Event Stream. So take this example. So if you have, say, five lines in your manufacturing environment, and you maybe only want to receive events for line one, right? I don't really care about the other lines. I only receive events for that line. Filtering is a way that you can do that. Once that line one is the only one receiving that event, then we can also transform that event flowing through this via live tag data or querying the database, whatever you wanna do within the designer, right?

25:33
Reese: And then finally, the handlers. So the handlers are going to be a way that we can stream data out of the platform, like I mentioned. And upon 8.3.0 release, these are the ones that will be available. HTTP, which of course allows us to post information to another endpoint. The logger, which allows you to log data or the event to the gateway logs. Database, for those of you that have used SQL Bridge at all, right? You know that you can map data to certain columns in the database. Very similar concept here that allows you to stream or receive an event via the source and stream that into a database. And we have scripting, gateway events, gateway messages, and then, of course, Kafka. So those are some of the handlers and sources that will be available upon release here. But there's a whole host of other sources and handlers that we do have planned for this, right? As you can see, there's a whole host of tags: MQTT, Ignition Events. These are just a handful of them, right? But really, what I wanna drive home on this slide is that there are limitless possibilities.

27:03
Reese: We're viewing this as a framework for you all to manage your events inside of one umbrella, right, and then utilize this platform to extend more and more handlers onto your Event Stream. So say you already have an existing event stream, you just plug another handler into that, right, when and if that comes available. And so you can see it's extensible. We can mix and match these sources and which ones come in, which ones go out of the platform. It really allows you to integrate with so many different systems. So, that's Event Streams with a lot of words, right? But you all wanna deep dive into the designer, so let's give the people what they want here. The first thing that I wanted to show in the designer is really just what this looks like when you open it up. As you can see on the left-hand side, there's the event streams. I'll call it a workspace, right? And creating a new event stream is as simple as right-clicking, or there's a little GUI as well. You might have seen that earlier in the tech keynote. But it's very similar with how you create new other items inside of the designer.

28:10
Reese: Then we're met with the source, right? This is where the event originates. So in this specific example, I'm subscribing to a Kafka topic, right? Bringing that event in. Then we flow into the encoder stage. This didn't really make the four main stages I was talking about earlier, because it's a smaller one, right? It's just a way that we can transform the data type. So say you have a JSON or a string; you can convert that into maybe a different data type very easily within this stage. The filter stage here, again, is where we can filter that data that's being processed through this Event Stream. And so, again, going back to that line example, right? Line one or two, or three, you can specify that here, just using the string language that you're already used to within the designer. Then we go to transform, right? Where we can transform this data, as I mentioned, whether that's reading a live tag value or polling data from the database, whatever you want to do with that, you can augment that data before then sending it out to the other handlers there. Once the transform stage is done, then we're going back into yet another encoder stage.

29:24
Reese: So, again, you can encode that data type into something else, and then we get to the buffer stage. So the buffer stage is really a very unique feature to Event Streams. There's really no way natively to buffer data unless you kind of create a custom application yourself. And so I'll give you an example of what I mean. Say you have a thousand tags, right? Each of those tags maybe has an event change script on them; maybe you are doing something on that change; you're gathering other data, logging that to the database. Each of those inserts to the database is going to be a separate insert statement. So you can see, as you scale, that can become not very performant. This buffer stage kind of allows you to batch all of those together, and it's really controlled by two different properties here. There's a couple other ones here, but the two primary ones are the debounce and the max time.

30:27
Reese: And so, imagine you have event streams coming in. We're going to continue to receive those until we hit the debounce time. And so what the Debounce time is, essentially, it's a rolling window. So every time we see a new event, it resets that rolling window. Receive event, reset. Until we receive all of these events, and then if we hit the Max Time, then we wholesale batch that into the database with one single insert statement. So you can see, this is really great for handling spikes of data, and you can tweak these properties exactly how you want them to be tweaked. Finally, the last kind of portion of the Event Streams here, there's a couple auxiliary UIs I'm about to show too, but the last kind of portion of the event streams kind of flow here is the handlers. So I just have a couple examples, but as you can see, there's a little plus icon there on the right-hand side where you can add more handlers.

32:06
Reese: So you've created this whole stream, and now I can send it out to ten different applications if you want. But just an example here with the logger: you can send the event.data, which is how this event is handled within each of these stages. This is just a JSON structure, so you could absolutely do a square brackets, right, key to grab the value out of that payload. So you could log the whole payload; you could log individual parts of it, up to you. That's a logger, and then the database, again, like I mentioned, similar to the transaction groups, right, where you can see you're mapping essentially the value expression.

32:09
Reese: Event.data and curly brackets item count, or square brackets item count, to column name one, or column one. So that would be how you can kind of interact with the handlers there. Now, like I mentioned, there are a couple different auxiliary kind of UI spaces here. This one's really nice to be able to handle errors gracefully. So this thing can handle thousands of events in subseconds. So if there was an issue that happened to one of those last night, like, how do I get to be able to find that information and debug that? So error handlers will capture any errors that happen within the handlers, yeah, any errors that happen within the handlers, and you could then, of course, log that to the database; you could send out an alarm; you can do whatever you want with that. The status page is going to be exactly what you imagine a status page has. Status is on the different stages, right? Events received over the lifetime of this, actually since the last time that we saved this event stream. Max times, min times, averages, average times of how these stages have executed, and so forth.

33:28
Reese: And then finally here, the test mode. And this is actually my favorite feature because, coming from a development background, this gives you a way to actually test this whole event stream without actually having to connect to a source to begin with. Okay. And so what happens here is you can see in that Test Controls there on the right-hand side, you have can specify JSON object and hit run all at the bottom, and you have the test results there across the bottom going through it's a good, through the source, through the encoder, the filter, et cetera. And if any errors were to happen, they would show up here. So that is kind of Event Streams. It's a great way where we can manage all of our events within the designer, and it's one central place and be able to kind of have a cohesive spot to put those.

34:22
Reese: So I mentioned Kafka earlier. And so Kafka is actually a brand new service connector in 8.3 that we'll be releasing. Kafka is an enterprise event streaming platform that's really, it's used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integrations with IT tools and mission critical applications, really so much more. But by connecting to Kafka, it really opens up a huge ecosystem of tools that have Kafka connectors already. It's a very common enterprise streaming platform. And so we know that, again, if we can just get that data to that level, there's so many other tools that folks can utilize to do what they need to do. So what does this look like in the designer, right? This is what the handlers and the sources, which we've already discussed, looks like. So within the Kafka source, there's actually two different ways that we can subscribe to a topic.

35:31
Reese: And so that would be done by using either a consumer group or a partition. As you can see, there's a couple other settings that you can specify. The partition specifically, the max records that you're pulling at a time from Kafka, and so forth. And then on the handler side, right, on the handler side, you certainly have the ability to publish to a topic as well. And so that's Kafka. That's Kafka as well as Event Stream. So, yeah. I think we're ready to look at another feature there.

