Ignition 8.3 and Beyond

00:05
Speaker 1
All right, we are set. Well, thank you everybody for coming. I know you didn’t come just to see me, but it’s really good to be here. I’m very excited to be in the home of the most automation that’s happening inside Industry in all of South Africa with Ignition right now. So, we went through Cape Town, went through Durban, and this is the third event and by far the biggest event. A lot of really exciting projects that are happening around here, a lot of really exciting examples, a lot of really exciting integrators and users, and yeah, I’m very excited to be here. So thank you for hosting to, you know, to everybody who’s put this together as well. It’s a fantastic team.

00:51
Speaker 1
At element 8, I wanted to start off with the idea, and I’ll actually switch over to a web browser here quickly, and I’ll circle back to that. Pretend you didn’t see that piece. But over on the Inductive Automation website, we’ve launched something recently that came about with the Ignition Community Conference. That was earlier this year, that was about a month ago. And we launched the idea of these Ignition solution suites. Solution suites are basically a different way to purchase Ignition. So instead of buying Ignition by the module, which is the typical way that Ignition is purchased, you can buy Ignition based on the types of functionality that you want, and then you get the modules for that type of functionality all together inside it.

01:43
Speaker 1
You could almost think of it like a package, except we are planning on and we already have a roadmap for adding additional modules to these suites. And as long as you have upgrade protection, just a standard maintenance support plan, you will get new modules that line up with these for free. $0 going into the future. So the idea is that you can pick solution suites, you pick the functionality, the types of functionality you want inside Ignition and you are set. Going into the future, you’re not going to need to feel like you’re being nickel and dimed by here’s a new module, and I’d really like to connect to AWS, but that’s a new module that Inductive Automation’s released. So that’ll be in the Data Ops suite.

02:26
Speaker 1
And as long as you have the Solution suite, you’re going to get AWS connectivity, you’re gonna get Google Cloud platform, you’re going to get Azure and other things that relate to that as we continue to release new modules. So we’ve been pretty excited about that. I won’t go through the video right now because I’ve got a Lot to talk about here, but the suites are the application building, alarm management, data ops, enterprise integration, and industrial historian suites. And just like always, these prices are available freely on our website. You can take a look. We’re very transparent when it comes to all of that. So I wanted to mention that quickly, and I’ll pop back over to the presentation to talk a little bit more about what we have inside Ignition, what we have in 8.3.

03:16
Speaker 1
And I did want to get a quick survey of the room by show of hands, how many folks have already delivered Ignition projects that are running that your company has delivered Ignition projects? Can you raise your hand and if you have, I expect quite a few hands. All right. How many folks have not delivered a project, but you’re working on your first Ignition project and it hasn’t gone into production yet? All right. And how many folks have never delivered, aren’t working on Ignition? You’re Ignition curious. That’s why you’re here. Or you’re curious about the technology stacks. That part of this? Okay, great. So I’ve got a little bit of something for everybody here. I decided that I wanted to, hopefully, get the clicker working. There we go.

04:10
Speaker 1
I wanted to show a little bit of the art of the possible with Ignition, a few examples of what folks are doing with Ignition to start off with. So those of you who are using Ignition extensively, this might be a bit of, you know, review. So I promise there’s more meat and potatoes later. If you haven’t ever seen Ignition before, this will probably be pretty interesting to understand what some of the things are that people are doing with it. That’s me. You already know who I am. All right, so the agenda for today, what can Ignition do for your operations? Game changing features for Ignition 2020 or 2010 to 2025. So we released Ignition in 2010, Ignition in 8.3. We have a lot of game-changing features, right? But we’ve had game-changing features versus the competition for a long time.

05:03
Speaker 1
That’ll be covering a few of those, a few highlights there. Ignition 8.3, of course, the things that are new there and the beyond section. So without further ado, what can Ignition do for your operations? So lots of folks do production tracking inside Ignition. So being able to see what’s actually produced, whether it’s mining or it’s, you know, CPG or it’s other types of production lines, general manufacturing, oil and gas. It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in. There’s some sort of production metrics. And everybody who uses Ignition and has it over a certain scale is measuring production in some way. Real-time visibility. Of course, this is one of the places that Ignition really excels. So you can get information to just about anybody whom you’re looking to get it to.

