Closing: What’s Next, and Where Do We Go From Here?

00:10
Speaker 1
Right. We are nearly done. You guys deserve a round of applause for yourselves. All right, so we’re nearly done. Thank you for being with us. You could have been doing many other things today. You chose to spend the day with us. We really appreciate that. Hopefully it was valuable. A Friday is always difficult. A full day on a Friday is always very difficult. And we really appreciate your time and being here. So we’re going to wrap up with some. Some Q and A, some questions for the team before they head off. Travis, unfortunately, has to head out in just a little bit to the airport. So this may be a good opportunity for you to just ask any questions that you’ve may have kept throughout the day. We do have a roaming mic if anybody wants to kickoff with a question. Oh, okay.

01:00
Speaker 1
That was quite an ego.

01:02
Speaker 2
He’s all in.

01:04
Speaker 1
He certainly is all in. Oh, fun fact about Travis, by the way, that I forgot to mention this morning. Travis did supplement his college fund quite heavily by winning bowling tournaments, which I didn’t know when we were invited at the time to go bowling.

01:27
Speaker 3
Okay, Travis, this is a question for you. With having different tag providers and now you’ve got different UDTs and you want to standardise it.

01:40
Speaker 1
Yes.

01:40
Speaker 3
We’re using EAM to move the standard across. Is there any plans maybe to make that a little bit easier, that you can rather have utilities derived from another tag? Let’s say you’ve got a standard tag provider or something like that. Is there a plan?

01:58
Speaker 4
Yeah. So what he’s getting at is that right now, in Ignition, you can define one or more tag providers, and in those tag providers, the UDC definitions, those data models are distinct. They’re per tag provider. So if I had, in one provider, if I had defined motor, then I went to my other provider, I’d have to copy and paste that to have the same one. If I make a change, I gotta synchronise across all the providers. So that is definitely currently something we know about. EAM can help you move that stuff around. But ultimately, we’re gonna. After 8.3 is released, and then one of the minor updates, we’re gonna actually give you the ability to move those UDTs to a global share resource on that server. So then you look at EAM or look at multiple, you know, your servers across multiple locations.

02:47
Speaker 5
You.

02:48
Speaker 4
You could build your common set atop and just deploy that down to each server, just to the server itself, not to every tag provider. So it makes that a little bit simpler to be able to build that out.

02:58
Speaker 1
Perfect. That would work. Good question. Any other questions? These easy questions, Damian. Just kidding.

03:18
Speaker 6
Thank you. To Rickus. The specifically that the portion of the measure collections and so on, where we have the ability to specify a commissioning date. Perhaps I missed this, but do we have the ability to specify a decommissioning date?

03:38
Speaker 5
No, not currently. But if there’s no longer any data being logged, so the null values will always get ignored. So it’s not necessary for you to have a decommissioned date because we will ignore any null values. So if it stops logging, it will just get ignored by the application.

04:05
Speaker 1
Cool. Any other questions? You have another question? Well, go for it. It’s your question standing between us and the beer. So now I’m kidding. Davia, please. If you have more questions, please.

04:37
Speaker 6
The new identity service. So does that mean we can start leveraging IDPs like Okta and Ping and so on?

04:45
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We in house, we run Okta as one of our tests because our form is backed by Okta. So we already had that kind of set up. But yeah, any IDP will conform.

04:57
Speaker 6
Okay. And then I’m going to keep the mic. Travis, the drawing tools, obviously very powerful, but to what extent are we able to leverage things where we can try and automate a lot of the CSS? So, for example, the example that you gave during the technical session was changing the background to red. What happens if you want to try and add a gradient? Typically the way you have to address that in Ignition is a long, complicated CSS thing. And is there any kind of interface or whatever where you can try and simplify that by defining like set points or something like that and essentially allocate colours and that kind of thing.

05:43
Speaker 4
So one thing that is missing from that example I showed earlier today is that in the Drawing Tools editor, you didn’t see styles on the right hand side to even specify a CSS or style, which is behind the scenes CSS class. But in Ignition, perspective style, and that is missing from there. But that is something that we need to add in there so that you can have the style; you can do binding to the style. Outside of that, there’s nothing planned right now to sort of make things simpler. If you have ideas, we’d love to hear it.

