Fireside Chat

00:12
Jaco
Good morning, Johannesburg. Welcome to Elevate. My name is Jaku. I am the team lead at Element eight and together with my team, my international guests, our system integrator partners, our customers on stage with us today. Very, very welcome to elevate 2024. I love Joburg crowds. There’s always so much energy. I’ll give you an example. Cape Town, we love Cape Town. We love the crowd in Cape Town. We had to beg people to grab snacks. You arrive in Jo’burg and it’s a case of opening a bag whilst putting another one in the pocket and it’s I love it. And there’s always big smiles and it’s always a fan favorite place for us to be at Johannesburg.

00:52
Jaco
All right, I had a chance to chat with some of you throughout the week on Wednesday evening especially and early this morning and it’s some familiar faces and I’m really excited to also see a lot of new faces, a lot of friendly new faces. That’s what it’s all about for us. It’s about growing the community and looking at the agenda for today. It’s going to be packed. There’s a lot to cover and a lot to go through and unpack. We’ll do it together and I’m really hoping that you find it valuable. And we are super excited for what we have in store for you today. A very special welcome to our. Is this flicking over? Yes, it is. Oh, there we go. A very special welcome to our international guests. These events would not be possible without them.

01:34
Jaco
It certainly would be possible, but it wouldn’t be as valuable then having them over the trek halfway across the world. Oh, there’s the guys at the back there. So a very special welcome to first of all, Travis Cox, the chief technology evangelist at Inductive Automation. Carl Kenzinger, director of Partner programs and Strategic Accounts. Kenneth Wine, director of Business Solutions, both at Canary Labs and Rickus Van Rensburg from Flow Software. If we can maybe give them a round of applause, that would be great. Okay, so we hosted our inaugural elevate event last year and had a fantastic time with you and we promised to return, I think post Covid especially it was so difficult to kind of get people together again for in person face to face events. And we decided we’re going to kick off this concept of elevate last year, which we did.

02:31
Jaco
The feedback was amazing and we promised to return and do it again. And we are with you here in 2024. Again, if you’re new to our community or elevate or element 8 for that matter. We are the Sub Saharan distributor of ignition, SCADA and IoT platform Canary Historian and the flow software, Flow analytics hub. And more importantly, we are a passionate group of women and men who humbly serve our industry and the community. We learn from others and share what we’ve learned. We provide intuitive solutions that scale and we help ensure a data driven and flourishing future for all. That’s really why we exist and what drives us every day. All right, so theme for today is building a data driven and scalable digital infrastructure. So maybe the question to start off with is what are we solving for? Why data driven?

03:22
Jaco
I don’t know, you’ve probably heard the comparisons. Data is the new oil, data is the new gold. I personally would like to think of it more as water, you know, similar to the data lake, more like water. But you probably would have heard those things. And I think the reality for most of us kind of day to day operational people is that production is king, right? It’s all about production. It’s on the plant floor. Nothing beats the numbers, the throughput. Your objective is to produce and process as much as possible safely until we get a problem, there’s a breakdown, inexplicable event, safety incident, a problem occurs and what do we need to solve that problem? Or what do we need to understand the path forward or what to do differently? We need data. And leading in modern manufacturing companies, every decision is data driven.

04:10
Jaco
They make every choice based on data. Data is a commodity. There are a lot of people that are advocating for data being the primary commodity of your business. And your digital transformation strategy should be a data driven one. And we tend to agree with that sentiment. And hopefully at the end of today you’ll get an idea of why we are so passionate about everything being data driven. And then finally, why is scaling industry 4.0 applications such a monumental task? I don’t know if you’ve had the experience, you want to deploy a POC or a pot, proof of concept or technology and very often post that process. Scaling that out across your business is actually very difficult and sometimes it fails. And why is that?

04:53
Jaco
And traditionally the automation stack, if you’re familiar with the automation stack layer, has very much functioned in silos where every layer of this automation stack required on some kind of interface between them to communicate, typically downwards and not upwards. And this method really necessitated a very deep understanding of all of your specific solutions and more importantly, how to create connection points between them, very often ad hoc connection points which you had to recreate every time you try to solve a new problem. And that greatly hampers scalability. So the shift towards a technology driven and solution driven strategy, very important that it’s not just a technology driven strategy, but also a solution driven strategy involves selecting this technology stack, if you want to call it that, based on specific requirements that your hardware or software needs to meet those requirements of.