05:51
Speaker 1
If you have somebody in the C suite who wakes up and wants to pull up their device, and you know, take a look and see how production is running across all the facilities in an organisation, Ignition gives you the ability to provide that. And so these enterprise dashboards, this visibility can be accessible remotely and not daily summaries or reports that have been sent out already, necessarily. It can actually be real-time. So Ignition’s built in that way. Of course, there’s a permission model. You want to make sure the security is in place to be able to do something like that. But first-class security is built into Ignition as well. Remote control.

06:29
Speaker 1
So some of these visualisation systems that you are just collecting data and you’re seeing it centrally don’t necessarily have control or the ability to set points or, you know, change modes inside systems. Ignition once again, with an appropriate security model in place, can give folks access to do that. You can also have it geo-fenced, so folks who are in a certain area might be doing some control. If you’re sitting next to some equipment, if you’re not sitting next to that equipment, maybe no matter who you are, you don’t have access to start and stop that equipment because it wouldn’t be a safe thing to do. So you can have what we call security zones inside Ignition that are set up where you can have it basically control based on geographic location. All right, are we still seeing the screen?

07:20
Speaker 1
It looks like it’s going back and forth. I’ll just talk through a couple of these as they’re trying to work that out. Report scheduling is the next item that I have here. Reports can be scheduled relatively easily and those can go out at different times. We’ve got a scheduler built in, and PDF reports can be emailed out. The Mediclinic example from Cape Town earlier this week, he has a report that’s going out at midnight every day that is letting people know how all 50 facilities are doing that are on the monitoring system. And he doesn’t have to set his alarm for 11:55 and wake up and press the send button, even though the email says it comes from him. General analysis. And I’ll unplug here and plug back in, in case that helps the team in the back.

08:10
Speaker 1
If you need to come up and do anything with the Laptop. Feel free to. Of course, please. General analysis. So Ignition systems, lots of, pretty much everybody does analysis in some way. I’ll just keep going here. Compliance tracking is pretty done pretty regularly. So the idea that in regulated industries you have to comply to certain regulations, you have to report back to the government, or you have to report back to customers that things were produced within a certain range, and it’s according to the contract that it’s being met. Here’s the historical data that goes along with that super common inside Ignition process reporting. So the clean-in-place system, CIP, equipment health, things like that, are all done all the time inside Ignition efficiency analysis.

08:59
Speaker 1
And this can tie into a little bit of MES, or if you break it down there, OEE specifically, or efficiency analysis specifically for downtime time tracking for how well our machines are running, are they hitting production targets? And if you know your machine can go at a hundred units per minute, let’s say, and it’s hitting 85 units per minute, being able to see that and communicate it out once again in real time. Downtime tracking, if you want to be able to see how well things are doing, not just from a run rate overall, but are they actually up or are the systems down? And I mentioned a couple of things here inside this MES category we do have, we’ve worked with for years a company called sepasoft that provides a set of MES modules that are all separated out.

09:56
Speaker 1
One of the things they’ve added in the last couple of years is this S88 batch. If you need to do really simple batching, let’s call it Recipe, you don’t necessarily need another module, but if you want to do things that are actually S88 compliant, ISA88 compliant, it can be really useful to have that S88 batch available. And it tracks every single piece of everything that’s happening inside there. If you’ve ever worked with these big batching systems, this is an option. Device data standardisation is something that folks find super useful. Where sometimes people will have, and I say sometimes, almost always, folks will have a variety of different types of devices.

10:39
Speaker 1
So if you have PLCs, if you have RTUs, let’s say it’s PLCs and you have a Siemens PLC, you probably have an Allen Bradley sitting somewhere, you probably have some off-brand manufacturer PLC sitting somewhere else. And even if you’ve standardised on a single brand, you probably have different models. Ignition can be used as that layer to take the data types. Say I want to treat a compressor over here like A compressor over here, set it up as a data layer where you have those different data types and map them to the different types of equipment that you actually have. So I referred to Mediclinic earlier. They’re a great example of this, too. They have three different types of generators. Of course, generators are really important inside the medical field and hospitals and especially with power grid in South Africa.

