Fireside Chat

00:00
Speaker 1
Good morning, Western Cape. How are we all doing? That’s a good response. With weather like this, I mean, jeez, what a beautiful day. Thank you for gifting us this blessed day today. It’s lovely. Thank you. My name is Jaco. I look after the team at element eight. I’ve had an opportunity this morning to speak to some familiar faces, some new people. It’s lovely to see the community get together and especially see some new young people into our industry. So that’s really encouraging. So Elevate 2023 together with my team at element eight, as well as our international speakers, customers, partners who you’ll see on the stage with us a little bit later this afternoon, welcome you to our inaugural community event that is Elevate 2023. So we are in Cape Town today and we will be in Johannesburg on Friday.

00:52
Speaker 1
And be sure that we will repeat these events for the next couple of years as long as we are able to. It’s very important for us to meet you face to face, as far as we can hear from you, and more importantly, also learn and share amongst each other. So if I look at the agenda for today, we’re going to kick it off this morning with some fundamental sessions. It was actually quite tricky to try and figure out where to target and what to talk about with such a variety and a diverse group of people. We have some customers, we have some people that we haven’t met before, so putting the agenda together was a little bit tricky.

01:29
Speaker 1
But I think we’ve covered all the bases that should speak or at least serve each one of you, depending on your needs or where you are in your journeys. But again, welcome to elevate. Before we start, it’s probably important to get the app. If you don’t have the app yet, if you have not done so yet, please download the app. I’m going to leave it on the screen for a couple of seconds. I see some phones coming out. All right, everyone pointing a phone now. Those are the people that ignored our emails the past week. Cool. We’re all good. Thank you. Oh, no, sorry, Brian, you must get an iPhone, Brian. All right, just very briefly for a bit of context. Context is everything.

02:15
Speaker 1
If you’re new to our community, which is the element eight community, it’s important that we share a little bit about what we’re about. And we are a passionate group of women and men with a common purpose, which is to humbly serve our community and our industry. To learn from others and share what we’ve learned, provide intuitive solutions that scale scaling is kind of a common thread or a theme that you can hear from us today or this morning. And then, most importantly, to help ensure a data driven and flourishing future for all. That’s really what element eight is all about. And it’s important to give you that context about who we are and what helps us wake up every morning and do what we do. I’m not going to say those words. Anybody brave enough to say those words? Right?

03:04
Speaker 1
So digital transformation, it’s nearly the end of 2023, and digital transformation is very much still at the top of the agenda. It’s been a continuation of trends and things that we’ve been spoken about for the last couple of years. And yes, it is at the top of the agenda. But what we certainly don’t want to do today is kind of explore any scare tactics. We were actually not laughing. It’s not a funny matter. We were chatting about it as a group last night. You know, these kind of messages that people receive. If you do not do this or adopt this technology within the next two days, your business will fail. That’s certainly not the objective for today.

03:47
Speaker 1
But there are ideas and there are some opportunities at the moment that has certainly elevated the level of utility and what is available to us today as an opportunity to reach digital transformation or the Holy Grail. I’m going to give you two quotes. The first one is from Jeff Bezos. There is no alternative to digital transformation. Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves. Those that don’t adapt will fail. That sounds a little bit threatening. The next one from Sol Berman at IBM. The next five years will be more disruptive than the last 15. It is not business as usual. A lot of technology that came in three years ago doesn’t work anymore. So we all know that technology progresses at an exponential rate.

04:34
Speaker 1
And we’re getting to a point where companies that have embraced digital transformation are starting to see the results and the value from digital transformation. So even with all of this hand wringing happening at the moment, many companies haven’t yet taken action. And that’s a very philosophical discussion why they haven’t done so. If you look at the three elements, people, technology, and process, why have companies struggled with this? What is the big challenge? And I think it’s important to understand the definition of transformation. So if we turn to the Oxford dictionary, we’ll see the transformation is a marked change in form, nature or appearance. So one of my favorite times of the year is New Year’s Day, specifically not because of the party that as well, but specifically the opportunity to review the past year and get to some resolutions for the new year.

05:27
Speaker 1
And I think while all of us commit to being six packed, millionaire, ever present leaders, at least by June, we know, as with New Year’s resolutions, that is not the reality. The reality is that change is slow, it is painful, it is baby steps, and it is only instilled through habit and through culture and an inherent want to change that you can actually get that. So what I prefer, or the way that I would like to look at it, is that transformation is actually a marked growth as opposed to change. I’m not sure if that makes any sense. I hope it does. But change doesn’t seem authentic. It’s more growth. At least that’s our view on it. Perhaps you’re familiar with a Welsh illustrated. His name is James Norbury. So James Norbury is a phenomenally creative person.

06:26
Speaker 1
He created a book called Big Panda, Tiny Dragon. I’ve shared this with a couple of people over the last little while. My team is so probably tired of hearing of James Norbury, but he created this beautiful book called Big Panda and Tiny Dragon. And one of the key lessons, or one of the profound lessons from this book, is where this character, Tiny Dragon asks Big Panda, what is more important, the journey or the destination? So maybe journey. Show of hands. Oh, oh, okay. It looks like this is journey and this is destination. Destination. Okay. So big panda replied to tiny dragon, the company is more important than the journey or the destination. And that was quite profound, especially in a world where we want to share and learn from others, where communities are so important.

07:18
Speaker 1
So I do believe if you’re joining us today from whichever industry you’re in, whether you’re a customer, a partner, whether we haven’t met before, I do believe that you are among the more forward thinking companies in South Africa. But that said, we all have different situations. We’re all on different stages of our journey. And our goal for today is, as it always is to help you wherever you are, to either start, continue, or elevate the journey that you are on. So that’s setting the scene a little bit for this morning. So once again, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for the lovely weather. If it stays like this, I think we may cancel the afternoon. We can just chill outside with a beer, maybe. But thank you very much for hosting us in the Western Cape, and welcome to elevate.

08:00
Speaker 1
So I’m going to invite to the stage the experts. I’m certainly not an expert. The SME’s the specialists joining us from North America from the US. First of all, please welcome to the stage Clark Bossett, the director of business development from Canary. Thank you, Clark. We have Kenneth Wyand, the director of business solutions, also from Canary. Welcome, Ken. And we have Kent Melville, the director of sales engineering with inductive automation. Thank you. And then last but not least, we have, all the way from Johannesburg, we have Leonard Smith, customer success manager from flow software. Welcome, Lenny. Thank you. All right, so maybe a disclaimer. What we’re not going to do is bestow on you some profound wisdom and key takeaways. I think that speaks from a position of absolute authority which we don’t want to do.

09:12
Speaker 1
What we’re rather going to try and aim to do is speak to you just based on our experiences, what we’ve heard from other customers across the world, things that we’ve seen, things that work. And that’s really the objective of the session. We are, we would love to take some questions. We’ve put some time aside, ten minutes, I think, as part of the next 40 minutes to cover some questions. So if you have any questions, please keep them. Please do ask them. It’s not often that we have these gentlemen with us, so it’s a good opportunity to pick some brains, which we’ve allowed time for.