06:16
Speaker 6
I’ll speak with you afterwards.

06:18
Speaker 4
Sounds good.

06:20
Speaker 2
You only have till five.

06:23
Speaker 1
Yeah, pretty much. Right. Good questions, Damien. Thanks. No other questions for the team. Brahms seems like a competition.

06:35
Speaker 3
No, it’s not a competition. Perspective app on iOS face ID. Is there any plans or am I missing something? I have not managed to get that working.

06:48
Speaker 4
Yeah, so we don’t do it in the Perspective native app because people have asked for it for our authorisation, meaning the IDP and Ignition that wraps our default or like our internal providers. But our strategy is really to leverage external IDPs and they do support face recognition. So for example, we have Duo, and for our Ignition systems, we tie in a Duo, and that does the face recognition on the phone or whatever that multi factor is. But they support that. So if you have that externalised, it’ll pop over the app and then come back.

07:24
Speaker 3
Okay, thanks. Yeah.

07:30
Speaker 1
Another question in the back.

07:39
Speaker 7
Good afternoon everyone. I’m trying to present the ladies. Where are the ladies here? Yeah, I can see a hand. Ladies, why are we quiet?

07:58
Speaker 1
Okay.

07:58
Speaker 7
My name is Chetamakoka, I’m from Brilliware. Simple question. I just want to find out if it’s possible to integrate any of the software that you presented with our own in-house software. If it’s possible, what are the. How do we then map up the processes? Is it something that we need to sit and discuss one-on-one or how does it work? Thank you so much. And ladies, please ask questions. Thank you so much.

08:33
Speaker 4
So maybe we can go one down line in terms of what we do. I mean from an Ignition standpoint, if the external system has supported OPC, UA or MQTT, or had a REST API, or put data to a SQL database, you know, or any of those kind of standards, it would be automatic. You wouldn’t have to do anything special. We would be able to automatically integrate with that. Now if there is, if we don’t have one of those standards or some way of communicating, it is possible. We have an open SDK, a free SDK for our product, where you could build a module that would tie directly into your software through some other mechanism. So we try to have as many open standards as possible and avoid that module SDK route. But module SDK gives a really deep integration.

09:24
Speaker 4
That is how, for example, Canary, they can have configuration on our tag system. Right click log to Canary directly using the module rather than we could also use MQTT. So we like the open standards, but there is also ways around it if we don’t have that.

09:43
Speaker 2
Yeah, and from a Canary perspective, we actually have APIs for inbound and outbound data. I’m not sure which direction you’re asking. Typically, people are looking to get data out of their historian. We’ve collected through some common mechanism and then, you know, trying to serve it up to other applications. So obviously, our web API is quite common. So you can use a scripting language, you know, to interrogate the database. It’s very common to use our ODBC server as a link server within SQL Server environments so that people that are familiar with SQL Server queries now you have access to Canary data within, you know, store procedures, views, whatever it may be, you know, work you’re doing in SQL Server. And then we also have a service that we call Publisher that can push data out.

10:30
Speaker 2
We push out MQTT, but we can also push out JSON to WebSocket connections. So there’s some third party applications that you can establish a WebSocket connection and have a continuous stream of data flowing to that as well.

10:43
Speaker 8
In terms of how it’s done, it is very conversational. You know, it’s finding out what your goals are and how we can help fill those goals and, if there are any gaps, finding a best practice around it. But yeah, it’s very conversational, and that’s a large part of what we try and bring to the industry.

11:00
Speaker 5
I think the same thing from Flow’s point of view. I think if you utilize some of the open standards and, or some of the technologies we already support, I think it will be an easy conversation. I think if it’s a more customer-focused solution, I think that is a conversation that we potentially need to have in person so that we can determine what is the best route forward.

11:23
Speaker 1
Cool. Thanks guys. Other questions? We’re done. Oh, one more. Carl. What is.

11:42
Speaker 3
Why.

11:45
Speaker 9
How’s it guys? This is for probably Kenneth, with all the cool stuff that’s currently coming up. Are there any updates coming to Cloud Edition as well?

12:00
Speaker 4
So you’re referring to Ignition Cloud Edition.

