Digital Infrastructure: The Role of the Industrial Historian

00:10
Kyle
Everyone still with me? Lord, didn’t scare anyone to go over to the technical side. Now’s your chance. Now, I appreciate everyone taking a full day to come and hear about what we have to offer. Here we go. I know it takes a lot of time out of your busy schedule, so just really thank you for taking the time here today to talk to you about Canary, the role of the industrial historian. So I introduced myself earlier. My name is Kyle Kensinger. I’m the Director of Partner Programmes and Strategic Accounts. It’s a long title. Basically, what I do, I just help to empower the system integrators and. And the accounts we have worldwide to make sure they’re maximising the value of Canary, the fact that we’ve been in business for 40 years.

00:58
Kyle
As you can imagine, the product has evolved and changed over that period of time. We are based on the east coast of the United States, in the state of Pennsylvania, not too far from Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. Sort of that part of the country. I think we’re a small enough group here. If I could maybe see by a show of hands how. How many system integrators do we have in the room? Okay. And what about end users? Great. Okay. It’s a nice mix. Very good. So in the early days of Canary, were focused primarily on selling directly to our end users. As Ken mentioned, we kind of existed at the edge.

01:37
Kyle
We would go after projects and deploy them, implement them, learn from them, to add to our software the way that we’ve scaled up to more than 20,000 customers, we’re more than 70 countries around the world, has really been through empowering integrators to provide feedback to us that they hear from their customers. So if you haven’t heard of Canary previously, it’s really within the last 10 years, we’ve superpowered the company to take the feedback, make the product as strong as it can be. So the historian, in some people’s minds, is antiquated term. It’s, you know, sure, it’s necessary to collect and store data, but you’ll hear many of themes, not just from Ignition, from Canary, from Flow Software. It’s a bit repetitive, right?

02:23
Kyle
We’re not trying to pound you over the head with the same industry terms over and over, but the importance, I think it shows how we interoperate, how we all work together, play nicely in the sandbox. So I know I’m in South Africa, right. Mining is big here. It’s also big where we’re from in Pennsylvania. So Canary is based not far from the coal country of Pennsylvania. My grandmother’s family came from coal country. And so the term the canary in the coal mine, I’m sure that resonates with each of you. Sure. The ability for the canary to tip off the miners when conditions may be hazardous, unsafe. Right. That’s what the historian can do, allowing engineers, decision makers, companies, the ability to understand what’s happening with their system, at their site, with their company, that you may not see with the naked eye. Right.

03:23
Kyle
So why does Canary exist? What’s the point of all this? Stop if you’ve heard it before. But it’s all about the data, Right? But just collecting and storing that raw time series data, as you’ve heard, is not enough. You need the ability to provide information to your users, your stakeholders at various levels of the business. Right. It’s not just the IT and the OT bridge, but it’s making sure that everyone has that single source of truth, that they’re pulling from the same data sources. And so the fact that we provide the tools to scale. Right. So some people here, industrial historian, they automatically think big systems. Ken mentioned this morning, we have customers with more than 10 million tags. And some people think, well, I’m not at that scale, so does that eliminate my need for an industrial historian? Right.

04:13
Kyle
Should I just get away with something that isn’t Canary? And sure, you can try to set something up, but it may not be performant over time, and you may be forced with that rip and replace that we talked about earlier today, that can be scary. Companies are always at different stages of their digital transformation. And sometimes when you have buy in from the right stakeholders internally and they say you have the green light, now’s the time to go. You want something that’s going to be performant and scalable. And so that’s really why we exist. Of course, it’s all about the data. But it’s not just Canary. We’re not trying to convince people that this can only be done within our system.

04:52
Kyle
We want to make it easy to bring data into Canary, easy to contextualise and work with it within our system, but then also to get data out. Because we understand that the tools and resources we provide they’re certainly helpful, they provide key insights, they’re useful, but you’re going to want to do more with your data. But when you have that single source of truth, you have the ability to pull from Canary and into another platform; we make it easy to do that. Not just easy on the technology side, but also it makes sense from a licencing standpoint. And so I’ll get into that as well. The last point, the fact that we are platform agnostic.

05:30
Kyle
So maybe just a key point about Canary as a company, we’re proud of the fact we’ve been around since 1985, because in this space you don’t always see companies that have the staying power approaching four decades. So were founded by two brothers, Ed and Gary Stern. They still serve as our president and vice president. They’re actively involved, and they’ve grown the business into what it’s become. But the size of Canary is a strength because that allows us to pivot when we see the right opportunity that we can take advantage of; we can go into the market. A prime example of that is when Ken spoke about our Lens Linux development, where that OEM came to us and said, here’s the opportunity. And we said, we need to jump on that. And so we’ve taken the steps to do what we need to do.