09:45
Speaker 1
So maybe as a way of departure or departure point, maybe if we can ask each of you to give us an introduction to who you are, the nature of your role, what you do at your various companies, and yeah, what you’re all about. Thank you. Start with you, Kent.

09:59
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah. Hey, everybody, I’m Kent Melville from inductive automation. We make the ignition software and I’ve been with inductive automation for seven years now. And over that time, it’s been fun to see inductive automation grow. So I am the director of sales engineering. So what that means is I manage some teams that get to work directly with customers and our partners to help everybody understand ignition, learn ignition and figure out how to utilize it to best solve problems. And so that’s really what we’re all about, is solving problems for people. And yeah, we’ll talk more about inductive automation and ignition later today.

10:41
Speaker 2
But I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to go and to visit with not just customers in North America where we’re based out of, but to also be able to come and talk to our distributors like element eight, and to see what people are doing here in South Africa and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

11:03
Speaker 1
Cool. Clark.

11:04
Speaker 3
Awesome. Thank you, Jaco. So my name is Clark Bossert. I’m the director of business development for Canary. And there’s several. My role is a little bit broad internally, but I’m pleased to be here because something that I’m interested in is learning about the ways that you’re using canary, the specific aspects of the tool that are really transformative for your operations. And so telling those stories internally and then being involved in any ways that I can be an internal champion for our roadmap, just to bring things that are relevant to you that really make a difference. So in addition to just working on our pipeline, of course, sales operations little bit as well. That’s a lot of what I do within canary, but pleased to meet you all. Thank you.

11:46
Speaker 3
For those of you that have had us on site, and it’s a total privilege to be here, thank you.

11:52
Speaker 1
Cool.

11:52
Speaker 4
Thanks, everybody. I’m definitely the shortest one. I feel a little bit intimidated, but my name is Leonard. Well, that’s the name I parents at all.

12:01
Speaker 5
Order.

12:02
Speaker 1
Lenny.

12:03
Speaker 4
Everybody just know me as Lenny. I’m sure most of you guys know me. I’m also known as the flow guy. So my passion is really all about information or turning data into information. And I’m really excited to see how people and organizations actually try to use their data in their day to day organizations to actually make informed decisions. That’s what it’s about for me. I know there’s some companies here that already is on their journey to actually utilize their data. So for me, it’s all about the information. How can we get or democratize our information and get people to actually act on the information that we generate on our plant floor? So for me, all about the data and the analytics of that. Perfect.

12:45
Speaker 1
Cool, thanks.

12:47
Speaker 5
Good morning all. My name is Ken Wyant. My official title is director of business solutions. I’ve been at Canary for almost twelve years now. I started in the development department, actually wrote a lot of the software as we see it today, but started working with a lot of our larger customers on integration, implementation tasks, things like that, and have moved kind of more on the sales side. I assist the sales team a lot as a technical lead, helping customers understand architecture options and all the fun stuff that go into projects and trying to figure out where to best fit the various pieces.

13:26
Speaker 1
Cool, thank you, Ken. So if you are a little bit familiar with our stack, if we can call it our product stack, we often refer to it as loosely coupled but tightly integrated, purpose built purpose, fit per solution, depending on your needs and how you look at a solution or a piece of software to solve your problems. So we want to kick off with, let’s start with the easy stuff, digital transformation AI. Let’s kick off with those.

13:55
Speaker 2
Perfect.

13:57
Speaker 1
Now, we do want to talk about trends, because trends are relevant. Trends indicate that people are experiencing the same pains, they are presented with the same challenges and potentially also the same opportunities in terms of how to solve those challenges. So we’ve seen a lot of trends over the last little while, and we can kind of lump it all together as possible ways to reach your, or achieve your digital transformation. So we’ve just returned from the ICC, which is ignition’s annual community conference in fossum, which is great. Congratulations. 20 year anniversary. That’s amazing. 20 years of ignition. That’s fantastic. We’ve just returned from the ICC and what was interesting to me is just speaking to different people from all over the world, is that it feels like everybody is in the same position.

14:45
Speaker 1
Everybody is pretty much feeling the same anxious, nervous, anxiety about what next, where to start, and looking at all the available options and technologies, what is going to be the best ROI immediately? Because it’s all about ROI, right? If you’re just going to deploy a piece of technology for the sake of doing it, really, what’s the point? So under this topic of digital transformation, maybe starting with you, Kent, I know you’ve, digital transformation is not only something that you speak about, but also something that you as a business have been going through as well as inductive automation.

15:21
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Digital transformation is not just for the industrial space. Right. We’re a software company and we’ve had to go through digital transformation as well, especially because we’ve had tremendous growth over the last few years. And so we’ve doubled our employee count over the last year and a half or so. And that involves onboarding new people, updating processes, all that kind of stuff. And one process that we just went through is cybersecurity is a big trend, a big concern for a lot of people. That doesn’t just start with how you implement the software. That also starts with how you build the software. We started working on, I say, 62443, which is a specification for how you should do software development and to look at your software development lifecycle and all those kind of things.

16:20
Speaker 2
And we wanted to improve the processes around how we develop software and how we do code reviews and how we do code scans and all these things. And just like as you try to do digital transformation, in your plants. Our developers experienced some pain points of like, why do we have to change? Why do we have to do things differently? Why are you adding additional steps? All those kind of things, right. But were able to focus on not just, hey, we need this piece of paper that says we’re compliant so that customers will trust our software. But instead we said, let’s talk about what is the motivation for this spec? And were able to get our development team to buy in on why this was relevant and how adopting some of these processes could actually make their life easier and better.

17:17
Speaker 2
And then it wasn’t just additional steps to do, it was a helpful framework for them to work in. Right. And it actually allowed them to expand what they were trying to do instead of constrict what they were trying to do. And I think digital transformation is really that it’s not just about getting a piece of paper that says check, I did something, or like, hey, we talked about an example last night, we need to move data to the cloud. And if you just move data to the cloud, check, you did it, what did you accomplish? Right now you’ve got data in an expensive storage format. Great, good for you.

17:58
Speaker 2
But digital transformation is really about looking at people and looking at processes and figuring out what are people trying to do and how can we make that better, more efficient, and then what are the tools which could be technologies or programs or this stack that we’re talking about today. But you know, what are the tools that can help us enable change in people and change in processes? And when we’re focused on then the ROI, right, the return on that investment and not just checking a box that we did something, then we can actually get value. And I’ve been talking a lot, I’m curious what these guys.