36:04
Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a look at the last feature we're gonna be talking about today. So, yeah. Is it in there, Reese? Or did you leave it off to the side, maybe?

36:14
Reese: You know what? I do not see anything in here, and that's because I was playing with the next feature here.

36:23
Reese: What do you got there, Reese?

36:32
Reese: We got a super fast car. This thing's got so much power in it. It's got frickin' scissor doors. It's got everything, man. Honestly, as a kid, I wish I had this. Kids are so spoiled these days.

36:48
Matthew: It's a powerful machine. There you go, Reese. All right. So, yeah. So, with this powerful machine, we've got the Power Historian. So, what is the Power Historian? So, we've kind of talked about it earlier, but it's essentially a new time series database-backed historian for Ignition. So, it uses QuestDB as the backend, and it is embedded in Ignition. So, that means no separate installs required. You just go create a new history provider, and it's taken care of for you. It's also built on the new historian API, so it has a lot of those features that were mentioned previously in the last session about native aggregation and all of that.

36:54
Matthew: There's a lot of features, of course, that we'll continue to add as well in the future, but certainly it has a lot already going for it. So, taking a quick look here, it certainly supports partitioning and pruning as you would expect, but it's all handled by the database itself. It uses write-ahead logging, which helps with performance and robustness. It has a native aggregation capability, so the Ignition's no longer having to do that. It's all pushed onto the database itself, which is far more efficient. And as mentioned previously, renaming your paths does not break history, which is pretty critical for anyone that's gone through and had to rename things. It can be a little bit painful, but the new API and the Power Historian certainly address that.

38:24
Matthew: It also supports automatic archiving, where you can detach a partition and move it to a new storage location, which is pretty key for larger setups there. You need to think about your long term; what is your data storage going to look like, and how do you take care of that? But you still want to be able to keep that data somewhere. So archiving it certainly helps out there. But enough about all that. Let's talk about performance. So I went through, and I was able to do some preliminary testing with the current system. And so I threw together something that was just throwing only 4,000 data points per second continuously into it. And of course it was handling it just fine, and I was measuring query time at the same time while running a Perspective session looking at the tag history data, so all in one system here, and then comparing it to what the current internal historian option is, which is SQLite-based, as well as the dedicated Postgres database just for comparison.

39:20
Matthew: So first question, of course, is, was that heavy on the resources? If you have an internal historian running alongside Ignition, does it take up too much? Is there any kind of issue there? And no, the system actually in this test was using just 4% CPU and 700 megabytes of memory. Is actually really low to be able to store millions upon millions of records in a partition like that. So it was actually performing extremely well and still being able to keep up with everything. The next question you might be thinking of is, does it use a ton of extra storage? If we're storing all this data next to Ignition, what are we gonna have to do with that? And no, it doesn't store a lot of extra data. It's historical data, of course, but it's comparable to all of the other options.

40:13
Matthew: So you just have to again, plan ahead for how much storage you need, and it will take care of it for you. And you have now the options to do the automatic detach and migrate the data to an archive location. So it actually helps out there. So you can offload that older data, for example, to something maybe a little bit more slower, discs, or something that's just more efficient for that type of data. But the real question is how performant is it? You know, was it performing well while all of this was happening, even though it's all local to this one in process storing? And of course it was great. Yeah, it significantly outperforms, of course, the alternative, which is SQLite. If you use SQLite for anything more than even 100 data points a second, you'll probably be running into, you know, performance issues because it is not going to be able to keep up. The Power Historian certainly can.

41:07
Matthew: We're talking like milliseconds worth of query time here, querying a tag for raw data over say an hour's worth, so thousands of points, and it was able to just do that. It certainly is comparable to a dedicated database, but yeah, it significantly outperformed SQLite so much that SQLite in the end was taking two minutes just to query data and ultimately failed. It couldn't actually keep up. It had to stop inserting. So if you're looking for that local historian option, but something that will actually be able to keep up and perform, then Power Historian is certainly great with that. And we are constantly adding onto it. So even just this morning I received messages that we've added even more to it. So this is all preliminary, but one of the improvements we've made already, and this was actually asked, I believe, in the last session, is: can we connect to the Power Historian and get data out of it externally?

42:07
Matthew: And so they added the ability to connect to it using a standard Postgres connection, and so you can query the data right out of it. So yeah, you certainly can do that, and we will continually add more improvements like that and improve query times and all of that moving forward. So there's a lot that it does today already, and there's a lot more that it will be able to do. So there's questions about can it store things like engineering units, and the API certainly supports that, the metadata, but as well, Power Historian will be able to support that as well. Support, eventually storing UDTs, things like that, that you would really, really want. So yeah, overall, the Power Historian, it's plug and play; it's designed to be that way. It is performant, and we're gonna add even more functionality in the future, of course. So stay tuned for all that. So at this point, we can open up to any kind of questions for everyone. Mic runners should be running mics down. Yeah. It looks like we've got one at the top already about...

43:19
Audience Member 1: Yes. Cool. So if we take a look at this Power Historian, how can we relate to that, if I compare it with a normal SQL database? Is it capable of storing terabytes of data?

43:40
Matthew: Well, yeah. It's a time series historian. It can record gigabytes, terabytes of data over time, just like you would expect a time series database. It all works as a tag historian. So yeah, are you asking for anything else specific? I mean, the storage size is purely gonna be based off the size of the hardware that you're running, right?

44:03
Audience Member 1: Of course. Yeah.

44:03
Matthew: So that's certainly like the size of the historian.

44:06
Audience Member 1: Yeah. There are no limits, like 1 terabyte or whatever.

44:10
Matthew: Well, yeah. We're not gonna impose a limit. What would actually happen is your partition size would matter, and there's only so many rows you should put into your partition. I believe it's, you know, hundreds of millions. And so as long as you configure the partition size, then those are going to go into new files, and so you can keep storing and storing until you run out of space.

44:29
Audience Member 1: Cool. And you can also set it then that you will not store all that data on your install drive. Your C Drive, for instance?

44:37
Matthew: Yeah. So right now it stores into that local. If you've seen the collections there, it stores into local, but I believe we'll be able to store it elsewhere, but we'll have to get back to you on that one.

44:51
Audience Member 1: Alright, thanks.

44:54
Matthew: The worst case, I was able to do it myself by just mounting the directory to somewhere else, and then I didn't have to worry about it.

45:01
Audience Member 2: Hey. Is Ignition Edge gonna get Power Historian and receive all like full features?

45:08
Matthew: Yeah. So we're definitely testing that right now to make sure it can perform on what your typical edge device might be, like a small embedded PC, but that would certainly be possible. Yeah. And it outperforms its SQLite option, so it's great.

45:24
Audience Member 2: Thank you.

45:27
Audience Member 3: How does Power Historian handle redundancy? Does it synchronize while it's running?

45:33
Matthew: So it currently does not do that. That's definitely something we can evaluate, but yeah, it currently does not.

45:47
Audience Member 4: For the new Forms component, will users be able to submit photos when they submit a form, and for the validation support feature, will that work offline?