12:02
Speaker 9
Yeah, Ignition.

12:03
Speaker 4
All those things that we mentioned today will be available for Cloud Edition.

12:07
Speaker 9
Okay.

12:08
Speaker 4
Minus the Siemens S7 driver. So we don’t want drivers to be in the cloud. But, but all that will be there. Plus our Ignition Edge offering is getting the power of story in.

12:17
Speaker 9
Okay, cool.

12:23
Speaker 1
Very good question. All right, that’s it. We can wrap it up. Perfect. Appreciate the questions. Thank you everyone. Any closing thoughts from you guys before we explain how the drinks are going to work? You. You. You spent the week with us in South Africa based on just on the basis of the couple of conversations you have had interaction. Any closing force to leave our community with? Sorry to put you on.

12:45
Speaker 8
Yeah, I’ll kick something off. Just quickly. The question came up in Cape Town about what is the business arrangement between our three companies? It’s not a formal arrangement. You know, we’re all three separate companies, but we are pulling the rope in the same direction. We share a lot of the same values. We want to see the success of the industry. And a lot of that requires collaboration not just between our companies, but others, other vendors, and something that we’re committed to. And it’s folks like Eliminate that can bring us all together and give us a platform to speak to you that’s so valuable, and just really appreciate your participation and thank you for coming. Those are my thoughts.

13:22
Speaker 1
Thank you.

13:23
Speaker 7
One more question from this side.

13:25
Speaker 1
Sure.

13:28
Speaker 7
Hi, yes, sorry, my name is Sharon. I just have one question. What would be the best practices to implement ignition in a manufacturing environment?

13:40
Speaker 1
Best practices. I can tell you what one of the best practices would be is to speak to one of these people on the screen. That would be a good start. But yeah, go for it.

13:53
Speaker 4
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, as I was kind of mentioning there, when you are getting ignition into your organization, make sure that you have the OT and IT teams working together at the get go to be able to provide, you know, whether it’s a VM or a server, however you’re running it, to provide the right infrastructure that’s there so that they’re managing it and making sure that it will stay up and running. Within Ignition, of course, there’s lots of different best practices you could apply. It depends on your use case. But I do think it’s in terms of data; I think it’s important to before you even address building applications, where’s your data coming from, how do you want that to look, and how you want to bring that in?

14:38
Speaker 4
Because if you get the right foundation for the data, it makes building a system in ignition incredibly fast. If I had the data already coming into ignition, I could build a complete system and give me one day; I’ll give you everything you need. So I think maybe that’s probably the best practice at the beginning.

14:54
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. That’s the most pragmatic approach, I think. Yeah, yeah, good question. And maybe just as a segue to what we have on the screen at the moment. We love speaking with you, we love spending time with our customers and just having the conversation. Part of that was quite difficult today. You know, you see the right people speaking to each other, and there’s good conversation and you’ve got to rush people along to come back inside and listen to a presentation. So maybe in an ideal world we’ll just organise a picnic, we’ll all get together and have a couple of drinks and have good conversation where it doesn’t feel like we’re rushing you into presentations, but the conversation is so valuable, you know, in an industry that is traditionally very competitive, very closed off, very, ooh, my IP is my IP.

15:36
Speaker 1
We have to be sharing more. And I think a good departure point would be our system integrators. You know, we run the stage; we’ve got the easy jobs. The system integrators are the true heroes in our story. You know, these are the people that take all of these things and make it work together. So an invitation to you. We do have a very good, strong community of system integrators in South Africa. If you’re new to our industry and our community, please make sure to reach out to one of them. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do that, please contact us. In fact, even if you contact any of these guys directly, it does filter down to us, and we’ll make sure that we align you with the right partner. But these are the people that really make the magic happen.

16:15
Speaker 1
And we wanted to make sure that we give them the real recognition today that they reserve. So it’s not just kind of us sitting on the stage telling you how fantastic everything in our world is. These are the people that make it all happen. So that would be a good next start. Next point. Any other closing thoughts? Sorry, Kyle. Thank you for that, Rickers. Good. Okay.

16:38
Speaker 4
I mean just, yeah, reach out, right? Reach out and share. That’s what we’re here for.