18:36
Speaker 1
Yeah, I’m quite interested because when we talk about digital transformation, I think the topic of data is always forefront, right? It’s about data because the idea is to give actionable information to the people. They need it, when they need it. And a big part of that is we want that now. But the foundation required to get to that point is pretty much everything from the edge onwards and what that looks like. And those architectures could be simple, it could be complex, but it really starts at the edge. And I know that from, that’s been a big focus for you guys specifically is to understand how do we not only at a scalable level, collect from the edge of, but then also transitioning more.

19:16
Speaker 1
The to you guys is how do we make it valuable from the edge already so, in other words, we don’t have to do a ton of data modeling at a later stage. You know, that stuff’s got to come with all the metadata and everything that we need for it to be meaningful from the time of ingestion into whatever our architecture is. So, on the topic of data, before we get to the analytics, which is the lenny did some predictions with flow, by the way, around the World cup, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be popular. Is it going to be popular?

19:49
Speaker 4
Stick around for my session.

19:50
Speaker 1
Okay. All right. All right. It’s a shocker because I can’t get closer than 1.1 point difference. Okay. But on the topic of data, maybe Clark and Ken just around the idea that we need to capture whatever we can get, store it long term, and make it available to get some insights from that data. What are some of the trends that you’ve seen around data collection, storage?

20:18
Speaker 2
I’ll take that.

20:19
Speaker 5
I guess there’s kind of two trains of thought. One is get everything you can get now, because I might need it someday, and then the other one is a little more selective, like, hey, let’s really think about what we’re collecting and not just throw everything over the wall into this massive store that is going to grow exponentially over time. I’ve seen slides where the amount of data being collected year over year is not linear. It is this crazy exponential curve. And the volume of data is just incredible that is made available at the edge that didn’t exist. You had to get everything back to a server, and then that was your single point. We have customers that have devices literally all over the country and, you know, sending to centralized hubs and things like that.

21:10
Speaker 5
It’s amazing, as the network speeds and things that have grown, the volume of data that’s available. And so while canary sells an unlimited history and ignition is unlimited, that doesn’t mean you should take everything. There has to be thought. There has to be a plan on how you’re going to consume that data. Who are the consumers of the data? What are their needs? What are their requirements? And so we try to hold back on that throw everything over the wall mentality. We try to make you think about your processes and think about what’s important to operations. And if you need to add things later, that’s okay. You don’t have the foresight of where you’re going to be in a few years. You can grow into a much larger deployment.

22:01
Speaker 5
As Jaco said earlier, scale is a big component of change and growth, and so you don’t have to be the largest out of the box. You can get those quick wins, get those opportunities, get people to buy in, and then grow the system over time. And that’s kind of the encouragement when I work with customers. The more data you throw initially, the more overwhelming it is upfront for them to sort it out and figure out how to present that or make that usable within their operations.

22:35
Speaker 1
Yeah.

22:35
Speaker 3
And I’ll just add one more comment. Ken, I love what you said about, well, basically just folks enthusiasm to get all of the data, even if they have a giant mess of data, and it’s maybe more than they need at the time. It’s great that they can still make little wins or substantial wins right off the bat and then sort some things out later. So I think it’s great. And this is sort of to your previous question about just, like, state of digital transformation. There’s a lot of companies, one in particular that I worked for in the US, that weren’t digitally transforming at all, and they really had a timeline on the relevancy of what they were doing.

23:08
Speaker 3
But I think that customers specifically, like the institution that I was situated in, they were really reticent and hesitant to move forward with any digital transformation things, but they knew that they were falling behind. And so really, the first question that they had when they evaluate a product is like, how is it going to help me? And, like, is there a huge barrier to entry? What is it going to take to implement? And then what does adoption look like? And so we’re pleased at Canary, and this is something that I try to articulate is like, the canary system makes it easy to use your data.

23:38
Speaker 3
And so I think for folks that are, I mean, we’re all in different places of digital maturity, folks that are starting out their journey towards digital transformation within their organization, I think it’s great that we can meet them at that starting point, but then also we can help them scale to several million tags or something that’s more advanced. But, yeah, I just wanted to add on that.

23:57
Speaker 1
Cool. And I think the data, I almost called it a data swamp. That’s what we call it. We refer to data swamps. No, that’s not fair. We have often spoken about the types of data, right? So we’re talking about real time. Real time is very often the only focus and the primary focus, historical data, getting a combination of those two views and then manual data, I think, at least, I’m not sure if it’s everybody’s experience, but for us, the last little while, the value of manual data is incredibly important. And how do you capture that manual data?

24:34
Speaker 1
And when we talk about digital transformation, we’re not necessarily talking about the big kind of Unilever view of digital transformation, but we are often referring to just simply replacing a paper process, which could be a shift book for a specific shift, just replacing that with something digital. And that’s where manual data entry comes in. So I know that you’ve had a big focus on how do we capture that, make it available, backfill it, and make it relevant as part of the process where automated ways of collecting the data doesn’t go 100%.

25:10
Speaker 4
Jaco. And it’s actually something that we’ve implemented in our own way of work as well, not just from getting industrial data, but the way that flow operates on a daily day basis. We were kind of forced into it because we can’t scale if we don’t have those processes of making the data available. We’ve recently opened up a new office in Austin in America. We’ve got a developer sitting in the UK. So scalability from us, from a development perspective, all of a sudden ballooned after the whole COVID scenario. So in the past, it was quite easy. You would either look over your bench and you would look at the developer, and you say, this is not working, or this is the request from the client. And the developer would always come back and say, we’re not client facing. We don’t know what the client wants.

25:55
Speaker 4
You need to explain to us what we need to implement. But now with them sitting all over the world, it’s not a phone call anymore. That manual process of actually delivering that information to him, you can’t do that anymore over a phone. So now you need to place in a way to collect all of this manual data and request and have everybody in the organization actually have access to that to make their own information. I don’t have to phone the developer. He’s available. He can log into the system, he can see all the requests and what is actually the need that we need to do. And for us, it’s very important that we don’t actually say that you implement digital transformation. We say that you implement outcomes.

26:35
Speaker 4
So your digital transformation strategy mode has a specific outcome of what do you want to achieve with that strategy if you make that mark, and it can be as simple as Jaco just said, taking a logbook that people had to write down on a piece of paper and just automating that process, that’s a small, massive win that you can have in your organization. It does not have to be this massive project with, you know, we spoke about it yesterday with this topical waterfall kind of process plan. It’s small, incremental, agile steps that immediately add benefit from that. And if you do that, then I think you’re on the right track from a digital transformation strategy.

27:13
Speaker 1
Yeah, 100%. I think you’ve got to pick up a little bit, Lenny. It’s not, it’s. Ask them.

27:19
Speaker 4
Sorry. Howdy all.

27:20
Speaker 1
Austin, congratulations on the new office. All right, so that’s a little bit about data and some thoughts around data. So I want to get back to the edge. The edge is very often today where the action is, because that’s one of the big opportunities as to how do we not only collect at the edge, but collected the edge contextually, potentially modeled already. That will save us hours, hundreds of hours later on to try and do that modeling post collection. So from an edge point of view, I know that you guys have inductive, has had a big focus on edge and how we not only control at the edge and monitor at the edge, but also collect at the edge. And you’ve had some recent announcements, I think, around edge.