05:53
Jaco
It’s very important that we look at it that way. And the other thing that we often kind of do need, not often that we do need to consider is the concept of legacy systems. Legacy software, legacy hardware, nobody wants to rip and replace. It is painful. Even the, even the words rip and replace sounds like it hurts and it does. And I don’t think the objective should be to do that. The objective should be to understand how do we put something down that adds value, that potentially makes all of these things work together without orphaning any of our systems or hardware when we can. Yeah, that’s quite an important one. And then lastly, just a final point I’m rambling is that rigid pricing policies, kind of archaic pricing policies, play a big role in kind of inhibiting scalability systems that are not interoperable.

06:44
Jaco
You’re going to hear the word interoperable a lot today. All it really means is it plays well with others, it makes friends with the other people on the school ground and they’re all good friends. That’s what interoperability is. And systems that are difficult to maintain. So in other words, the self serviceability of the software, if you depend on a specific expert having to fly out from Germany to help you do something very simple in your system, there’s something wrong with the usability of that piece of software. So those are a couple of thoughts that we have around why often scalability past POC or POT is so difficult. All right, so our objective for today is very simple. We firstly want to cover some new highlights. What we talk about highlights is new version upgrades.

07:29
Jaco
There’s some really exciting ones today and they add some really amazing new features, big upgrades. For example, We’ve got ignition 8.3. Is anybody excited about that? No one. Ignition 8.3, that’s a massive release for inductive automation. We have Canary 24 under the hood. Probably likely the biggest upgrade you’ve had, Ken, is that fair to say? Lots happening with 24 Flow software 7.1. There is also a little sneak peek into something new called timebase, which Rick is going to talk us through a little bit later. And then secondly for today is we want to share insights and Help you understand these building blocks and kind of how they fit together. And hence why went with the LEGO theme, which was really fun. I don’t. Do you like the LEGO theme? It’s pretty cool.

08:18
Jaco
I know there’s one person that absolutely loves it which is Kunrad from Dana. Where’s Kunrard? He has a smallish Lego collection at home. But that’s theme we want to help understand kind of what are the building blocks that you have available to you. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean you need to have a hammer. Use a hammer. So we really want to help understand kind of how these solutions fit together and to sort of aid with that is really track two for today. Track two wasn’t planned, it wasn’t on the agenda. We did decided to add it afterwards when we looked at the attendees for today. Thank you very much to everybody that’s joining us for the first time.

08:59
Jaco
It’s always special to meet new people but when we did see the number of first timers we thought okay, it’s been probably going to be less valuable to jump into the upgrades without sharing a little bit more about kind of the technologies. So that’s what we’re going to do. In track two, which is again just across from here. We’re going to talk about how digital transformation starts with scada. Quite controversial, but it’s a good one. The role and the value of the industrial historian, information and KPI management. And I think Travis has very graciously volunteered to do the keynote for us this afternoon. Travis, thank you. Where Travis is going to talk us through the digital transformation journey. Not your typical digital transformation slides.

09:41
Jaco
I do feel like a little every time I hear digital transformation but Travis has got a very different take on it and I think you’ll find it valuable this afternoon. And then the last thing is this is your event. You know, we kind of the people hosting it hoping to create some conversation and share some insights. But this is your event and very often the in person face to face conversations we have are the most important and the most valuable and I did see a lot of that this morning. So hopefully there’s a lot more of that today.

10:09
Jaco
And how are we going to try and aid and hopefully invite you to have some more conversation as we have some customer stories that we’re going to be talking through today, specifically Reproplast Michael and Damian and we have Clover Dion from Clover going to talk us through a couple of things that will. And again please feel free to ask some questions afterwards. The Guys are here and it’s always valuable to share those stories. Alright, so to kick off the day, we are going to do a fireside chat. I’m going to ask Travis, Kyle, Ken and Rickus to join me on the stage. And while they make their way to the stage, please note that we’ve allocated a Q and A session at the end of the day.