11:26
Speaker 1
And so they have to have all of these available. And they decided, let’s build this out. So I can just map my tags here. I create my templates once I create a set of visualisations for all of this. And it doesn’t matter that they’re different brands, it doesn’t matter that they’re different models. I’m treating them all exactly the same as soon as I put that data layer in there. Automatic public sector reporting, this is another thing that people do all the time. So it can use web APIs, it can use standard reporting communication mechanisms. Behind the scenes, Ignition will talk to just about anything and send data to just about anything. IT side and OT, EPMs, BMS, DSIM. If you work inside Data center, this means something to you. If you don’t, that’s fine. But we’ve got folks doing this in data center.

12:21
Speaker 1
Regulation, compliance, security, very common validated Systems, things like 21, CFR, 11, GMP, GAMP5, things that have to go through validation processes. That’s something that we’re pretty familiar with. Helping folks, helping integrators, and end users who are going through these processes with Ignition get to a point of actually rolling out validated information, validated systems. And last time it worked to unplug and plug in again. So I will try that one more time. It’s the IT solution for a lot of things. Right? Hey, all right, there we go. Remote reliable communication. So different PLCs are sitting behind. Yeah, that’s what the image here is showing. Right. But sitting in a way that is communicating up to a central location. If there’s a dropout and a restore, we have a product called Ignition Edge that’ll do buffering. It’ll do store and forward.

13:28
Speaker 1
If you have other devices that have some of that buffering built in, Ignition will just play into that. Depending on what protocol you’re using and how that buffering is done. But Ignition basically will be able to take that, feed it back into whatever process historian you’re using. Whether using our built-in or Canary doesn’t really matter to us. We’re pretty agnostic, and we’re happy to feed all of that through Enterprise Dashboarding, so you know, views of a high level of an enterprise, once again, are really common. That’s a blow-up of the screen that I thought was kind of neat. But I know I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to keep going. High security systems, so these are ones that require a high level of security compliance and encryption.

14:19
Speaker 1
TLS 1.2, 1.33 IDPS, we basically have a team that is dedicated to security that is top of the industry, and we’ve received awards in the past for what we do. We have full disclosures that go out there. We’re very focused in this space, which means that we can play inside these high security applications that some other systems can’t. IT-friendly deployments. Ignition is very IT-friendly. The idea that Ignition runs in a manner that most IT departments understand and appreciate, and has the ability to talk to databases, as well as restful communication, as well as Kafka, as well as some of these other IT technologies and adapts to the environment that it can be put in and that it can run on any hardware. You know, it’s a commodity. It doesn’t require specific pieces or specific devices for Ignition to actually run on.

15:18
Speaker 1
We’ve gotten high praise from IT departments, and we’ve worked really hard to make that the case, which helps with it. OT convergence and Ignition will go to a massive scale. Ignition will. We have customers who are running hundreds and thousands of different sites and locations that are all feeding back to central locations using a variety of technologies there and also deployments. There’s this project over in Texas that is maybe some of you have heard of, that’s a data center project that is. We had somebody present on it at ICC. They called it Project Ludicrous because it was just so massive. And they have hundreds of Ignition gateways that are all orchestrated when they send these things out.

16:01
Speaker 1
It’s the collaboration between OpenAI and SoftBank and I forget who the third company is right offhand, but it’s the biggest data center, AI data center in the world that they’re working on building right now. Democratisation of data. The idea that you can take data, you can make it available to anyone, of course, with permissions and a security model, so it’ll be available to other systems. There’s data governance that’s built in there as well. Making sure that it is being shared and communicated within an organisation in a responsible way. ITOT integration I mentioned a moment ago. Industry 4.0 IioT, we support things like MQTT and MQTT Sparkplug B, OPC UA, and Kafka mentioned a second ago. A lot of other technologies that play into this space, unified namespace, UNS you might have heard of. We’re all inside that area. Digital transformation journeys.

16:59
Speaker 1
We empower in a real way. And the one that I’m most excited about here, and I’ve heard time and time again from folks, is this unleashing innovation. So Ignition has rapid development tools built in a way that takes the ability to do something, to iterate on an idea and makes that really accessible. You can, you know, inside Ignition, if you have an engineer, you can go in and somebody has an idea and says, I want to take a look at this and see if I move this hopper in this specific way, am I going to get better production over here? And you know that somebody can take two hours and go in and build a new small application, make some changes to a screen, test it out, try it out, see if it helps the organisation. If it doesn’t, just toss what was done.