46:00
Matthew: Yeah. So the...

46:00
Audience Member 4: Yep. Sorry.

46:01
Matthew: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there's File Upload components; I believe there's more field options as well. But yeah, you could usually with the File Upload button; it allows you to snap a photo if you're looking for that with your device. But yeah, it would support that. And then the validation, all of that is browser-side, so it doesn't require the gateway to perform that action.

46:21
Audience Member 4: Nice. Is the offline function just for forms, or you mentioned it could work with static views?

46:29
Reese: Yeah. You just have to imagine when you design a project, bindings and scripts transforms. Those are on the gateway side, but the form component has certain features that work, you know, on the browser side, as mentioned. Other components, they're just resources, and so we would download those onto the device so you can navigate around; you can see the images text that you have, but you're not going to get live tag updates while you're offline. So you have to keep all of that in mind.

46:53
Audience Member 4: Understood. And would there be an indicator for whether the app is offline or online to let the user know that their changes are gonna be queued and then forwarded?

47:04
Matthew: Yeah. So with the offline mode specifically, you actually launch into it. It's not something where you would temporarily revert to offline and then it would auto-reconnect to online and back and forth like that. It is, you would go launch it in offline mode and you are in offline mode, or you go launch it online.

47:24
Audience Member 5: For the Kafka streams or for the Kafka integration, is there gonna be any support for consumer groups to like ensure that a certain Kafka message is only processed once by a consumer?

47:38
Reese: Sure. Yeah. So right now, the way that you do that is by the offset of the Kafka topic. There are definitely plans right now to for... Basically, what you're saying is an acknowledged message for that source, right? So right now that is not something, but it's definitely something that we are planning on putting into that.

47:54
Audience Member 5: Okay. Also, what about schema registry?

47:57
Reese: I'm sorry?

48:00
Audience Member 5: Schema registry?

48:01
Reese: Schema registry? I'm not really familiar with what you mean by that.

48:06
Audience Member 5: Okay. It's basically a framework for Kafka to define what a payload looks like. Like, basically, if you define a proto buff for a certain topic, it's a way of having a centralized store of saying, you know, what payload should be produced on a topic.

48:24
Reese: Okay. Yeah. I couldn't answer that one off the top of my head, but I could certainly connect up with me, and we can chat about that for sure. Do we have any up, up in the balcony there?

48:34
Matthew: There's one up there.

48:35
Reese: Yeah. Looks like one over there.

48:37
Audience Member 6: Yes. One more. So with the Forms component, does it also support adding additional views in there? Your own created views?

48:45
Matthew: So the Form component is a component inside of it. It doesn't have an embedded view field type. The problem with that is then we would have to figure out what your specific view would be doing, and so it would probably break the functionality of it.

49:01
Audience Member 6: Right. Makes sense.

49:02
Matthew: But you could always put a view alongside it and still... It's still a component.

49:08
Audience Member 6: Yeah.

49:14
Reese: Yeah, right here.

49:15
Audience Member 7: In a previous keynote session, it was listed that you can poll up to like 1.8 million record in one second or something. So how was the performance on a GUI side if we are pulling that kind of data on a history trend?

49:32
Matthew: So that I believe was ingestion rates. I think it was like 1.4 million a second. And so that is literally what the database could support on a performance system. Querying that back, I mean, 1.4 million data points, it's... That's a lot of data, but that's not what that graph was showing, but you can certainly query. I was querying millions of data points, and it was taking maybe a hundred millisecond, maybe 200 milliseconds, to query through all of that. So it is performant, but again, it is still preliminary, so we'll have more numbers, of course, later. All right.

50:07
Audience Member 7: Any change in a trending package?

50:14
Matthew: Any change in like trending overall? This is all standard historian. It all works with the same components, so there was no change with the trending there. You do get the native aggregates, but the functionality should be the same. The end result's the same.

50:25
Reese: We'll do one more question here. Yeah. Right over here.

50:33
Audience Member 8: Yeah. Alright. So talking about offline mode, when going online, when two or more upper people are, make changes to the same, let's say, talking about a database field, what about conflict resolution?

50:53
Matthew: So the...

50:53
Audience Member 8: Last in wins, or is there gonna be a mechanism to solve these conflicts? And on top of that, what if let's say that I'm talking about a database table and what about... What if the schema changes when the device was offline? How are those conflicts are gonna be resolved?

51:18
Matthew: Yeah. So what would happen in that case is you have your package, your data there that would get sent up, it ends up in your session handler, that special Form component submission event handler. And it's essentially gonna be a bunch of data that's gonna be provided to you. So that form component doesn't send you; I have, you know, this column of data. It sends you, here's my essentially JSON package. Your handler at that point, if the schema had changed, it would be up to you to fix your script. And at that point, the new data coming in later, as long as you can interpret it and understand it, if that part of the data didn't change, you could send off a query to insert that and that would be fine and it would be in the order that it is received. So if you insert and then insert or if you do an update and update, that last update would override it. So that would be part of your handler logic.

52:10
Reese: Alrighty. Well, thank you everybody for coming to the second session here. Really appreciate you coming out.

Hear from a panel of industry thought leaders and experts as they explore how utilizing data and technology can inspire new ideas, open new opportunities, and drive digital transformation efforts in industrial organizations.

Transcript:

00:04
Don Pearson: So welcome everyone to our panel discussion with the Industry Panel today. The focus is innovation and transformation in industrial organizations. And I think we got a really good panel. I had a chance to meet with them all yesterday and today, and just to get a little sense of what kind of things we're gonna cover. So I really appreciate the opportunity to be the moderator today. My name is Don Pearson. I'm with Inductive Automation, and this is always one of my favorite panels of the conference. First thing I'm gonna do is introduce each of the panelists, and then I'll go back through and have them each give a real better introduction of themselves and a little bit about their company and what they do and how they're actually engaged with Ignition inside their various activities and organizations. And then I have a bunch of questions.

00:50
Don Pearson: We have some seed questions and things, but we also have runners. And really it is your opportunity to ask questions of any panelists. I also noticed in our discussion yesterday, some of the panelists started asking each other questions, so that's open, fair game for that too. Just wanna make this interactive and really a useful time for you to sort of see what they're up to and how it may relate to some of what you're involved in. So first off, I'm gonna start to my right and introduce David Lam. He's the Business Development Director of Vertiv.

01:21
Don Pearson: He's a motivated and detail-oriented professional and a strong communicator and collaborator who thrives in dynamic environments. He has a passion for innovative solutions, a solid sales and business development background in EPMS, automation and control systems, and two years of Ignition experience. His dedication to continuous improvement, learning, and growth has helped him foster strong team dynamics and networks, and he's excited to see how his industry transforms through innovation. So please help me welcome David.