10:47
Jaco
So if you have any questions, please keep those questions if you don’t mind and we’ll cover that at the end of the day. We have a lot to go through and we’ll make sure that we don’t miss out any questions at the end of the day. And then very importantly, sometime throughout the day, please check out the little container there with the Lego. Guess how many LEGO pieces in that container. Scan the code, submit your answer and you stand a chance to win. The little. The McLaren Senna, it looks like box right behind it. Everybody good to go. Right, guys, thank you very much for joining me. So we decided to keep this fairly conversational and not scripted. It felt like it’d work in Cape Town.

11:33
Jaco
I don’t know, but it feels like it’s always a little bit more authentic if we get honest opinions and talking points. So maybe before we get into the philosophical stuff, to kick it off by way of introduction, if you guys can maybe introduce yourselves and your role at your business. Yeah, that’ll be great to show this.

11:53
Travis
Yeah, I’ll kick it off. Hey everybody, I’m happy to be here. So I’m Travis Cox. I’m the chief technology evangelist for Inductive Automation. We are the producers of the ignition software platform. I’ve been with the company since the very beginning. So I just celebrated my 20th anniversary with inductive Automation. Oh, all right, thank you. And throughout my career it’s always been about helping customers in their journey and whatever that may be, helping them with best practices, building the right architecture and of course putting the best in class solutions together so they can solve their challenges and get the best outcome. So excited to be here today. Thank you.

12:33
Ken
Good morning all. Ken Wyant, Director of Business solutions at Canary. Thrilled to be back. I’m the only returner on stage here besides Yaku of course, was thrilled to be in the country last year during the World Cup. It was pretty cool to be here in Jo’burg and watch out over the crowd and see, I think 50% of you had on your rugby jerseys last year. So that was a really cool time to be in the country. I wish that World cup was every year, and we could experience it again, but we’ll have to repeat that in a few years, I guess.

13:02
Jaco
So.

13:02
Ken
I work as a technical lead for Canary and back up the sales team with all discussions around architectures, implementations, integrations, and all that fun stuff.

13:15
Jaco
Cool. Cool.

13:17
Rickus
I’m Rickus Van Reinsburgh. I’ve been with Flow for four years. I’m a software engineer. More recently been working on our new product, Timebase as well. Used to be a control engineer, like I said. And yeah, that’s me.

13:30
Jaco
Cool. Welcome. First timer?

13:32
Rickus
Yeah, first timer.

13:33
Jaco
Good to have you.

13:34
Kyle
First time for me as well. Kyle Kensinger. I’m the Director of Partner Programs and Strategic Accounts. Basically, my role is just assisting and making sure that our system integrators have the tools and resources they need to bring Canary to the market. And it’s a pleasure to be here.

13:49
Jaco
Cool. Thank you. I’m going to poke fun of you guys again, if that’s okay. So we. I think I lost count. I lost steak count this week. I think we’ve had steak three. Three. Three times a day or just about three times a day the last week. Apparently the beef in South Africa is really good, so the guys are impressed. Cool. Maybe to kick it off with digital infrastructure, since that is our theme, so we refer to it as a digital infrastructure, which kind of per function and definition makes the most sense? You may or may not have heard of a term called uns. Unified Namespace. Anybody heard of uns? Really? Is that all five, six hands? Unified Namespace. Come on. Okay. All right. That looks better. Yeah.

14:37
Jaco
A unified namespace is a term that was coined by a gentleman in the us, Walker Reynolds. That has been quite a discussion point over the last little while. We didn’t lead with uns. We called the digital infrastructure the uns. I think, has a specific connotation to it. What we have found and why we made that theme and why we wanted to kick off this discussion on unified namespaces. We do get a lot of, hey, can you quote me one unified namespace, Please? Can you quote me one unified namespace? And also, you know, send over the PDF in terms of how I implement it. We get that fairly often, and there are beautiful guides available around the uns. But we wanted to make sure we kick off with that discussion point this morning.

15:22
Jaco
And to put you on the spot, if we can maybe get some thoughts around digital infrastructure more specifically. Unsure.

15:29
Travis
Yeah, absolutely. I can start things off here. I mean, UNS is a big buzzword. Everybody’s talking about it and Everybody wants it, don’t necessarily quite understand exactly what it’s going to mean for them, how it’s going to be applied to them. But it really is all about, in my opinion, thinking about data differently and building a better infrastructure to be able to get data to where it needs to go, whether it’s people, whether it’s a business, whether it’s the cloud for data analytics and more. But it’s be able to kind of bring everything together into a centralized repository that makes it accessible. And it is a concept, it is by no means a product. It takes lots of products that we put together, leveraging open standards so that everything can be interoperable and that you can get the most out of your data.