17:50
Speaker 1
It’s quick enough that you can iterate and you can move on some of these things that folks really want in a way that gives you the ability to unleash this innovation that a lot of companies feel paralysis with some of their existing technology stacks, where it always requires a PO and it requires instead of or it requires a full project write up and a full bidding process in order to even try out some of the things that maybe when they were smaller they could do really in an exciting way, in a way that they could just move and try out ideas and now they feel kind of stuck. Ignition.

18:28
Speaker 1
I’ve talked to so many folks who said Ignition has changed that Ignition has changed my life when it comes to being able to be excited about things again, being able to be passionate about things again, being able to just explore and dream things and try them out and do them, have successes, have failures along the way and it’s okay because it’s so fast to do things. And we have a licensing model as well that plays into that. Unlimited tags, unlimited clients. There’s no need to go in and say, I want to go from 1000 tags to 1500 tags, and I’m going to have to pay extra for that. No, that’s all included inside the licensing model, where you buy Ignition once. As long as you’re going to anything that a server will be able to handle, that’s one license.

19:13
Speaker 1
So, you know, hundreds of Thousands of tags, 100 clients, maybe sometimes 200 on a single system. And you can spin that up on a single Ignition gateway and then just play with it. If it exceeds that threshold, if your hardware won’t handle it anymore, you can buy another license. We scale horizontally and we scale vertically too. But if you’re just doing a normal system, trying things out is normally really easy, really quick and you know, for engineers who are into these types of things, really exciting. All right, so I had a few people ask me questions about what industries Inductive Automation is in right now. What are some of the hot things that are happening? These are the ones in Africa. Mining, food and Bev, healthcare, utilities, data center, manufacturing, energy, public administration. And of course, this is a subset.

20:04
Speaker 1
But these are the ones that are hottest right now, and for the last 12 months globally, the list is pretty similar, actually, with just a couple of different changes. So this is Ignition around the world. We have tens of thousands of installations that are out there, hundreds of thousands of users. This is a big footprint, and this is boiling down some information from all of that. So manufacturing food and bev energy, utilities, data center, aerospace and defense, distribution and mining. All right, so game-changing features from 2010 through 2025, who wants to see this in song form? I got some laughs. I got one person saying yes. Does anybody else want to see it in song form? All right, all right, well, I give you. Oh, sorry, that’s a preview there. That’s where it’s supposed to be. All right, here you go.

21:04
Speaker 1
Well, that’s a little hot.

21:31
Speaker 2
In looking for 2003 factory SQL set free factory P United stage Java clients bring the cage 2010 the merge is done. Ignitions platform’s number one vision is a safe home. Fridge pulls data through the inducted University.

22:06
Speaker 1
Cirrus.

22:07
Speaker 2
Links LQTT and your rising 17-inch money taxi fee, Storing coal and wall.

22:19
Speaker 1
T.

22:23
Speaker 2
Waves Fine Reborn Restore central view Edge control over me.

23:05
Speaker 1
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was a lot of fun to put together. We. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Inductive automation as you can see. So the lyrics to that song were actually put together by Kent, who, if you were here three years ago or two years ago, Kent was on stage and he was doing some of this presentation, and he was the lead singer there as well. So I decided to pull some of those lyrics and use them as the game-changing features for 2010 through 2025. So these are the things that have happened inside Ignition that were some of our milestone moments as we’ve released things, and this all led up to today. Right? So, Java clients Vision back in the day, when we first launched Ignition, that was brand new.

23:53
Speaker 1
Nobody was doing cross-platform, nobody was doing things that would just be accessible everywhere. And we decided we want to run on Mac os, we want to run on Linux, we want to run on Windows, we want to run on anything that somebody wants to use us on, and we want to make Ignition accessible to everybody. So that was right out of the gate. SQL Bridge was right out of the gate too, which is to take data from PLCs, put it in databases, take data from databases, put it in PLCs, take recipes, do all of this, bridge the gap between those technologies that didn’t have a good solution back then from other vendors either. So, game-changing features when they came out. Still really powerful features today. Inductive University we started in 2014. If you don’t know what it is, it’s the free online training.