02:00
Don Pearson: And to his right is Trevor Nichols. He's an Electrical and Controls Engineer at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he designs and supports control systems for the cryogenics on particle physics experiments. Inspired by best practices found in industry and other laboratories, he developed a library of function blocks for PLC programs with corresponding UDTs, templates, and popups for Ignition, providing an object-oriented framework for control systems design. This approach has been implemented on newer experiments that employ sophisticated liquid argon cryogenic systems to study neutrinos. Now, I learned a little bit about neutrinos earlier today with Kevin. Maybe some of you already knew all about it, but we learned a little bit about it earlier today. It's a class of elusive fundamental particles, and it was a presentation as a Firebrand Award winner that was talked about earlier. Very glad to have you on the panel. Welcome Trevor.

03:01
Don Pearson: To his right is Dan Stauft. He's the Director of Operational Technology for SugarCreek. He spent the first 21 years of his career in manufacturing engineering for automotive assembly plants where he specialized in process automation, data visualization, and analysis. In 2013, Dan was hired by SugarCreek. It's a large privately held food manufacturer, and he was hired to lead their Digital Transformation. Over the past 10 years, Dan has led a team of engineers who utilize Ignition to enable decision makers access to real-time production data and historical analytics. In 2017, SugarCreek won a Firebrand Award for their initial MES project, which monitored six manufacturing sites. Currently, SugarCreek has over 20 Ignition gateways and edge tag providers that monitor over a quarter million tags and host over 30 projects utilizing both Vision and Perspective. All of SugarCreek's Ignition development has been done and completed in-house underneath Dan's leadership. Please welcome, Dan Stauft.

04:12
Don Pearson: And to his right is Becca Gillespie. She's been the Managing Director for Energy Systems Network since 2023. Prior to that, she worked as the New Products and Services Lead at Duquesne Light Company, the electric utility for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Before that, she was Sales Director and Product Manager at UniEnergy Technologies. It's a low battery startup in Washington. She was also an Energy Analyst at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and a Production Engineer at NASA. Becca has a Bachelor of Science and Engineering degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and a Master of Science degree in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds a patent for a nitinol valve for in-space propulsion systems. So please welcome Becca.

05:12
Don Pearson: To her right is Dick Willis. He was educated and trained for 30 years to be an industrial software tool builder from PLC-based control systems to OEE monitoring systems to full-stack MES in an automotive factory. He helped create the OEE software engineering services company after that. The software platforms they use range from RSLogix, Visual Basic, Wonderware ArchestrA, .NET, and now Ignition. He points out that he's not yet certified but working on it. So that's good. Thanks. But working on it. At Trane, his responsibilities include connecting legacy equipment to their data network and creating tools that collect, monitor, alert, and notify and escalate to reduce the amount of time spent searching for data so that the time can be spent problem solving and making changes instead. Please help me welcome Dick.

06:10
Don Pearson: I do wanna start by, I gave an introduction to a little bit of their backgrounds, but I've asked each of them to talk a little bit about what they do, where they work, and how they're involved with Ignition, and there's a lot of people at different states of the journey, and I was really pleased also when Becca could join us because she works in the public sector, but they work with a lot of manufacturers in Indiana and I'm very excited about the program they're doing. There's another session on it. You'll be with Benson, I think tomorrow, but we got a variety of talent here. So with that, David, I'm just gonna start left again and give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about what you do, what you're excited about it, how's it innovative, how's Ignition fit into it?

06:51
David Lam: Sure, sure. So good afternoon everybody. So David Lam from Vertiv. Originally, I spent, prior to my time at Vertiv, I did 10 years at Schneider Electric in the software business and Ignition was a very, very big, it still is a very big competitor to Schneider. So I came over to Vertiv to see what this is all about as they've been using it for the last five years. So Vertiv is a OEM manufacturer of MV, LV, and bus duct electrical equipment. And as part of that, I lead the BMS and EPMS controls and automation business globally. So we primarily deliver into enterprise and data centers. So we take everything from the source, i.e., renewables and utilities, and we deliver all the manufacturing switch gear into data centers. And then we overlay the BMS and EPMS solutions on top of that to essentially make the invisible visible so we can control, analyze reports. And we predominantly use Ignition now as our go-to platform.

08:09
Don Pearson: Good. Thanks. Good introduction there. Trevor.

08:12
Trevor Nichols: Hello. I'm Trevor Nichols. And so I work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which is United States' most prominent lab for particle physics research. So my background is in electrical engineering. So before I came to the lab, I actually worked in aerospace for 10 years working on electronics for the Boeing 787. So then I came to the lab as a controls engineer. And so I work on control systems for the cryogenics, primarily on our neutrino experiments. About five years ago, I was introduced to Ignition because it was used on a dark matter experiment that a colleague of mine was collaborating on.

08:58
Trevor Nichols: So when the pandemic came along, we all got sent home to work remotely and there was sort of a lull in our work. And so that was when I really got to work on trying to build something that I'd be able to use across multiple experiments. So I started building libraries both for our PLC code and on the Ignition side. So a function block instance on the PLC corresponds to a UDT instance in Ignition, and those are strictly one-to-one. And so this library, this framework for developing control systems, I've now been able to implement it on three experiments, and we have a couple more on our roadmap. So I'm looking forward to using it on a even bigger project.

09:42
Don Pearson: Great, Trevor. Thanks. Dan.

09:45
Dan Stauft: Hi. Dan Stauft. Excuse me. Happy to be here. You know, as Don said, for the first 21 years of my career, I was with General Motors Toyota Nissan, which has been doing what we're doing, you know, for the past 30 years. And learned about lean manufacturing, data collection analytics. As he said, I joined SugarCreek in 2013, and quite frankly, they didn't have a job title for me. They just knew that I could do something. So my first job was to write my job title. Shortly thereafter, we were looking for a machine data collection system and I had 10 different, Don loves this, I had 10 different applications we were looking at, none of which were Ignition. Wonderware came in and gave us their spiel. We asked how much it would cost, they said, "Two million bucks."

10:41
Dan Stauft: We said, "Haha, no thanks." And they said, "Well, if you can't afford us, there's this little startup in California that you might want to consider," and the rest is history. Our first project was an MES project. We put six sites on MES, I forget how many lines it was. It was around 20 lines. That took one person that was me and we tripled our OEE in two years. And it wasn't Ignition that tripled the OEE, it was Ignition plus a continuous improvement group, which composed of one guy who went to all of our sites and taught them how to identify opportunities, break down problems, identify solutions, implement countermeasures. So that pretty much paid for itself. I mean, I think that probably would've paid for Wonderware. When I joined the company, we were doing around 300 million in sales. Last year we did 1.2 billion in sales, and that was not through growing plants. Some percentage of that, probably 30% was growing plants. It was from our OEE improvement and tripling our capacity.

11:55
Don Pearson: That's great. And just a point for you and for David. You guys, they are wearing Ignition socks, so they get extra credit for wearing their socks today. It wasn't a requirement to be on the panel, okay?

12:07
David Lam: They match my shoes.

12:10
Don Pearson: Becca.