16:15
Travis
And that’s a lot of what we live and breathe, that interoperability, that working together.

16:20
Jaco
Absolutely. And I think what you mentioned about data, again, this is why we’re so passionate about the data driven point of view. It’s also not just about data. I think garbage in, garbage out. Which is very often why any kind of initial initiative to go straight to something like machine learning fails. Because there is a bit of a data process that’s gotta go through. I don’t know if any of you wanna speak through that experience, what that typically should look like.

16:48
Ken
Well, yeah, you know, transformation. You know, I talk to a lot of customers and they wanna do that very thing. They wanna, you know, machine learning predictive, you know, but they haven’t even started to crawl or walk along their journey yet, you know, and so it is a process, you know, it’s a process around open standards and. But it requires you to go all the way back to the beginning and think of, you know, good naming conventions, tag, normalization, you know, someone can’t make sense of the data, you know, when they’re trying to do machine learning. If you have multi sites, multi devices and you have a different naming convention for every piece of equipment that you’re plugging into your system. So it is a process, it’s a methodology and it is a progression that you need to follow.

17:32
Jaco
Absolutely. And I think Rickus, from a flow point of view, you’ve gone as far as even positioning around the Unified Analytics Framework since the UNS has gained some popularity. You want to make sure that if people are hopefully understanding kind of what UN is, they should be able to understand what Unified Analytics Framework is. But also very important to you is that kind of the transformation of data to make it valuable as information and what that looks like from multiple data sources.

17:59
Rickus
Yeah, Exactly. I think one of the key things that I think the UNS does not solve is necessarily how we can access historical data, how that historical data is actually viewed at a higher level, potentially at an enterprise level. We don’t necessarily care about a real time value at that level, but potentially an aggregated value, a contextualized value. And how the UAF or the Unified Analytic Framework actually ties in with your UNs to get data to and from it as well.

18:32
Jaco
Absolutely. And Carl, maybe a thought for you. You spend a lot of time with international partners, but it’s always good to understand that we’re not the only ones having that conversation. You hear that elsewhere as well. Yeah.

18:46
Kyle
And also it’s not a one size fits all approach. You know, it has to work for your organization, it has to work for your customers on the integration side. But there’s a lot of common themes and I think that you can take peace of mind in knowing that there are the right guides and the right knowledge out there. You just have to tap into, but also make sure it’s going to make sense for your organization.

19:06
Jaco
Absolutely. So if we think about digital infrastructure, maybe we can get some thoughts around what would some of the key tenets be of a digital infrastructure? What are some kind of the imperative, some of the non negotiables we need to think in mind when we want to put together a digital infrastructure.

19:24
Travis
Yeah, I can start in terms of the architecture. I think it’s an important thing to look at in terms of how do we build the architecture. You know, for so long we build, for the last 25 years we built SCADA kind of the same way in that we connect SCADA directly to the devices that are there, bring it in, and that’s the data we need for that system to function for the operators. And then we go build another system the same way we go build the MES system or analytic system. They’re all kind of these siloed systems and ultimately it’s about being able to define the data at the edge closest to the source of that information, contextualize it.

20:01
Travis
There’s have that single source of truth that then applications like SCADA and MES and others historians and analytic frameworks can actually tap into and take advantage of.

20:11
Jaco
Cool. Any other thoughts?

20:13
Ken
Yeah, I was just getting you kind of said the word siloed. You know, try to avoid situations where you are using software where the data is kind of siloed or maybe even held hostage. You know, try to adapt open standards where software packages can communicate further freely. Have open APIs, things like that and.

20:33
Jaco
Absolutely. So the single source of truth. That’s something we haven’t heard before. I think a lot of kind of ideal platforms speak to that. So we want to maybe chat a little bit about mqtt. If you’re not familiar with mqtt, our industry is littered with three letter acronyms. Sometimes you look at a TLA and you think wtf? It’s literally there. TLA is around every corner. So MQTT is message Q Telemetry, transports, people call it. We, we do see that becoming a lot more popular. And I’m guessing as a. There’s a couple of reasons why, maybe we can understand why MQGT has become really important. But you guys have all under the banner of interoperability, you do play well with others via the MQTT as well. Yeah.