28:04
Speaker 2
We have, yeah. It’s funny, about five or six years ago, we released our first ignition edge version, and at that time we had three versions of ignition edge. And the feedback we got pretty quickly was, we’re trying to do all these hyper specific things at the edge and we need more versions. And so we proliferated out to five versions of ignition edge so that people could just do the data collection, just do the visualization, send it up in this specific format or this specific format, and all these things. And a few years went by and people were like, the edge is too complex. You need it to be simpler. And so we consolidate our product line to two versions of edge where just more is included out of the box so that people, it’s funny, you get trapped in that.

28:53
Speaker 2
You come up with a project and you say, I know exactly what I’m trying to do, and you implement that, and then you’re like, oh, that’s cool. But actually, now that I’m in that process, I realize I want to do this as well. But do I want to go through procurement again to buy a new piece of software, do all these things right? Maybe it’s not worth it. I’m not even going to do that new project. We’ll tackle that in a few years. And so with the edge, we said, all right, we’re just going to consolidate it. So you get more functionality out of the box, so that when you get to that second phase where you realize you need more things, you already have the functionality and you can just roll it out.

29:32
Speaker 2
And so we have what’s called Edge IoT, which does data collection. It’s got a bunch of built in drivers to talk to different devices, and then it can publish that data up over our gateway network, or MQTT. We’ll talk about what all those mean, if you don’t know, later on today. So don’t worry about it. We said, oh, people wanted to have a week’s worth of data. That was cool before as a buffer, but we need longer data. So now you can do over a month’s worth of data in that buffer and so on. And then we also have what we call edge panel, which has local visualization, can do local trends, all that kind of stuff. And the panel used to be that you could get just the panel, and it didn’t have all the IIot functionality.

30:09
Speaker 2
We said, no, people, if they put in a panel, eventually they’re gonna want to do something with that data. And so now the panel includes everything that is in IIot as part of it. But we wanted to make it so that it wasn’t like, oh, to add all this extra functionality. It’s a bunch more money. So, so they’re now discounted as well. But long story short, people are doing really cool things at the edge, where people are collecting data, where it matters, and the operations team can help define that data and add context to that data at the edge, and then they can publish it up to a centralized system.

30:44
Speaker 2
And now you get a lot more options of what that centralized system does and where it’s located, meaning now that you’ve got something going on at the edge that can publish up in a meaningful, secure way, maybe that centralized system is in the cloud or at a remote site that over a broader network, I can send data and I can consume it there, and I don’t have to recontextualize all my data, and I could also send it to canary or to flow or whatever. Right? Once again, don’t need to recontextualize all my data. It can just be augmented from there. And you start building out this single source of this data backbone, this unified namespace that, once again, we’ll talk about later.

31:21
Speaker 2
But we’re seeing that edge doesn’t just mean, oh, I need something that can operate locally independent of the rest of my system. But the edge is the gateway into your centralized system. It’s where the magic starts happening. And that divergence of saying edge is not isolated, but edge is integral, is really powerful, and people are doing some really cool stuff.

31:48
Speaker 1
Yeah, for sure. So we’ve been looking forward to having a discussion around OPC UA versus MQtt. No, no, I’m kidding. We’re definitely not going to do that. That’ll probably be a day’s worth of discussion. I think the more important message is regardless, OPC UA, including the new OPC UA with pub sub MQTT, whatever your flavor is, I think the ability, interoperability is a big factor. We loosely refer to it as the ability to play well with others. If we’re talking about data democracy and liberating data, and making it available to all systems and all people, we need to have the ability to do that and not be selective and not be close and not be proprietary in terms of how we do that.

32:30
Speaker 1
So whether it’s OPC UA, MQTT, whatever that may be, is the ability to ingest that data at the edge or wherever we need it. And I know that you guys have also, Lenny, including you outside of the list of what we can speak to and speak from or get from that list is growing. You know, you’re adding things to that list pretty much on a monthly basis.

32:54
Speaker 4
Yeah, I think the new technology coming up to the market, we used to see a new product maybe every six months. It’s now it feels like it’s every two months. There’s a new cloud provider, a new device that we need to connect to, but it’s not just connecting to the devices. Jaco. It’s also about one big thing that we realized is in this whole edge game is it’s not just one platform anymore. Flow used to be a Microsoft only, we are a Microsoft development house, so it was able to run only on kind of a Microsoft environment. Now all of these devices that come out is either based on a Linux subsystem, running a docker container, whatever the case is.

33:32
Speaker 4
So were kind of, I almost want to say forced, which was a good thing, that we need to be multi platform agnostic as well. So yeah, as we are today, I can spin up a flow engine on a docker container, on a PLC, getting it as close as possible to the edge, to do that contextualization and send the already context data to wherever, if it’s going to be new thing of the day, Snowflake day, beta warehouse, or whatever the case is, you need to be able to do that. But that interoperability of the platform is also becoming quite important. And we kind of addressed that as well now with our latest release as well.

34:07
Speaker 1
And even for your historian, I know that’s been a big focus for you guys. And you have some imminent releases. I’m not sure if it’s imminent. I know software is always as early as December ferry the 42nd. But you have some imminent releases as well, or plans?

34:21
Speaker 5
Sure, we always have plans. You know, execution and time are always the limitation. Right? So same with digital transformation, you know. No, so, you know, from a historian standpoint, you know, our theory has always been it’s got to be easy and we want to be as low maintenance as possible. So actually just one of our most recent releases, you know, we know OPC UA is not going away. You know, even though some of us may prefer MQTT, you know, we’ve done some things in our UA collector to make it more dynamic in nature, just as MQTT is. So as nodes are added to the OPC server, we can consume those automatically. It’s kind of hands off maintenance. Those tags are automatically consumed in historian. And so kind of from collection to visualization, it’s really hands off maintenance at that point.

35:15
Speaker 5
Just as Lenny said that they are now in the container world. We’re working towards that. We’re also trying to get to Linux. We’ve been a windows only shop for almost 40 years and so getting away from that has been a challenge and a costly venture. But we’re also trying to get to a OS agnostic stance where we can deploy quickly and easily in the cloud. We host some systems for our customers. Hosting costs are crazy. It’s a large portion of our budget. And if we can get to Linux operating systems get away from Windows licensing costs, our hosting costs are going to be dramatically reduced. And that can extend to clients that do their own hosting. It’s going to be a much lower cost of entry solution for us. But we’re not there yet.

36:12
Speaker 5
We had a little more work to do than flow did. But we’re inching towards it though, and hopefully next year we have something that can run on a Linux platform as well.