06:18
Kyle
Another good example of that is the fact that if you think about data, you think about the historian it serves. Every industry, regardless of what industry you’re in, you have a need for this, whether it be oil and gas, mining, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals was a fairly new thing for Canary to break into the life science space. Understandably, a lot of the regulations that go into it, the compliance that you need to be up on, was something that were always aware of, but we never had the right use case to jump on those opportunities. And so a couple years ago, were working with a large pharma company on the East Coast. They came to us and said, you checked every box that we’re looking for. However, we need the 21 CFR Part 11 compliance. And okay, this is something were aware of.

07:08
Kyle
We knew that this was coming. We just had to tackle it. And so we did. We went through the audit process; we worked through what we needed to do. And now, pharma life science is one of our fastest growing industries. And so I think when people think about Canary and the fact that we are just based on the east coast of the US we serve a global market because of the integrators and the stakeholders that we serve. And so we have nearly 150 certified system integrator partners. What does certified mean? It means they’ve gone through the onboarding process, the training process. We work closely with them to make sure that we’re serving their customers. Now, there’s hundreds of other integration shafts we work with that aren’t necessarily certified partners.

07:53
Kyle
So it’s Not a barrier to entry that you must be a certified partner for us to work with you. And then our international distributors really do the heavy lifting in certain regions to help us serve. Imagine different time zones. Now, when a support issue happens, and we’re based on the east coast of the us, it can be challenging to make sure you have your questions answered. So that’s where element eight comes in to help provide that support. So what does work best? This is not just Canary. This is just software in general. Something that’s open, secure and adaptable. A lot of people in the historian space, they feel like they’ve been pigeonholed into putting their data in a silo and it has to stay there. They can’t always get it out.

08:41
Kyle
There are lots of tools that you’re expected to use, continue to use, even if you feel like it is not the right fit for your solution. So we want to break free from that platform lock that exists. We want to make it easy and be open. Data security is of the utmost importance. Certainly in this day and age, it almost goes without saying that you have to be secure. When you look at the environments we’re installed in, it speaks to that security. The U.S. Navy has been a longtime customer of Canary. That’s something that we take pride in. Adaptable, right? Everything has to grow, has to be able to scale, but it also has to fit your architecture needs. Not every project is going to be the same.

09:21
Kyle
And that’s why, even though there is some overlap in Ignition, Canary, and Flow, you guys call the shots. It has to make sense for your operation, for your customers’ operation. We just can be a guide in that process. We can tell you what we’ve seen with other companies, what works as a best practise. We can help you troubleshoot. But ultimately, the adaptability turns into a conversation. You’re not going to talk to us, and we say this is how it has to be. It really is a give and take and just finding the right solution for the right project. We’re also adaptable when we talk about our licencing, the fact that Canary still provides perpetual licencing. In fact, the vast majority of our sales are perpetual sales. Now we do have a subscription licence.

10:09
Kyle
Sometimes, companies don’t want to take that big jump and have a large capital expense until they’ve proven it out. So we offer free proof of concepts. We also have the ability with a subscription, it includes support, so there’s no added risk you take on by going subscription versus perpetual. But the perpetual option really helps from a long term roi, you buy that licence one time, that’s always your licence. You have annual customer care. Customer care includes new version releases, access to the support team, and free virtual training. Now, some companies, they want us to come on site and train them in conjunction with an integrator. We’re happy to do that, but the virtual training a lot of times can take care of the initial questions. So we have the Canary Academy. It’s an online video based tutorial.

11:00
Kyle
Kind of go at your own speed, learn the basic controls of our system. And a lot of times, we found that when you go on site and train a customer, you’re kind of going over some of the basics. And so we wanted to make sure that when we do have time in person with companies, it’s more, okay, we’ve worked with the tool, here’s what we really need to know. You’re not just following the A, Bs and Cs. So we’ve talked enough about sort of what Canary is in general terms, so let’s get more specific. So at the end of the day, it’s a NoSQL time series database. Highly performant, highly scalable. So Ken mentioned that we have the ability to scale beyond 2 million tags per server. 2.8 million, I think, is currently our biggest one.