12:10
Becca Gillespie: Right. Thanks Don. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Yeah. I work for Energy Systems Network and we're a consulting shop that works, as Don mentioned in the public sector working with the state of Indiana to help them implement energy-related projects. The particular program that brought us to working closely with Ignition is called Energy Insights. And the purpose of that is kind of dual goal. On the one hand, it wants to help small-to-medium manufacturers just take that first step into their digital journey and start that first pilot program. We happen to say that pilot program should hopefully have something to do with energy, but we really let them be a little bit free there. And then the second goal is to expose them to their energy consumption and start them understanding how they may be able to use energy efficiency measures or data collection measures to improve their energy... To decrease their energy consumption.

13:07
Becca Gillespie: We do that with... We give each of these manufacturers basically hardware, which is our partner, Opto 22, which I'll be speaking with tomorrow, software, which no surprise is Inductive Automation. And then about half of the grant goes towards time with an integrator because we understand small-to-medium manufacturers can't necessarily use something out of the box. Everyone's processes are so unique that they actually need time with that integrator to develop it. And so basically the goals at the end of the program, what the state wants from each of these, is that they just have the capacity to take the next step in their digital journey, whatever shape that might mean. So we just want them to see that ROI so they can say to their boss the next time they want to actually pay for it themselves, "Hey, look at this pilot project."

14:04
Becca Gillespie: "Here's something we did and it had an ROI and now can we invest in the next opportunity?" And we also want them to get that sort of on-the-job training, which in Indiana's opinion, is kind of the best way to train a manufacturer. By letting them do a thing. So that basically brought us to Inductive Automation. I mean, there's a lot of software out there that can take energy data and zoink it to the cloud and give you energy dashboards, but that's not what we wanted. We wanted something that was scalable, modular, reconfigurable, all the buzzwords to say that, you know, this is your beginnings of your smart manufacturing platform, and yeah, you're starting with energy, but you can do anything. So we thought Inductive Automation is a great fit for small-to-medium manufacturers and it's a great fit for being scalable. And that's really what we wanted to give them to get started.

14:58
Don Pearson: That's great, Becca. Okay, over to you.

15:00
Dick Willis: Yep. About five years ago is when Trane Technologies divested from Ingersoll Rand and there are 50 factories. I work for the residential and the Thermo King factories now, and what we inherited was each of the factories had a wide range of thickness of their SCADA layer. Some machines were still not connected to the network. Some of the engineers on site did have Ignition skill sets and built some pretty significant things. One of our sites had a Ignition developer who'd been doing it, you know, for 10 years and it was his full-time job. Most of the other sites didn't have that experience, though they had an engineer who was dabbling in Ignition on-the-job training, did it as he, you know, found, you know, time and availability. But even then, in the first couple years of that development, we had some really good successes.

15:48
Dick Willis: We put in Sepasoft to two of our plants to monitor OEE. We then let the engineers develop their own faceplates for some of their equipment. And one of the... And there are two successes that came to mind, where in one of our machines was monitored by Sepasoft, the operators were putting in notes about what was the problem with the downtime. And one operator was pretty fastidious about that. And she was putting notes that says, "I'm down because I don't have any empty carts to put my material in when I'm finished." Nobody knew that. And all of a sudden we realized that a lot of these issues that we were running into and nibbling at us were productivity and keeping our OEEs low, were things we could easily solve. We just hadn't seen it. So again, making the invisible visible is a big part of it.

16:32
Dick Willis: And same with one of our sheet metal stamping presses. An engineer made a faceplate for himself to keep track of what the photo eyes were doing over time. Realized that again, one of his outages that was eating his lunch on that machine was because a photo eye was tripping a little bit earlier than everybody thought when they wrote the PLC program. He fixed the PLC program, availability went back up, and all of a sudden we're heroes. So we had really good local success, and we were getting more and more need for Ignition, but we didn't have enough local, you know, site developers. And we're still struggling with that. Our journey is now to go past, just thicken. We wanna uniformly thicken our SCADA layer so that everybody has OEE that's geared towards problem solving. To Dan's point, it's not just OEE the number, it's what it feeds to your problem-solving team.

17:21
Dick Willis: That's the key. You know, we don't pretend that having an OEE system gets you better numbers. You have to have OEE system that's credible that your people will then use. And then we also have a SCADA community that we're building. We have a SCADA governance team that we're building. So again, we can all have uniform capabilities. One of the important things we talked about this morning in the keynote was the value of this community. This is one of the reasons why I think we made a good choice when we picked Ignition for Trane Technologies, is because of the breadth of the community and all the help that we're currently getting. Now, our main challenge is to take this monitoring system, which has been showing a lot of good local results to make it uniform across all of our plants, and then take advantage of the alerting and notification capabilities to say, "I don't want you to watch the screen. I want you to go do your work. The SCADA system will tell you when the pattern you're looking for is a problem. So do your work and let SCADA help you as much as it can." So we expect that that's gonna yield even better results for us in a very short period of time once we get that uniform layer developed.

18:26
Don Pearson: Great. Thanks Dick. I think I'm gonna start with the questions. Maybe come back to you Becca. 'Cause yours is a little bit unique also. Many people already know this, but I learned it when I started going to Indiana when the program was first getting started. There's almost... Is it approaching 10,000 individual manufacturing companies in the state of Indiana? Yeah. Kind of a busy place.

18:48
Becca Gillespie: I don't know how you measure it. Yeah.

18:51
Don Pearson: But why small and medium business? We talk a lot about the first step, the journey, and Travis and Kevin were talking about the sophistication levels of deployments that you start someplace and you wanna go somewhere. Tell a little bit about why the target of the small and medium business, how it's going, what are some of the challenges of getting that entrance point going with those folks?

19:17
Becca Gillespie: Yeah. I think the entrance point for small-to-medium manufacturers, I mentioned a little in my intro, but it's a real one. It's that first cost hurdle. It's that ability to describe to a CEO of a company that's been running and running well for 50 years and manufacturing parts well for 50 years that looking at data can help them save money. That can be really difficult to explain. It can be difficult to articulate without a lot of hand-waving. And so the state says, we see the writing on the wall. Smart manufacturing, SCADA systems, data collection, this will keep you competitive. A lot of people within the small-to-medium manufacturers also see the writing on the wall. This is what's gonna keep us competitive. But they have a hard time getting that first investment and getting people to sign off on this kind of difficult-to-explain-and-it's-different-in-every-plant value proposition of data visualization, data analysis, and then, again, notifications. It's hard to know what those gem of a use cases are gonna be until they've happened. So that's one thing. But it's more than just money. I think a different problem in the small-to-medium manufacturers is that information gap.

20:31
Becca Gillespie: It's a very busy space out there. I understand that, frankly. I feel like I'm the filter for them of all of the IIoT and software and SCADA solutions that are there. And I feel that burden on myself, and I'm glad that I can take that off of their shoulders for this first implementation, 'cause there's nothing better than getting your hands dirty, starting a project, getting the pilot going, and building from there, especially with a reconfigurable or open platform like Inductive Automation that you can continue to use in some ways and bring on other pieces. But that's the beauty of it, that they don't have to dig into the world of all of the vendors at first. They can just get started with something. So we think that's a really good one. And then they also have the issue of they're starting to... Need to understand their energy, 'cause energy prices are going up. A lot of big manufacturers are levying greenhouse gas requirements on them, and they definitely don't know where to get started.