36:22
Speaker 1
Okay, fantastic. That’s good news. I wanted to maybe so. One of the good or valuable learning that we typically look forward to is when we get together as a global community, have some global folks over is the learning of, you know, do we have any examples of people that have done something really at a scale that is impressive, or have done something not necessarily at a scale that is impressive, but have done something really well when we talk about some of these trends and topics and things that are shaping our industry. So maybe I’ll put you on the spot, but can you maybe share an example of a customer that have done something really well? If not, it’s okay. I’m sure you do have.

37:07
Speaker 2
Sure. I can go first. Well, so I’m going to start with a non traditional example, and I’ll let them do more traditional examples. So in Nashville, which is in Tennessee, in the United States, there’s a big homeless population, and it’s a big problem. And so there are a bunch of homeless shelters that all got together, and they formed a group called Room in the inn, which is a religious reference, but wanting to bring these people in and give them a place to stay. And so they had some software that they had tried to put together through some commercial solutions that allowed them to track all these people and making sure they were getting the care they needed and where they were staying and so that people didn’t fall through the system. Right. And get lost. And so the software they had just wasn’t working.

38:06
Speaker 2
And so one of the people involved in the project also did stuff for food and Bev and for a bunch of other stuff. And so he knew about our ignition software, and he said we could. We could solve this problem with ignition, and we could build something to track all these different homeless shelters and track the people and also the volunteers that participate and all that kind of stuff and make sure people get the help they need. But they didn’t have any budget. They wanted to make sure that all the money wasn’t just using it to write cool software, but instead where it’s actually helping people. And so they opened it up to the community of people who just deploy ignition. And they said, were looking for volunteers and people to help build this project.

38:53
Speaker 2
And they had over 150 different engineers volunteer to help with this project. And one of our.

39:00
Speaker 1
This from the system integrated community.

39:02
Speaker 2
Absolutely. Yeah. And so it was kind of led by Vertec, one of our premier integrators based in the United States, but they have offices all over. But they went and pulled together this coalition. They said, all right, we’re going to need some structure for all these different people. Right. And so they had to have kind of built out a plan of what this was all going to look like. And then they formed groups and started building stuff. And it’s not collecting data from PLC’s and stuff like that.

39:31
Speaker 4
Right.

39:31
Speaker 2
Instead, it’s all database driven, and it’s very visualization focused they were able to bring all those people together and build a really cool application. Part of the problem was UI. They needed it to be able to run on any type of device, a tablet or just a computer at a desk or somebody with their phone, walking out amongst people and gathering information or whatever else. And so mobile responsive design was a big deal for them. And it needed to look like a true web app that people are used to because it’s not trained operators that were going to be operating this. It was just going to be any volunteer that came and was helping at the homeless shelter. And so UI was a big deal.

40:11
Speaker 2
And then also they needed it to be scalable because they wanted to roll this out to like 76 facilities and they didn’t want 76 instances. So it was cloud based, but needed to deploy, you know, to a bunch of users. And so they needed to have a scale out architecture. And so it was cool that they took this knowledge non traditional system, but that they tackled some of the same problems that we have, right, industrial space, we have scalability issues. We’ve got a lot of users want to access it. We need people to be able to access it on different types of screens and they’re able to build a really cool project. And part of why I talk about this is a selfish reason.

40:50
Speaker 2
This project actually inspired us at inductive automation to release a new version of ignition that we call Community Edition, which is free for nonprofits.

41:00
Speaker 1
And that’s available globally.

41:02
Speaker 2
It’s available globally. And so what’s the criteria for who can use that kind of a license? Anybody who’s benefiting their community in a nonprofit kind of way can get access to this free version of ignition. And so, but it’s fun that it wasn’t, you know, we’re now piggybacking on this project, like cool, let’s do more. But it wasn’t in some, inspired by us, it wasn’t initiated by us. Right. It was inspired by just well meaning people that wanted to do good in the world and wanted to use their industrial space skills to do that. And so I thought that was a cool project. And we have a case study on our website that highlights that project. And to be honest, it’s a great example just to go get ideas for how to do things well, especially from a mobile responsive design perspective.

41:45
Speaker 2
So yeah, that’s my non traditional example.

41:47
Speaker 1
I want to share. Love that. And also the platform allows for that kind of flexibility in use. That was probably the differentiator also as part of the success stories or some showcase stories from ICC. The Discovery gallery will probably include a link. I think it’s worthwhile to include a link to just have a look at some of the amazing projects that have been submitted this year, as well as some of the firebrand winners. I think previous winners includes PHP in Australia. I can’t think of last year, but there’s amazing applications and I think it’s worthwhile watching those videos, those stories. Yeah. Cool.

42:28
Speaker 3
Yeah. So I may defer some of this question to Ken. It’s always neat when our softwares can have, like, a humanitarian impact. I really love that story and also that it kind of catalyzed launching the community edition that anyone can access. But, yeah, that is something that’s important to us as a company in terms of values. We love the way that our product’s used and the quality of life that it brings to regions, especially for something that’s like utilities or wastewater or something that really impacts a region. We’re thankful to be able to craft our licensing model in a way that’s accessible. But I have some great stories that I feel that they’re pending opportunities that would be fantastic for the same question next year. So that’s why I kind of wanted to defer to Ken.

43:09
Speaker 3
But there are some really cool battery, electric storage, and solar opportunities that we have been brought into that aren’t completed yet. But really enormous scale, you know, enormous tag counts. But that’s something that can maybe can provide, like, I don’t know, more of a real life example that we’ve already walked through.

43:28
Speaker 1
Maybe that’s also part of the. Sorry, again, part of your response is when we talk about enormous scale, what is, what kind of a scale are we talking about?

43:36
Speaker 5
Yeah, sure. When we’ve talked to some of our partners that are in the renewable space, when you start talking supplying a solar field to power an entire town or community, and then they need battery backup to supplement that. Of course, when the sun isn’t shining or demand is high so that they can avoid load shedding, which I’ve learned what it is. In the last week and a half, you know, we’ve had discussions with partners where, you know, the tag counts are going to be in excess of 10 million tags, you know, at a site that is covering, you know, 15 acres or so, you know, and that’s tremendous. You know, like, we’ve been in the historian business for 30, over 35 years, and, you know, when we hit 10,000 tags the first time, that was like a huge system.

44:25
Speaker 5
And then when we hit 100,000. We’re like, wow, we got someone with six digits of tags, and now that’s just. You bat an eye at that. The scale and the amount of data is just grown exponentially. And so, to date, our largest customer that I know of, they’re running about 3 million tags on a server. But these new renewable projects that are coming down the pipeline, they’re just tremendous in the amount of data and the number of tags. Just the sheer volume is mind boggling.

44:59
Speaker 1
Almost the advent of cheaper sensors and cheaper devices.