21:22
Travis
It might be important to know kind of the background of mqtt. Yeah, Kind of where it came from. It was actually developed for the industrial world 25 years ago. In fact, they just celebrated the 25 year anniversary of MQTT. And it was developed between a collaboration with an oil and gas company and of course IBM. So Arlo Nipper worked for Philips 66 in the United States. IBM, Dr. Andy Stanford Clark. And they came together because on the IBM side it was all about enterprise service bus. It was the ability to get data to all the IT or business systems in a very seamless way. That concept, we wanted to bring that into the industrial world. But at the time with Philip 66, they were struggling with phone lines that were getting deregulated to get data back to their SCADA host.

22:12
Travis
So they had to go through satellite technologies because it was very remote telemetry and when you go through satellite back then you were paying for every single byte that was being pushed through. So polling over that was not going to work. So the idea was to really have it be a protocol translation to get polling data published by exception over satellite back to the SCADA host so that it can access the information. And it’s funny enough, it didn’t really become popular until really the IT sector took it over.

22:43
Jaco
And what is the most popular use case for mqtt? Anybody want to guess the most popular application of mqtt? Facebook Messenger. That’s right. Yeah. Very few people know that.

22:54
Travis
And what about if you say, hey Alexa, do something that is also MQTT behind the scenes as well as pretty much every IoT platform, your car speaks MQTT back? It’s very prevalent.

23:07
Jaco
Yeah. And so maybe just to Recap. We, we mentioned the report by exception. Definitely. That’s, that’s an important one. Report by exception. It is the broker sentry kind of hub and spoke broker sentry kind of architecture. And then of course, as you pointed out, the kind of lightweight, but still secure and fast transmission of mqtt. So maybe from a protocol point of view, shall we do a quick kind of versus comparison between the OPC versus? No, I’m kidding. We’re not going to do that. I think a lot of people do want to do that. It’s kind of an either or. For them it’s either OPC or mqtt. I don’t think we see it that way.

23:52
Ken
No, not at all. I would say historically OPC has been around since the early 90s, you know, so from our standpoint, I would guess 80% of our logging data coming into our system is still OPC based. So obviously it still has a place. You know, that doesn’t mean that, you know, newer projects are maybe more apt to lean towards mqtt. And so it is, you know, starting to gain some traction. But they both have their place, you know, within the plan or shop floor and within enterprise architectures and ultimately they.

24:25
Travis
Become very complimentary in that we can leverage the best of OPC with all the devices. Now there’s a lot of support for opc, especially ua and getting that data to then be able to bring it into an MQTT infrastructure, which is more of the IT infrastructure, it gives you a lot of benefit.

24:43
Rickus
I think one thing that both of these products do well is they’ve got open standards, it’s easy to communicate and it’s easy for different products to get data across. I mean, Spark Plug be the new thing with mqtt. It’s an amazing tool that just makes communication between products, especially in the industrial space, just a lot simpler and it saves time and money.

25:06
Travis
It’s like magic.

25:07
Jaco
Yeah, like magic. I think it was important to mention that we do often get the request to help somebody with an argument why they should do MQGT versus OPC ua. And I don’t think that’s the way we should see it at all. In fact, we should even think about the protocols. The way we should be thinking is what is best for this specific application and what is best for the customer and kind of figure out what will work for them best. So we spoken about uns. There’s a couple of really nice resources available around uns, both from our side, Walker Reynolds, again, he’s a gentleman in the U.S. He’s got a couple of really helpful guides. We’ll maybe share some of that afterwards.

25:50
Jaco
Available for you to peruse and go through, but we’d love to get your feedback and understand how some of these solutions are being built and worked. We unfortunately don’t have today a use case where we’re using OPC and various other protocols as well as mqtt. But on Tuesday in Cape Town we had a very good insight from City of Cape Town in terms of how they are essentially replacing the entire old telemetry type systems with an MQTT infrastructure. And it’s yielded amazing results for them and not only performance results but also savings. But at the same time kind of on the plant floor level OPC us still very much dominating that, that space of it. So we’ll be she we will share the City of Cape Town story from Tuesday if you’d be interested in watching that with us afterwards.