21:37
Becca Gillespie: It's coming from above. They hear this new accounting principle is now greenhouse gases, and they can't necessarily measure it. So they get this feedback, and the Indiana state says, "We wanna help you with this. We know this is important. We know it's hard to justify. We know it's a difficult space to get started in. But we think that if we can just give you this pilot, you'll be able to grow and scale and figure out, chart your own course, essentially, from there."

22:05
Don Pearson: Thanks. Thanks. I wanna turn to you, 'cause David, you guys are doing a lot of innovative things with 3D view, Digital Twin, things with the technology. Can you talk a little bit about that journey, what you think about that, where you think it's going, both in terms of making products and in your products... I mean, the manufacturing of it and the product itself?

22:19
David Lam: Sure. So Vertiv. We entered the Discovery Gallery this year. Vertiv has quite a wide range of manufacturing facilities. So we perform self-delivery with Ignition in our facilities, as well as being a systems integrator and selling to our clients ourselves. So first of all, we adopted Ignition in our own facilities, 'cause we have quite a wide range of manufacturing. Everything from heavy industrial electrical manufacturing of switchgear, right down to sensitive batteries and UPSs for the mechanical side. So we first deployed that, and a big thing when it comes to trying to cascade the right message and the right solution of what we can offer as an organization for something that inherently, electricity is invisible, is quite a hard sell. And no matter how many presentations or slides that you give out, nothing is better than actually walking the talk and seeing the true simulation or a demo. So we showcased our manufacturing facility using Ignition. We used Ignition Edge in all of our facilities, and it goes up to a main Ignition head-end using Perspective.

23:36
David Lam: From there, we were able to use it as a data center demo to serve our data center segment as a main client. From there, obviously, we live in a world that's extremely digital now. A lot of this is done remotely... Meetings, video conferencing, Teams, Google Meet, is all done remotely and virtually. So some of the innovations that we started to see in the video, we are able to do augmented reality using the Apple Vision Pro. We're able to generate 3D images from CAD images that were already created, and we leverage the designs off of our 3D switchgear models, embed that into Ignition. And then apply it to an augmented reality, and it allows engineers from anywhere in the world to come and test and see the actual device through the goggles and interrogate it and see the reports live. So it demonstrates efficiency, and that innovation going forward is perfect for training and upskilling new talent that's coming into our industry. It's a great way to see things live without having to travel all over the world to do live testing in a factory.

24:52
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. So, Trevor, I'm gonna go to you 'cause I know Kevin shared some of his excitement about what you're doing and where you're going and the whole work with Fermilab, but how do you, I mean, that's a unique application. How did you go about selling the idea of Ignition or a newer technology, if you will, to address some of the challenges you had with argon, with whatever the difficulties were in getting things going?

25:16
Trevor Nichols: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I can speak to that. So I'd say one of the keys is being objective about it. I mean, it's great to walk in and be really enthusiastic and tell them, "Oh, it's great" and everything, but if you have some data you can point to, that's better. So in our case, we kind of came up with a set of criteria that was the basis of comparison. So we looked at Ignition and we looked at a couple of Ignition's competitors and we also looked at a homegrown tool and we came up with a set of criteria. We were looking at things like, is it commercially available? What does the support look like? Is it object-oriented? Is it modular? What does the licensing look like, the cost? And so we were able to compare different platforms on this basis and then I got it all documented in an engineering report that then gets released into our engineering document repository. So that way, it makes this comparison readily available 'cause you can imagine this conversation is gonna come up over and over and over again, you know, "Why do you wanna use this new product? We've never heard of this."

26:35
Trevor Nichols: So this gives you an easy reference, something that you can go back to and easily point to that, you know, this is documented, it's been reviewed by, you know, some of our subject matter experts, stakeholders. And then I also wanted to kind of jump off of something that David said 'cause David was talking about demonstration, which that's also really important. So in my case, I built a small demo project in a simulated environment that gave us enough confidence to use it on a smaller experiment. And once it kind of proved itself on the smaller experiment, then we were able to take it to the big scale and use it on something really big and something that gets, something that the lab has a lot more publicity for. So that was sort of the progression of it.

27:28
Don Pearson: That's great, thanks, Trevor. So, Dick, I wanna move over to you with a question that relates to, I know that you mentioned when we chatted yesterday, the day before yesterday, that there's, you're at a stage of the journey, not at the level that, say, Dan is with SugarCreek in terms of the 10 years of history, but you're also using internal and external sources, so you're using integrators. You had some comments on that that I think are worth maybe sharing of how do you make decisions or how do you balance who you work with outside, who you work inside, how you build your individual team, where does that balance lie?

27:56
Dick Willis: Right. And that is a significant challenge, right, 'cause we, Ignition is the kind of toolkit where you are expected to be able to launch it in the afternoon and have something running the next day. And that's true. I mean, like I said, that faceplate that the engineer built, he built it by himself, for himself, for his own purposes, and it worked great and yielded results pretty quickly. One of our concerns, though, was the next guy, right? How is he gonna hand that off, or is it something that we could take that pattern and replicate system-wide? And there was a lot of doubt about that. We'd already, as everybody in the building knows, you inherited stuff from the previous guy and you don't know how it works, and if it breaks, you don't know who to go to, and maybe he's dead, maybe he's gone, you know, there's a lot of things that get in your way. Or you wish he was dead, one or the other.

28:43
Dick Willis: I wish he was dead. So we pretty quickly realized we had to have two things, a SCADA community that was an internal resource for us inside the buildings, and then a SCADA governance group, which was trying to say, "Have you thought about this? Here's your standard, you're not quite standard, what's your game plan to get to standard?" And that also highlighted we didn't have enough subject matter experts in the building. So we are still looking for a way to increase the strength and depth of our bench. So I'm here this week also trying to figure out who can partner with us, who can show us what good looks like, but the goal is, I'm gonna say goodbye to you in a couple years 'cause you've taught me, and now I can design and maintain on my own.

29:28
Dick Willis: That's our goal. Whether it's practical, still to be determined, but that is our goal, is to become more self-sufficient than we are right now. But it's a wicked balance. We've been doing this for a few years now, and there's still a backlog of needs that we haven't finished.

29:44
Don Pearson: Sure. Yeah. I wanna reiterate what I said at the beginning, and I'll have to have some help with being able to see, but this is your time, I wanna give folks a chance to get acquainted with you a little bit, but any questions you have, we have folks running with mics, and you raise your hand and they will see it probably before I will see it. Also try and catch people up in the top. But any questions you have, raise your hands, a mic will be there, I'm gonna ask Dan one, and then I'll shift over to somebody in the audience who wants to ask one.