45:02
Speaker 5
Oh, absolutely, yeah. And now storage, when we started, storage was a premium. That’s part of our secret sauce, is our compression and our low disk space usage. Now, it almost doesn’t matter. I mean, it does for performance reasons, but for cost reasons, people just. You could just keep throwing raids and terabytes and, you know, I don’t know that we’ve reached petabytes or exabytes yet, but, you know, we’re not Facebook, but, yeah, we do have customers that are beyond what a hard drive capacity was even five years ago, ten years ago.

45:37
Speaker 1
Cool.

45:40
Speaker 4
I just want to quickly talk about the ICC as well, from a scalability perspective, before I add some scalability numbers from one of our largest components. I think one thing that was great for the ICC as well was the data dash project. I don’t know if you guys know about Plugfest or data dash, but from a scalability perspective and what the technology allows us now to do, I think it was pretty amazing that they spin up a MQTT broker into the cloud. They invited the community to actually push data to it. There was data from Australia, there was data from France, there was data from us in South Africa that pushed to this broker and was just amazing how all of these data points is now available in one single location and for everybody to consume.

46:24
Speaker 4
I don’t have a nice, unimitarian kind of example of scale, but from a scalability perspective, we have a client in the US, and they came to us and they said that they’ve got a massive logistics problem. They run quarries, they just take rock out of the ground, crush it into different sizes, and put it on trucks, and off they go. But what the guys would do is they would. Sounds like a south african problem, but what they do is they start earlier in the day so that they can leave early in the afternoon. Now, from a logistics perspective, that is a nightmare. The trucks were waiting at the Weybridge, or the trucks were not there because they’re not following the schedule that they actually need. To, to run.

47:04
Speaker 4
So they needed a way to track actual production when actual production actually starts and ends, and compare that to the actual schedule that was set up by the logistics department. We’re talking about 150 sites scattered all over the US. We’re at a point now that they can easily roll out four sites in a week to get them on the same template and compare site with sites and how that adherence to schedule is. But from. And that’s the other thing. Scalability from not just the technology that you deploy, but scalability of the application that you implement. That is also key to enable this whole scalability scenario from digital transformation perspective. And very important, little ramble. But the talent that you guys have, you need to nurture the talent of the guy that actually built that application.

47:54
Speaker 4
Because without the talent to understand the technology and how to actually implement that technology in applications, I think that’s a very important aspect of this as well, is don’t forget the people aspect of the talent that you need to nurture in your organization as well.

48:09
Speaker 5
Yeah, so I just wanted to add to what Lenny said because I was actually going to talk about the same company until Clark sent me down the renewable path.

48:17
Speaker 4
So, yes, it’s based on Canary story and data.

48:21
Speaker 5
And so that has actually been a pretty cool success story for us because it was, you know, as Lenny said, it’s a, they’re not really a mining company. It’s an aggregates company. You know, they have rock crushers and all the fun equipment, and so much of their equipment wasn’t even digitized. You know, they were having all kind of maintenance issues, you know, conveyors going down, crushers going down, all kinds of things. And corporate wants to know what’s happening. Why aren’t you hitting your targets? Why aren’t you sending out the number of trucks that we need to per day? And so they’ve had to do a lot of instrumentation at these places. These are all brownfield. These sites have been around for 50, 60 years potentially.

49:04
Speaker 5
They had a long road ahead to first get the ability to collect data and then figure out how to get it back to a core corporate view. And then once you have the corporate view, okay, now, what actionable items can we do? And that’s where, you know, flow came alongside then as well.

49:21
Speaker 2
So.

49:21
Speaker 5
And when we first started talking to them, this was a five, six, eight year project, I forget, but the speed that they found they could deploy was exceeded their expectations. And, you know, they hit their 50 and their 100 and their 150 milestones years before they ever expected, you know, because once they got into it and found a repeatable process, the deployment was much faster than they anticipated. And I think the total is. They’re aiming for. They have over 300 sites, and so they’re well on their way to getting all of their sites digitized, get a unified view at a corporate level. Not that big brother is watching and dictating what they need to do. They’re just trying to understand our operations and how they can run more efficiently. Look, everyone’s running as lean as they can.

50:11
Speaker 5
No one has bodies sitting around waiting for tasks, you know, so, you know, they’re a lean company, and they. And they’re trying to just maximize their operations and their profits in the bottom line.

50:22
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, one thing that I recall from a couple of those were the notion that if it’s a greenfields project, you have the opportunity to obviously build the architecture, how it feeds the flow of data to information to. To value. Brownfield’s the objective wasn’t necessarily how do we eliminate data silos? Right? Because very often. How do we eliminate these data silos? No, it doesn’t matter if you have data silos, because there are so many auxiliary systems and things that add value. Some piece of technology or a system or an application that you’re adding somewhere in your world that, yes, it is a data silo, but whatever you’re deploying over and above that needs to have the ability to include that data as opposed to trying to figure out how do we replace that data.

51:07
Speaker 1
So I don’t think the strategy is always to eliminate data silos, but it shouldn’t really matter if you have data silos. If you have the ability to bring that data in contextualize, it doesn’t really matter. Cool. So I think we are a little bit behind on time. We definitely want to take some questions. I know Paul and the guys are sitting in front because they have questions. Any questions? One question would be great. Kenny’s got a question. No, Kenny’s quiet. You asked all these questions yesterday. Is this Geetha, when is canary coming to Linux?

51:55
Speaker 5
Well, internally we have it running, but it’s not production ready yet. So our goal is probably maybe fourth quarter of next year. We’re probably still a year out. We have a lot of work around. Our historian is running. We have a lot of work in our ancillary services. Now, besides running on windows and communicating with the. The operating system at the lowest level on when to flush the disk. It was the basis for all of our security, too. We were tied into windows ad. And so unplugging from that has been quite a chore, too. So I think maybe towards the end of next year is when it’s going to be production ready. We’re running in house. We’ve been testing for many months already, but it’s not ready for end user consumption yet.

52:47
Speaker 1
So, Ken, we are recording. So we have it on record end of next year.

52:51
Speaker 5
That’s why I really hesitated.

52:54
Speaker 1
Cool, thanks. Any other questions before we continue? Rob.

53:05
Speaker 4
Find the join the merge between.

53:08
Speaker 2
All three because you can use canary for dashboards, you can use flow for kind of extending that and kind of information. But, you know, is there anything in.

53:18
Speaker 4
The pipeline to help join the three together for us? Maybe that’s something we can talk about.

53:26
Speaker 1
Yeah, that is a good question. And I think we, if we talk about, loosely talk about reporting and even more loosely speak about dashboarding, right. There’s a couple of many different ways that you can build many different types of applications to serve different people, depending on where they are. We kind of always, you’ve got reporting, you’ve got very intuitive dashboards you can build, you’ve got the analytics, obviously, you’ve got the very unlimited, powerful axiom views that you can even do. Some mimic builds where there are some, not some, where there are a fair amount of flow and crossover across all of those things. The kind of way that we typically look at it maybe is Lenny is the one that spent the most time on that is to understand, all right, what are we actually trying to show and get people to look at?