26:40
Jaco
We’ll share that with you. Anything else on the technology side that we perhaps not going to cover today that we want to talk about when it comes to digital infrastructure? All good. All right. Should we spend the last couple of minutes talking about what is happening in the world of inductive automation, Canary and flow? What are we excited about? What can we look forward to over the next little while? I know there’s a lot yeah I’ll.

27:07
Travis
Start with from our perspective we live in really exciting times. I mean I think we said it last time, but it’s a great time to be an engineer. Right now the technology is pretty amazing and I’m excited to see more IT technologies into the OT arena that we could take advantage of. Especially when it comes to deployment and infrastructure management. Leveraging containers you can kubernetes clusters and getting the best of that world into OT so that we can scale our systems and manage them much more effectively. The days of having to go and put a computer in the plant floor, install things manually and upgrade them and patch them or we just don’t we leave it alone. We still have Windows XP out there right. I mean was the best operating system ever so.

27:53
Travis
But being able to leverage more of that technology and to take advantage of IT because it can offer some amazing benefits and really having those two sides working together.

28:02
Jaco
Yeah.

28:03
Ken
From a technical background I grew up being a programmer and so just the rapid change of technology. For a while it seemed like there was a status quo and now things are changing so rapidly. You see cloud providers rolling out new Services seems like weekly, monthly. Just in Cape Town, someone mentioned something. I’m like, I never even heard of that, you know, and so there’s always the cold new toy out there or the new flashy thing that you’re chasing.

28:32
Jaco
Has anybody heard of Snowflake? You heard of Snowflake? It’s not somebody who skipped a leg day at the gym. It’s an actual. Yeah, Snowflake is gaining a lot of popularity, which is why I’m guessing we kind of. We have the ability to inject as well. But yeah, many of those platforms available.

28:48
Kyle
I think just on a broader scale, the way the ecosystem has grown and you see vendors that are willing to share how they can work together to help customers. I think, like I said, the knowledge is out there and on our side. We take pride in the network that we’ve built and how we all work together to best in class in what we do.

29:09
Jaco
You also have an event scheduled for next year sometime. I think your first event.

29:13
Kyle
So next year is Canary’s 40th anniversary and we figured what better time than to have our first user conference than our 40th year in business.

29:21
Jaco
40 years, that’s phenomenal. 40 years, that’s amazing. And Ken’s been with him for 42.

29:28
Ken
I’ve been in the workforce almost that long.

29:32
Jaco
Sorry, Ken. I know everyone’s a good sport. So Rickus, maybe I know you’re going to chat a little bit about. You’re going to maybe not get into detail around time base, but maybe a couple of thoughts around that.

29:46
Rickus
I think there’s a big market for a free unlimited historian that can help customers just get data historized, get some benefits to what they already have at their plants and not necessarily have to spend a lot of infrastructure or on software licensing and starting to reap those benefits.

30:10
Jaco
Maybe a point on that because it is exciting. It’s a new product and there’s a kind of a barrier to entry I’m guessing that you’re trying to overcome with that introduction. But also storing data just for the sake of storing data is kind of pointless. It’s about how do we transform it and what are the client tools available to make it useful. So maybe a question for the Canary guys is, you know, we get the question often, you know, you guys have a stack portfolio. We don’t quite see it that way. We see it as a set of tools and solutions that you can deploy in any combination that you see fit. And we also don’t really always, even though the solutions compete functionally that’s not the way that we look at it.

30:50
Jaco
We look at it, yes, there may be functional overlaps, but it’s certainly a set of solutions that exist for you to align and figure out how you want to use them in different ways. So, you know, as soon as there’s the mention of something called time base, the question we get is, oh, what are the canary guy thinks guys? Think about that. And you know, with likewise the ability that you’re having with adding, not to give away too much of your 8.3, but some of the point, the historian type capability that you adding, it’s kind of not the way that we see it at all. Or am I wrong?

31:22
Kyle
No, you’re right. I think the fact that we mentioned 40 years in business dedicated to one product and being best in class in that, but we’re not resting on our laurels. The product continues to evolve and develop over time and supporting that product is key as well. And so we certainly have the use cases to point to. And then from a technical side, that’s my friend Ken’s expertise.

31:44
Jaco
Yeah.