11:45
Kyle
But the way you can cluster those together, there’s no limit to how the system can grow, you know, above 10 million tags, certainly in oil and gas, that tends to be some of the higher tag counts that we see. On the performance side, it’s our lossless compression algorithm that stands out for Canary. So the fact that you never have to interpolate the data values, never cut the data values, you always have access to that raw data. And that granularity is so important. Laura joked about machine learning. AI, what does it do? How do we use it? Well, if you’re feeding data that’s been watered down over time and not feeding those tools the raw data values, you’re not getting as much information as you could gain from it. And so it’s that lossless compression algorithm that’s so important. Already touched on scalability and flexibility.

12:39
Kyle
Again, the architecture that you need, we can guide you through best practises, we can guide you through what we’ve seen with other use cases. But it’s that flexibility that customers really appreciate because things can change, right? You can have a new acquisition, there could be a merger, there could be one site that’s following certain protocols and they’re collecting data a certain way, and then another site comes on and they’re following something completely different. So Canary can be flexible with that and dependability. Don’t mean to keep repeating the fact that we’ve been in business for so long. Some people see that as you’re a dinosaur. How are we still relevant in this space? But really, it’s the support and we continue to put time, effort, resources into growing the system. The solution we have our product roadmap publicly facing; it’s on the Canary community.

13:28
Kyle
We have all of our training publicly facing; we have our knowledge base and all the resources there. We don’t have anything behind a paywall because we want people to see what we can bring to the table. So we break it down really in three steps. You know, first, data collection and storage. As you know, as we’ve said time and time again, it’s much more than just collecting and storing. It’s adding that context to the data. And then the third step, putting your data to work. So for many companies, it’s only the third step that the users really ever touch, feel, and see. If it’s just data behind door number two, nobody really cares, right? They need to be able to interact with that data. And that’s what the third step touches on. So on the collection side, we work with industry standard protocols, right?

14:19
Kyle
We’re not trying to have hundreds and hundreds of drivers for every custom solution. So we wanna work with industry standard protocols. The vast majority of customers are still using OPC, UA and da. But as you’ve heard already today, MQTT is really gaining a lot of momentum. We sit on the sparkplug B Foundation and so we know as the protocol is changing, we have a seat at the table to make sure that we’re up to date on the latest and greatest. Even down to the fact that we have manual data entry. You can create custom collectors through a web and net APIs. So there’s a list there. It’s not all-inclusive. An example of that, GEOSCADA. You guys familiar at all with GEOSCADA? Has that come up? It’s more of a regional thing.

15:03
Kyle
We’ve seen it a lot in Australia with some companies; we had an integrator, have an integrator that said, hey, there’s a lot of opportunity to migrate. Some of these customers, they need the ability to send this GEOSCADA data to Canary. So they developed a driver, and that’s now included as part of the system as well. So anytime you purchase the Canary system, every protocol is covered; it’s all included. You don’t have to pick and choose and say, I need this one and that one and this one. It’s like going to the buffet. You get it all. You pick what you want, what you need. Now, assigning context to the data. Ken is speaking a lot about virtual views and building out asset models.

15:44
Kyle
If this is new to you, I would encourage you to check out Ken’s recording because there’s some pretty powerful stuff you can do with that. We have a lot of resources on the website, but it’s that virtual views and the ability to scale that’s so powerful. And that’s where it’s important. On the smaller side, we talk a lot about the big numbers, more than 10 million tags, and try to make it sound impressive. Right? But that’s the outlier. Most companies have smaller tag counts, and when they think about an industrial historian, they think, okay, how does that help me? Well, it’s the views and the future proofing that gives you the foundation that builds, that allows you to see your system grow over time. Or as you add new applications and platforms to feed that contextualised data into those platforms.

16:33
Kyle
You can normalise your tag naming structure. We use regular expressions to restructure and re alias tag names. Anyone use regex? Gary, my man? No. Then calculations. The calculations. There’s a couple ways to think about CALCS within Canary. The main one is the calculations that you build within the Canary administrator. Those values then get written back into the historian and stored as part of the historical record. So a lot of times the question comes up: Does that impact my overall tag count? It does, but you also have the ability then to query those historicized tags. Now, the second way. So there’s two ways to think about it. On the Axiom side, you can just run ad hoc calculations to give your users the ability to maybe learn something new.