54:13
Speaker 1
You know, if and very, and it’s kind of scary. But very often we, people ask us, we’re a little bit disappointed and. Disappointed with what? Well, I mean, your dashboarding, regardless of where it is or your templates, are a little bit bland. You know, you. We’ve seen these amazing dashboards that other people are using. Why? Where are those dashboards? Well, it’s a blank canvas you can design on whichever platform, again, depending on your needs, what you want to see. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is they don’t actually know what they want to see. You know, you can speak to metallurgists, different people in different roles. You know, what are the top five KPI’s that you want to see every morning, Friday morning, once a month, and they can’t tell you that is the more scary thing.

54:58
Speaker 1
And they do often look at us for some guidance. All right, what are other people doing and what are they building as far as KPI’s and dashboards go. But our departure point is usually, I almost want to say a blank page to say this role requires these KPI’s and these kind of views on a daily basis and they want it in their inbox based on what they have already, what exists. We hate rip and replace. Rip and replace is a horrible, it’s painful. You’ve invested, you’ve spent money, you’ve implemented, everybody’s bought into a piece of technology. So to advocate ripping and replacing is not always the first step is to understand based on what you have and this reporting or dashboarding requirement for this role of person in your organization. This is what we would recommend to add to your stack.

55:51
Speaker 1
And if the opportunity is there, potentially replace something and you build that out per role player. You know, this type of person in your organization, depending on where they are and what data they need it on email, they need an SMS, they need a, it’s kind of that practical. I don’t know if that’s accurate or true even.

56:11
Speaker 4
Yeah, I think from the product perspective, Rob, we will always use the open standard technologies to integrate the products with one another. Especially from our side. We use the APIs, we use mqtt, we use sQl. So we use all the open protocol that’s available from the product integration perspective between them. For me, where things becomes where I play well, I think I play very well, is when I need to add context to data. Now, context to data means something completely different to anybody in this room, right? For me, it’s about adding context, not just from one data source. I’m not talking just to a canary, but I also need data from context from a batch system, or I need context from an MES system. I might need context. I know it sounds silly, but I need context from a time perspective.

56:59
Speaker 4
For a week, for a day, for a shift. When you start to need to create these buckets of data and associate context to that data, then it becomes to Jaco’s point, what is the need of the production manager? He needs a shift leader. Sure, that word needs some practice. He needs a shift.

57:18
Speaker 1
It is a shitty report.

57:19
Speaker 4
It’s a shitty report. Yes, he needs to shift the report, but what is the context of the data that’s going to actually make him making a better decision? I think that’s where the question is, we need to be able to transform that data into such a way that the more context we can add to it, the quicker and easier he’s going to be able to make a decision. And that’s a role for all the products that sit here to talk together, but it starts with that. What is the business value that you need to achieve? What is the actual KPI that’s going to give him that functionality to actually make that decision? So I know a little bit philosophical, but I think that’s where it ends up with Thanksgiving.

57:57
Speaker 5
I just wanted to address it a.

57:59
Speaker 1
Little bit, too, because it’s a question.

58:01
Speaker 5
I hear quite often, you know, like, you know, and all three of our software, we have different strengths, you know, and as Lenny said, potentially we have different context, you know, like, I might not only get all my data from ignition, there might be other SCADA systems in place, so I have more data available to visualize, you know. And so I think I’ve seen some really good displays where, you know, an axiom dashboard is embedded in a perspective screen. And when you bring it up, it’s hard to tell where the ignition data ends and where our portion of that screen maybe starts or I know we have some customers that I think the one that we both talked about, there’s a flow dashboard embedded in an axiom screen.

58:43
Speaker 5
And as you’re going through the application screen by screen, all of a sudden there’s a flow report, and it looks almost native. The fact that we’re all web based and we all have a web browser, iframe control, you can lean on the advantages of each product, but still build a seamless dashboard or end user experience by embedding us in each other almost. So I think you have to play to the strengths of our visualization. I don’t know that we’re necessarily going to collaborate and say, oh, you take this piece. I’m going to only work over here because we have many implementations where we’re not the full stack, we’re running independently, but we do have uniqueness in our dashboarding abilities to present data differently based on what our package is aware of.

59:38
Speaker 5
I think you can do that embedding and make some really unique displays utilizing each of our strings.

59:48
Speaker 2
And that’s not a unique concept, right. We talked about, we’ve seen it before, saw it yesterday at Zuntari. Kenny already hasn’t just turned around, he’s got one to show you. But it’s funny, when we first started going to web based hmis and stuff like that, people thought were crazy, because I know people want a dedicated app. That’s all they’re ever going to want. But by going to these more standard, it best practices going to the web based things, it’s given so much flexibility. And so our answer right now is, well, you can do it on your side. Right. And, you know, ignition with perspective could be your home base for that and embedding stuff in it, or you could embed it inside axiom or inflow or whatever. Right. But are you.

01:00:37
Speaker 2
Should you hold your breath for a one solution that includes all of them? I don’t know, but I think it’s worth talking about because I think that we in the future could provide some examples, at least a starter project that shows you how those integrate. How could we solve some problems for you out of the box? Ken, I’m looking at you as we solve the ability for signing into the different applications, you know, more natively, that kind of stuff. Right. There’s. There’s some things that we could do on the software side to make it easier. And so I hope we keep having this dialogue going forward.

01:01:11
Speaker 1
Yeah. And one of the foundational things about that data, before we even get to the house displayed, is whether you can trust the data that’s, you know, you’ve all been to the kind of production meetings where we argue about the validity of the data. Is this really 50? Was it 54? I don’t believe that it’s 50 and 50 watt. So the. So the ability, not the ability, the trust of the data is the foundation before you can even think of displaying any of those visually, at least. Good question, Rob. Thank you. My question is just on a similar level, but more on a data level. I think what we see is that there’s a lot of. In companies that we work with, there’s a lot of. It’s a siloed approach.

01:02:01
Speaker 1
You’ve got Iot data, you’ve got operational data, you’ve got analytical data, and then you’ve got your AI and predictive. Do you see some sort of convergence coming in these different areas in the future, or is it going to stay almost siloed or what is happening in the industry at the moment?

01:02:27
Speaker 2
I’m jumping in. So later today, I’m going to be talking about unified namespaces, unss. And that’s one of the big efforts of that, is to find a way to bring all your data together and so that you don’t have all these separate streams of data. And the rationale for that is that if you have separate data going to AI and you expect AI to come up with meaningful results, that’s going to now go apply to your operations team all the context that they added at the edge or with flow or with canary or whatever. Suddenly now they missed that context. And the results of AI aren’t going to be as useful. And same idea with all the other consumers of data. Data, by not having a central source of truth, they’re missing out on the insights that everybody else could provide.