16:42
Speaker 1
So what’s next? Helpful resources? We have a couple. There is a lot out there, especially on the topic of digital infrastructure builds and UNS. It’s one of those kind of things that you would want to understand what to do next. There is a very helpful guide that was prepared by Inductive Automation. It’s called what is a UNS and how does it work? It’s not a comprehensive guide, it’s not an introduction. There are comprehensive guides. They are comprehensive guides by companies like NorCal, sorry, Cisco. Geez, I’m really losing it. Corsa Systems, Alex, the guys, they’ve done a very nice practical guide. There is of course 4.0 solutions. More specifically, digital mastermind Walker Reynolds and his team. They’ve got some really nice practical kind of crash courses.

17:30
Speaker 1
And there’s of course, just a conversation, you know, reach out to any of these people or us and we’ll help you get your journey started. Information Management and Modern Manufacturing, That is a very nice white paper that Flow has recently introduced that kind of also talks about this thread of data and how to make data valuable and how to scale the KPIs across your business. And something we didn’t really spend a lot of time on today was Canary Virtual Views, is how do you virtualise your environment and your assets within Canary to really get the story behind your assets and get the kind of unified view of all of your assets. So we refer to that as Virtual Views. There’s a really nice guide on that as well. So we’ll share some more over the next little while.

18:14
Speaker 1
If you are familiar with our Data Liberation Front webinars, who has been to a or attended a DLF webinar before? Okay, there’s a couple of hands. It’s not a political party. If it was, we would kick ass. But it’s not a political party. It’s just a group of like-minded men and women that get together and share stories and updates. Our next one is on Friday the 7th February, very well aligned with the release of 8.3, amongst other things. So we’ll make sure that we give you a lot more updates in February next year. And we will also talk about our top system integrator partners for this calendar year. We will likely announce at the DLF as well. And it’s just a nice way for us to continue the conversation with each and everyone of you is to join us on these webinars.

19:02
Speaker 1
And then, to close it off we have this that I need to hand over to a lucky winner. I just need to find out who that was. It was WhatsApp to me a few moments ago. I hope it was. Yes, it was. So the winner is Gerard Coetzeer from Stero Integration. Gerard. Yes. Oh, he’s not here. Forfeits the prize. Oh, he is here, Gerard, please come collect your, well done. So if we know anything about you, we know that you’re a good guesser. Thank you very much. Cheers. And then. Yes. So Gerard’s answer was 327 in that little container. And the correct answer was 332. So that’s phenomenal. That’s quite scary actually.

19:56
Speaker 2
That’s scary because that was the same guest in Cape Town that won.

19:59
Speaker 1
Cape Town was also 327. That’s right. Yeah. That is OO Twilight Zone. Yeah, 327. Well done Gerard. And thank you for taking it something small. Hopefully the giveaways we had today was valuable as well. And then is Clarice in the room? Is Clarice in the room? No. Is she outside? Just the last thing from our side we really enjoyed spending the time with you. It would not be possible without these people. It would be possible. It would just be far less valuable. It definitely wouldn’t be possible without my team. So thank you very much to the Element 8 team for making it happen this week. It was a crazy week. Love to work with you guys. You’re all rock stars. I do want to highlight Clarice, specifically. Clarice, if you don’t mind coming to the stage. We just want to say thank you.

20:46
Speaker 1
Your work this week was phenomenal. Maybe give her a round of applause. It’s important to highlight that because really there’s a lot of organisation that happens behind the scenes and Clarice has just been amazing at that. But again, thank you to the Elimin8. To you guys, our system integrated partners with us, the customers that presented on stage. That’s very nerve wrecking. Thank you for them for doing that and each and everyone of you. We hope to see you real soon. You will collect your drink tickets at the door. It’s not to actually get a drink. There is an open bar. The tickets you will use to get either a gin tasting. So you get three gin tastes, gins for your ticket. You get three milkshakes. If anybody’s really into milkshake tasting, I believe it’s a thing.

21:46
Speaker 1
There is also a wine selection, either red or white. You get three each of those. And there’s also a beer tasting where you can get a couple of beers over there. If you’re not into any of those things, please feel free to order anything else from the bar and we will chat and see you outside. Thank you again for joining us. Appreciate it.