31:44
Ken
And so obviously we try to think of ourselves as more than a historian too. There’s certainly customers that is the use case and the mechanism in which they use our software, but we have all kind of modules that surround and add to our solution as well. And so we’re always looking to continue to expand the capabilities of not just the historian, but everything that you can do with it.

32:07
Travis
And I think it’s important to know that every customer is going to have a different journey and they’re going to. Some are just starting, some are more sophisticated in where they are and they’re going to need different tools. And you have to realize that not one vendor can be the one size fits all solution for everybody. And that really for you to win, you have to be able to choose best in class and they have to work together. It has to be something simple to put in. If you’re having to put a couple pieces of software in and then write a lot of code to make those things work together, we’re doing it wrong. And so that is something that we firmly believe in. The ecosystem is really important. And while there might be overlap, doesn’t matter, right.

32:46
Travis
It’s all about being able to select the right solution that fits your needs 100%.

32:51
Jaco
Very, very good summary. Any other thoughts around technology?

32:56
Travis
Well, I guess everybody’s probably wondering why I didn’t say what my favorite thing or what I’m excited about is ChatGPT.

33:02
Jaco
I mean, I was going to ask about ChatGPT. Definitely ChatGPT. And yeah, you know, there’s a couple of really nice tools available for that. Maybe we should kick off with that. Let’s chat about GPT.

33:12
Travis
Well, you know, I mean it is the big buzzword right now. So everybody’s using to go and I should have had my image up there be one generated by ChatGPT rather than an older image of myself. But I mean there are some exciting use cases for that. But I think what we’re up here trying to really showcase today is that we have to lay the right foundation so that those kind of tools can be accessible, so that we can build our data infrastructure so that building an LLM for ourselves could be actually approachable and easy and that we’re not doing it and wasting a lot of resources and time and money just trying to solve one little thing, but then we neglect the rest of our infrastructure.

33:53
Ken
Should I be embarrassed if I say I’ve never used ChatGPT?

33:56
Jaco
That would make two of us. I know. No, I have. I’ve tested it, I’ve played with it. There are some, there are some really nice functional GPT. What do you call them, Wizards, libraries out there. There’s a couple for ignition. There’s some for. For Canary. Some. Some people in our community as even develop their own based on how to, you know, how it helps to. You develop modules for some really smart people in South Africa. So I wanted to make sure we, you know, at least mention GPT as a buzzword and maybe also how more importantly and more seriously, maybe around a unified namespace or I’m going to stop saying uns, your digital infrastructure kind of. How does that support something like digital mirrors and digital twins?

34:41
Jaco
Which is I’m guessing an expected benefit that some people would imagine they have if they put together that kind of digital infrastructure. Don’t know if there’s any experience with digital mirrors and twins as a uns.

34:55
Travis
I’ll just say it’s interesting that you mentioned digital mirror. A lot of people are thinking about digital twins and digital twins goes all the way and to be able to model the process, to understand the physics and relationships that are there with that process. And in order to do that though, you have to be able to define your process, your assets in a standardized way. And I consider that to be the digital mirror. So you’re basically being able to provide those data models that then we can leverage in a digital twin solution.

35:26
Jaco
Yeah. Cool. Happy with that. Awesome. So did you see we are at time that was close. We have actual fact one minute left. Any questions while we have time? I know we’re saving the questions for the end of the day, but any questions for these guys? Please don’t feel intimidated. It’s just the six of us here. If you do ask a question, there must be a couple of questions around UNs and digital infrastructure. Anybody brave enough? Damien, I know you want to ask a question. I just love putting people on the spot. No questions. All right, so everybody is very familiar with UNs, how to build it, how to go about it, can do it tomorrow. We’re all good. Fantastic. Look forward to seeing all of those hundreds of unknown. Okay, we are at time.

36:18
Jaco
Then again, if you’d like to submit some questions to us throughout the day, which we can cover at the end of the day, please do that. You don’t have to ask the question in person. And yeah, that is our time together, gentlemen. Thank you very much. We’re going to see you later today. You’re going to cover 8.3 overview as well as the technical deep dive after lunch. Ken, you’re going to talk of 24 as well as a technical deep dive after lunch. And Rick, as you can do the same for flow. And then I think, Ken, you’re going to cover the what the value of the industrial historian after luncheon in the room over there. So we’ll see you a little bit later. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Give them a round of applause. Thank you.