17:22
Kyle
And a lot of times we’ll see that an ad hoc calculation that’s built in Axiom, they’ll go around and write that back through the administrator because it’s something they want to have access to in the future and be able to historicize and query that way. Then automating the workflow. So we do have event monitoring. That’s a powerful way to use that Canary data in some new ways with events. Of course, some things you can do on the flow side can kind of take CALCS and events to the next level. For a lot of companies, they have what they need within Canary. Third step, the ability to analyse an axiom. So Axiom is Canary’s tool. That question comes up A lot. So. So it’s our trending dash boarding and reporting tool that we’ve built in house. We support it; we add to it.

18:11
Kyle
Every system comes with unlimited users for Axiom, so you don’t need to pick and choose who has access to Axiom. Of course, through security you can manage who has access to the data values and maybe some read-only dashboards that have been built. But we’re not going to be the ones to tell you that you can’t provide that data to your company. Right? It’s ultimately up to you. We joked yesterday that Excel is the cockroach in our industry that refuses to die. It’s trusted, right? Companies rely on Excel, they’re comfortable with it. It’s that nice blanket you can curl up in. And so the ability to provide your Canary data to Excel is vital, and it’s not going away, so you got to use it and then integrating your data.

18:58
Kyle
So just like we don’t licence the data collectors to bring data into Canary, we don’t individually licence the tools to get data out of our system and into other applications. So those APIs are open, and a lot of third-party applications that we work with, One of the main ones, of course, being Ignition. So we have our Canary module for Ignition, not just the ability to collect data from Ignition, but then also publish that contextualised data back in through to Ignition. So we have lots of training, lots of videos, again, just kind of hammering home the fact that we all work well together and integrate well and then transforming the data again, you can build those asset models and also embed Axiom screens into Ignition. So from the user standpoint, a lot of times they just see the application they need to see.

19:50
Kyle
They don’t care or know that it’s coming from Axiom or Ignition. They just have the tools, the resources at their disposal to make their lives easier. So just to kind of reiterate what we’ve touched on, this is foundational, right? Regardless of what stage you’re at in your digital transformation, you need the ability to have the historical data because everything else you down the line, you want to have access to the raw Data values. Those TVQs are vital, especially without the granularity. Granularity is key. We’re filling critical needs. So I imagine more than 20,000 customers. It’s wild to see the use cases we have varying from things in every corner of the globe. NASA’s been a long time customer. There are certain logos that we like to talk a lot about because when you talk about some companies, it doesn’t resonate across industries.

20:48
Kyle
So we talk about NASA, Coca Cola, US Navy. It’s something that we take pride in because everybody can relate to that. And just the fact that we’ve been in business for a long time, we’re continuing to evolve, and it’s really through the ecosystem and the network that we’ve built that makes us so strong. Going to events like this, having webinars that we do together, it’s really just trying to clear up the misconceptions that may exist and show you that while there’s overlap with a lot of these platforms and applications, it’s not a competitive tug and pull. Right. We’re pulling the rope in the same direction. We want to provide the tools and the resources that your teams need to serve customers, make lives and projects easier at the end of the day, data driven decisions.

21:39
Kyle
So we have a quote here from one of our customers. We have a lot of case studies and resources online. Feel free to reach out to me either on LinkedIn, whatever it maybe, we’re happy to help. We take pride in helping customers globally. So again, just want to thank you all for taking the time, learning a little bit about Canary. If you have any questions at the end, Ken can handle the more technical questions. Oh, sorry. One thing. Licencing side. So I mentioned how we don’t licence our data collectors, we don’t licence the APIs to get data out, so how do we licence the product? Right. I said you can have perpetual, you can have subscription. We also host data in a private cloud environment for customers. So our pricing’s public. We start at 3500 tags.

22:23
Kyle
We can scale all the way up to unlimited tags. And so by selling the product based on the overall number of tags, it makes it easier for companies to say, well, I fit within this bucket, I need this many tags, and here’s what it costs. So by not doing a pick and choose, it makes it much more, I think, performant for companies to see how it’s going to scale out over time. If you buy one size system and you have an acquisition, you’re adding new lines, new sites, you need to add tags. It’s easy to do that, so just keep that in mind. Another thing, when it comes to architecture and dev testing, staging systems, or redundant systems, it’s not going to be a full price based on the retail price. So that question comes up a lot.

23:07
Kyle
Hey, I went to the website, I see I need 60,000 tags, here’s the price, but I need three servers or I need to set up redundancy. How’s that going to affect everything? So just. Just keep that in mind. And again, if you have any questions, we’re an open book, so reach out to us. But again, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure being in South Africa, spending time with each and everyone of you. Can’t wait to come back. Thank you.