01:03:23
Speaker 2
And so I think that’s when we talk about the future. The future has to be that organizations have to buy into the idea that they’re not the only mind that matters, they’re not the only one with good ideas within their organization, right? That there has to be this blending of the data so that the insights can actually impact the whole organization. Organization.

01:03:42
Speaker 4
I think to that, me personally, I don’t think that silos, we’re gonna get rid of silos. I don’t think that’s gonna be one company that’s gonna give you the silver bullet at the end of the day. Ken mentioned it. We all play to our strengths, but do we need to play nice with them 100%? I need to provide the AI or the machine learning platform with nice, clean, contextualized data, because the more context I can give to them, the better the models is that they’re going to run. So to have one central place that’s going to create that hub for you to be able to access the data from all the silos, definitely. But I don’t think that there’s going to be one company that’s going to provide it all.

01:04:24
Speaker 4
Some of them promise that they can do it and just give us all your data and we’ll figure it out when it’s up there in the cloud or whatever the case is. I strongly believe that contextualization of the cleanliness, that needs to happen down, and it can happen in any one of the applications. But if you are looking at that, just look at companies that play with the open standards. Don’t look at something that’s, oh, now it’s locked in their little IoT platform, and you can’t really get the data out. So, because there’s many of them, right, every second vendor has some IoT platform that their data goes to. As long as they have the data available with using the open standards and open technologies to access that data, that’s fine.

01:05:08
Speaker 4
As long as we create the central hub, the UNS that Ken is speaking about, we play with the UNS as well, because we’ve realized that to augment the UNS. What about all the analytics data? So now I’ve created this massive, nice regression analysis, you know, prediction. Well, I need to share that with the UNS as well. So the UNS becomes this one central point, but all of the silos feed to it. But I don’t think we’re going to see a complete no more silos on the operation.

01:05:39
Speaker 1
My personal opinion, and the UN’s is not a product, contrary to popular belief, it’s not a product, it’s an approach, it’s a philosophy. And it’s right now the best bet that we have to make sense of that and as opposed to relying on those linear kind of point to point connections to get data from different systems to find that common structure where we can pull and inject data to from one central place. So Kent is going to cover the unified namespace in two parts. It’s that big. It’s two presentations. There’s a little bit more about the, what it is and why you should care, as well as the practical aspects. Some practical aspects we’re not going to cover how to. In half an of hour, Lenny is going to talk about the unified analytics framework, which kind of builds on top of that.

01:06:23
Speaker 1
Again, it’s not a product, it’s an approach. And we will also have this afternoon, apart from Clark’s introduction to Canary, that will cover some elements of those. Ken is also talking about asset views. Asset views is very often probably the biggest requirement for an asset intensive or that kind of high value organization with that kind of equipment is going to talk about how to build those asset views in Canary this afternoon. But yes, that is a good question. And unified namespace is something that we believe is an approach that could solve for that. Thank you. Right. Any other questions? Good, thank you. All right. On the spot. Number one thing you are looking forward to over the next three to six months, or should we make it a year that we can include 8.3?

01:07:22
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah. I would say from an ignition standpoint, what I’m looking forward to, we are going to be releasing eight, three next year. And one thing that’s coming there is something called event streams. Event streams is a new type of data within ignition. So we have time series data already, right, of where we’re streaming in. Like, I want to see where this point went over time, but more event driven data that can then flow around your enterprise and be used in different ways and flow through Kafka or Amazon SNS or whatever else. I think it’s going to open a lot of doors for doing new things. And so stay tuned for event streams.

01:08:06
Speaker 3
Springbok Victory. Yeah, I’ll let Ken talk about release things and stuff around our technology, but I’m looking forward to producing a new training program. So we want to have, you know, like a 301, a 401, a deeper dive. We want to make it easier than ever to get started with Canary and then to become really proficient, confident with it. So that’s something that I’ll be working on and then Ken, I’ll let you go ahead with the.

01:08:34
Speaker 1
Yeah, we didn’t even cover that. I think as far as enablement goes, that’s a big aspect of learning or adopting any new technology is how do you enable people to easily get their hands on the technology and be able to work with it. Workability is a key thing, right? If you have a piece of tech that you need to work with or make things happen with and your technical debt or the number of people and complexity to use it is so, is unsustainable, that doesn’t work either. So enablement is a big part. And I think what all three of your companies have done really well is how do we enable people either through inductive university, there’s Canary Academy, there’s flow, masterclass, really intuitive, easy to use online resources that’s available to anybody to help you with that enablement journey.

01:09:18
Speaker 1
So, and I know you putting a lot of effort into building out those programs. So cool.

01:09:24
Speaker 5
Can I say vacation? I did that last week here. Sorry, I was enjoying South Africa.

01:09:30
Speaker 2
So.

01:09:31
Speaker 5
No, the Linux migration has been our largest project we’ve ever taken on. Like this has literally been thousands of engineering hours. And so just seeing that to completion will be a huge milestone for our company, you know, and for our market and where we want to go.

01:09:54
Speaker 1
So.

01:09:57
Speaker 4
From my perspective, yeah. Personally for the event we’ve got guy that’s already convinced. So stick around for my session. I’m going to try and predict the score with flow. So if you’re a betting man, I’m not promising anything, but I’ve got some good results for you guys. From a flow perspective, we’ve just come from our version seven release where we included this Linux capability that we can run on Linux and Docker. So that’s a big thing for us. So we still getting our head around that and what the opportunities and capabilities that can unlock for us. And then yes, we started with master class. Again, there’s a numerous amount of content that we haven’t even touched to provide and make available through the masterclass program.

01:10:45
Speaker 4
So we need to get our ducks in a row there and create some more content and some more videos around. Just enablement and ease of user, making it faster for people to do things like a very simple little regression analysis based on their data. So I’m looking forward to.

01:10:59
Speaker 1
You just mentioned AI, by the way. That’s AI. That’s machine learning.

01:11:02
Speaker 4
AI. Machine learning just said it. So we’re going to use some machine learning to predict the scores. Regression analysis, not as impressive as it sounds. It’s actually very simple, but yes. And then the adoption of just people need to start using it and start getting it into their operations as well. And then for us personally, from a flow perspective, just the growth that we’re seeing, it seems like the US entity is going really well. We’ve got some great partners signing up. We’ve introduced some partnerships with the sesame organization, the Eclipse organization that kind of controls the sparkler specification of MQTT. We’ve got some great partners on board in the US as well.

01:11:41
Speaker 1
Four IR for cloud deployments.

01:11:43
Speaker 4
Four AR for cloud deployments. I know they are partner of ignition as well. So yeah, it’s getting busy and that’s a good thing.

01:11:50
Speaker 1
Lots happening. Thank you. Appreciate it. If there are no more questions, I’m going to hand it over to Kent who is going to kick off the Fundamentals series. Sounds like a nice ring to the fundamental series with ignition, but thank you very much to everybody on stage. Give them a round of applause. Thank you.