30:12
Don Pearson: But before, I wanna put you on the spot. I know a few years ago, about the time you won a Firebrand, we did a more extensive case study on SugarCreek, and there were some pretty good... We had good interviews all the way from your CEO all the way down to finance people and stuff, and I think one of the things that's really important about Ignition is, how do you have the justification throughout the organization for ROI? You mentioned some numbers on OEE and OEE change, for some reason or another, those people were all ready to go on camera and say how cool Ignition was, and they all have different metrics they're looking at. So how do you work up and down the organization to get the agreement, and what metrics are you using, and how are they going?

30:48
Dan Stauft: Yeah, for us it's pretty easy, because SugarCreek, even though we're a large food manufacturer, we're owned by one guy, his name's John. I saved John a ton of money in the first two years of the project. So it was pretty easy, but when we started out, I learned quickly that... My background, in the automotive industry, everybody at all levels, from the line operators all the way up, they are drilled with continuous improvement teams, so you've got a very, very well-trained audience. At our facilities, we didn't, and we hadn't had to. It's a 59-year-old company, second generation, now run by the third, but they were running things like when they started in 1965, they didn't realize what the potential was. So what we did is, we taught them that if we did an initial measure, and we were meeting our standards, and our standards were dead wrong, and we proved that right out of the gate, because our standards were based on tribal knowledge that had been passed generation to generation to generation, not based on the capability of the machines that were on the lines.

32:08
Dan Stauft: They'd upgraded the machines, but they hadn't upgraded the standards, but they were still held to the same standards, so they built to the standards. Easy, right? So I took a line where our productivity sucked, I put Ignition on it, and now everybody could see that our productivity sucked, and they could see that it sucked in real time. I love saying that. So the next phase, and it happened very, very quickly, 'cause we said your OEE is 27%, and they said, you know, they didn't believe it. But we were based on what the capability of the machine is on that particular line. You know, it's a microwave bacon line, and the bottleneck's the microwave, and a certain number of kilowatts can only cook so many pounds of bacon. So we did the math and said, "For this SKU on that line, we should be able to produce this much," and they said, "You're lying." And that's when Craig came in. Craig came from Conagra, and Conagra's got a good automotive style of thinking. So he taught the team leaders.

33:13
Dan Stauft: He created something called the SugarCreek Performance System that dovetailed into our Ignition platform to where we showed the data, they reacted to the data, he trained the operators, and then he got a daily cadence of meetings going. As soon as you start seeing incremental growth, we went on one line, the first line we did, in two months, we went from an OEE of 28% to 78%. So in two months, with no, I mean, very little investment. And then we did it across every other line in the company. So it's really easy when you start saving that amount of money, especially when it's all coming out of one guy's pockets, what John would say is, "Well, if we can't change the culture to match a continuous improvement culture, we will change the managers and get managers in that will agree with a continuous improvement culture." So we've been so far along in this that we're doing just super oddball stuff. I've got a great group of programmers with me now, ask me, and I'll tell you all the cool stuff. We don't have time.

34:23
Don Pearson: Yeah. Well, good. Thanks. So I appreciate some of that detail. That's great. There's got to be a question out here. Who's got the microphone first? Alright. Right here. Yeah.

34:35
Audience Member 1: Yes. Hi. This question has kind of become, I guess, an annual tradition for me. But whether it's Ignition-related or digitalization, many of the presentations today and what the panelists have talked about involve a lot more connections between the plant floor and the business level. And so I always ask, you know, what kind of cybersecurity best practices are each of the panelists using? And, how do those dovetail with the connections you made?

35:03
Don Pearson: Your annual question. That's good. Appreciate that. So everybody doesn't have to answer that, Becca, if you're not dealing with that with your customers at that level. But let's get a couple of answers to that. We'll start over with you, Dick.

35:22
Dick Willis: Yeah. I don't know how detailed you want that question, but this past year, all of our sites in the North America region have gone through an OT security segregation. So we now have VLANs. We now have firewalls. We have Ignition and its related pieces in what we call the DMZ. We've gone through a thorough review. We have appliances on the network that are scanning and detecting and sniffing, notifying us when rogue devices have been added to the network. So we've gone through a lot. It's been a lot of engineering network, you know, the secret network where the guy runs his own cable. We got plenty of that and it's gone. So we think we're much more robust, but it's still a journey for us as well. Big, big, big effort.

36:03
Don Pearson: Cool. How about you, David?

36:08
David Lam: I guess we're a bit unique here 'cause serving the data centers, they tend to look after the cybersecurity themselves. So they're very selective. They deal with a lot of the Ignition partners here that are here today, Phoenix Contact, Moxa, etc. So it goes through rigorous testing by those hyperscalers directly themselves. So we're quite fortunate that we don't have to really get too much involved in the cybersecurity pieces. They kind of take on that responsibility themselves.

36:33
Don Pearson: Okay, cool. Trevor?

36:37
Trevor Nichols: So I'm gonna, you know, Dick mentioned the VLANs. That's something that we definitely put into practice. I'll say I'm a bit out of my element, so I kind of depend on our IT folks for that. But I know that we lay out a number of different networks that have different levels of accessibility. So I mean, we definitely got to keep the PLCs safe. And so that sort of, since that's what's actually running the system, and so we use Ignition for monitoring and intervention, not for active control. So you could actually turn the computer off and the PLC will keep the system running. So that's why the PLC has to be the most protected. But we do have a fairly thorough cybersecurity review where they go through things, looking at isolation. They're big fans of multi-factor authentication. And so those are some of the things that we employ in our system.

37:38
Don Pearson: Okay. Go on Dan.

37:40
Dan Stauft: You know what those guys said. Yeah, so we're micro-segmented VLANs. You know, IT takes care of the majority of our security. We're pretty secure. At our latest plant, Cisco Advanced Design Services, whoever the hell they are, they design the entire system. And it's to the point where it's really, really, you can ask Nate, it's really, really difficult to get people into our network.

38:11
Don Pearson: Cool. Alright, we got another question out here somewhere right there. Do you have a mic? Perfect.

38:17
Audience Member 2: Hi, my question's for Becca. Dealing with such a broad range of end users, have you been able to quantify any trends and improved energy usage over that kind of portfolio?

38:32
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, it's been a pretty broad range. I don't know that I can give a specific number. So we would say that the thing we look for in our screening, actually, people often ask, which industry vertical do you most look for? And we don't look for an industry vertical. We look for a human that is the right fit to be a champion, a project champion. So the way we screen it is that. And when we have success, and when we don't have success, it's usually that that person has left the company or disappeared or got pulled into a different task. And so there are cases where that has happened. And then when we do have success, it can range really broadly. So there'll be cases like the sort of one-time savings where a big, there was an over-voltage event from the utility side, and all of the machinery was at risk, and they were able to unplug it and save it. And how can you, you know, quantify that? And then there's others where we'd hope that they're gonna use it for energy efficiency.

39:40
Becca Gillespie: And as a huge energy geek, I hate this, but a lot of times I use it for preventative maintenance instead. But, you know, they quantify that in a totally different way. So they'll say, "Hey, you know, actually, I saw the amperage going up on one phase compared to the others. And it means that one of the coils is bad and my motor," etc., etc. So sometimes the savings are energy-related, sometimes they're not. And even when they're energy-related, they can come as these huge chunks of change versus, I guess, the more sort of run-of-the-mill, which is justifying an investment in a new energy efficiency piece of equipment. So like understanding how much their new line saves versus their old line, or kind of watching a degradation over time and being able to like foretell and forestall those sorts of energy efficiency degradations over time, which is the beauty of data and... Trending it. And so, yeah, I mean, but roughly, oh, yeah, we would roughly say they sort of span the whole gamut of what they work on, but they typically can save some energy as well as sort of implement some kind of other manufacturing use case that is of interest to them at that time.

40:50
Don Pearson: Thanks. Dan, you wanna say something?

40:53
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so somehow we made the cut to get included in that program.

40:57
Don Pearson: You guys are our customers, so.

41:00
Dan Stauft: Right, so our biggest plant is in Indiana, it's about 400,000 square feet. It's ammonia refrigeration, wastewater systems. I think our power bill last month was $360,000. So we are in the program, and we're just now getting around to doing the energy part of the program. We obviously didn't use the integrator, and we're using Benson's hardware for something else, but we are now monitoring all 10 switchgear at that plant. We're trending everything. We're working on an AI system to do analytics, 'cause if we can get a 5% save on a $300,000-a-month bill, that's significant. Obviously, we'd like more, but any little bit, it's definitely worth the investment.

41:47
Don Pearson: Sure, thanks. Next question, back there.

41:53
Audience Member 3: Hi, thanks for your time. It was very, very interesting to know. I had a question because over the years, we've been speaking about IT/OT integration, Unified Namespace now. I'm just curious when new plans or new capacities are being put, is there any executive-level talk among the user, talking like a unified business, which is like reimagined, and are we otherwise consistently looking at continuous improvement? Is there a new generation of plants coming up that from a concept level, a different way it's done so that we are not fixing a problem on the legacy systems? Because some of the customers we have met, we've seen over the last 15 years, they have created new legacies because they could have avoided creating the legacy, you know what I mean. So I'm just curious what happens within companies, the manufacturing companies themselves. Is there any executive-level talk around probably reimagining how to put up new plants or some conversations like a unified business, how to look at it?

43:02
Don Pearson: Anybody wanna take a shot at that as you go forward? I guess it's the greenfield world maybe of where you go with plants into the future with all that exists right now, if I understood the question correctly. You wanna say something, Dick?

43:15
Dick Willis: Sure, yeah, we did have a greenfield plant come online over the last two years, and we did try to take some of the learnings from before we did start with Ignition. We started with Kepware and it's gonna become Ignition, and we have an MES stack, and we tried to imagine it from the point of view of problem solving right off the bat. I'm not sure we were always completely successful 'cause we ran into some snags, but it's certainly the approach that we talk a lot about Digital Transformation. It's one of our key milestones for the company. We've got a lot of effort and workshops going on to say how do we make that real even in our existing facilities, nevermind the new ones that we bring online. So I think it is changing, but it's, getting it proven out has been tricky.

44:00
Don Pearson: Okay. Yeah. Okay, any last comment, David?

44:03
David Lam: I think so, certainly in our segment with data centers, everything we do is greenfield, and obviously it's speed to market and getting online as quickly as possible. So where we're seeing now is we embed, we try to embed everything. We create a design philosophy with that client, and they will roll it out pretty much to all their data centers and then data center campuses. So it's speed to market. We can do all of the commissionings. We have all the UDTs specifically designed for that client. It'll roll out with all of the switchgear, with all of the thermals, and all of the cooling, and then they can decide to come and test in person or using the latest sort of innovation that we've been doing with augmented reality. They don't even have to come.

44:50
David Lam: They can just sit. We're talking about developers and people, techies that can be anywhere in the office or in their home, working from home, and do that testing from there, and then the equipment goes straight to site and it's powered up quick, and that's one of the beauties, I guess, of Ignition is the speed to market.

45:08
Don Pearson: We got maybe time for one more question. Is there a microphone in somebody's hand that wants to ask a question out there? Over here. Go ahead.

45:20
Audience Member 4: Hi, and thank you again for all your time and your feedback. Do any of you have any thoughts on the future integration of using an AI or general artificial intelligence in the industry and where that might fit in best?

45:38
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, I mean, I guess I do. I'll just add one to that previous question as well. I think we do try to standardize the tools for small-to-medium manufacturers, which is really bizarre, but we wanna give them all of the same replicatable things but it's the way to meet in the middle between making a bespoke energy system and giving them something scalable that has that. But with respect to AI, I have a pretty short answer, I guess. It's not your first project, and that we learned the hard way. Yeah, it's not the first project. So we do find that looking at the data, sort of getting human eyes on it and starting to have them see and uncover their first findings is really important. But there's certainly a role to play in the future and I'll let you guys, I'm sure you're already using it and finding success there.

46:32
Don Pearson: Anybody else want to comment?

46:33
Dan Stauft: I think probably the, not full-blown AI, but automated anomaly detection is something that is very valuable and pretty reliable right now. Whereas AI models, garbage in, garbage out, it takes a PhD almost to define what goes into the model, what the context is, how it's formatted, what you're looking for, what are the key variables. There's a lot more than just simply saying AI, but anomaly detection definitely.

47:04
Dick Willis: Yeah. We've got a couple of things on the burner where we're trying to look, when people are putting in notes about what's going on with their machines, we're trying to look for a current spike. Like all of a sudden we're complaining about this and trying to use AI to say what's noise, what's signal, and trying to see if we can get a quicker response to a problem that's just now popping up on the shop floor. And we also have some very complicated engineering problems in terms of managing yield. And a lot of what we're tempted to do is just throw everything into the AI and see if it can predict that on Tuesday at 10 o'clock we're gonna have a yield crash. So we're trying some of those things out, but we need a much thicker SCADA layer to be able to get any kind of correlation out of that.

47:48
Becca Gillespie: I mean, I think that, well, I'll just add one more thought. Adding context to the data is so important. And so when you, obviously in my case, if we're doing pilots where there's no context, it's just three machines are being monitored within the system. But it's so difficult to add, and yet it's the only way AI can really learn is with those context layers. Otherwise it can find things that just aren't real. So it can uncover that every Tuesday your machine is breaking down. Well, you know what? The only guy that can run that machine has a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, right? Or it's the most bizarre things because you don't have all of the context in there yet. It's capable, you can get it in there. There's ways to do it, but until you have that, you can't really, you can't always learn all those things.

48:36
Don Pearson: Well, as it often happens, we overran our time, but you guys did great, okay? But we're the only people standing between this group and a little activity at headquarters that they may prefer to this panel. But can we take a minute and acknowledge all of our panelists and say thank you?

49:00
Don Pearson: Thank you.

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.