24:37
Speaker 1
We spent about 10,000 man-hours building this thing and decided to release it 100% for free to the entire community. We wanted to get that education out there to make you successful. Knew that we wouldn’t be able to fly around the world and do all the training to all the different areas that existed. And at the time, we didn’t have a great distribution network. Right now we do. Element 8 is fantastic, but at the time, we had nothing. It was just us in our office and Folsom with our 100 closest friends. And we’re all trying to get that out there to make people successful everywhere that they were, communicate best practices and help make the projects go off. So, they released the 2015 enterprise administration module. Centralised backups, centralised viewing of different things, and the ability to do remote restoring.

25:30
Speaker 1
All of that from an enterprise standpoint as our first dipping our toes into the enterprise space. 2016 is when MQTT was first released. So Cirrus Link, our partner, released the first Ignition MQTT modules, engine, transmission and distribution Edge arrived in 2017. Edge is our data collection that’s sitting next to equipment or it’s an HMI solution. We’ve got two different software products. So Edge HMI, if you’re using it as an HMI, you buy a panel PC, any panel PC. It’s commodity hardware. Doesn’t matter which brand you get, as long as it runs a modern operating system, Linux or Windows. It’s going to be able to run Ignition, and then you install the Ignition Edge panel on it, and you’re often running with a full Ignition-powered HMI. Yeah, Tag, syncing, store and forward.

26:23
Speaker 1
It plugs into the rest of the Ignition ecosystem, and it’ll also send things to other systems as well. So if you need a bunch of HMIs and you want them to use modern technology and be really flexible and also be able to pipe data to just about anywhere, that’s another reason for using Edge Panel, Edge controls. These are. Right. That’s all part of Edge 2020. Perspective came around. This is our modern visualisation. If you’re not familiar with it and it is web-based, it runs inside a web browser. You can run in thick clients as well with Perspective Workstation; it’ll run on phones, it’ll run on tablets, and it is where we’re putting most of our development effort today because we have heard loud and clear from the community that Perspective is the thing that almost everybody wants going forward.

27:16
Speaker 1
Almost every greenfield project that’s created is running on Perspective these days. So, yeah, modern technology takes advantage of things like identity providers, IDPs, OAuth, SAML, and enterprise security is built into that project. Inheritance we added at the same time. In 2023, we released Cloud Edition, which allows you to take Ignition and run it inside the cloud and pay for it as you go. You can use the subscription models. If you spin it up for two hours, you pay for two hours. If you spin it up for a month, you pay for a month. And it’s modelled that a lot of folks are used to. You can still run perpetual licenses in the cloud if you want to, but if you want to use your cloud spend and billing profiles, or provide a system that is accessible to.

28:06
Speaker 1
If you’re an OEM, for example, and you’re creating equipment and you want to create a portal that everybody can log into and see information, or you want to report back to Central, Cloud Edition can be a great option for that. Right. And that brings me to 2025, which is this year, which is Ignition 8.3, which released a month ago and as of I believe two days ago, released the latest 8.3, which is 8.31. So we’re iterating on 8.3 with the release train here. New features, new bug fixes, new security features that are inside Ignition, and that’s going to continue going forward here. As it says, the wait is over. By show of hands, is anybody running Ignition 8.3 yet? No. Okay, so these features are probably going to be new to all of you, which is great. All right.

29:04
Speaker 1
And some of these will get a little bit esoteric, a little bit engineer-focused. So if you are not an engineer, I’d say hold on or take a nap for about 10 minutes. And then we’ll get back to other things that are very accessible. But these are human-readable configuration files. This is a big deal for integration with things like Git, where you have version control, where you have the ability to basically come in. And I’m going to try the IT fix again here. Everyone, cross your fingers. All right, all right. And so human-readable configuration files.

29:46
Speaker 1
Yeah, these are if you want to do change tracking, if you want to see what somebody has changed in different versions of Ignition, if you want to go through, if somebody changes a database connection inside the system, somebody comes in and adjusts, you know, adds a component to a screen or changes the way something works. And you want to be able to take a look at the history there. If you have Ignition committed to a Git repo, you can take a look, you can see the change history, you can see the change log, and it’s all plain text, it’s all human-readable JSON formats or XML for some of the vision screens. And it is all there. It also opens up a lot of possibilities for some of these bigger orchestration tools, which I’ll get to in a second here. Context-aware configuration.

30:31
Speaker 1
This kind of applies to everybody, but the context-aware configuration. The idea here is that you might have different systems. You might not want to deploy things to production immediately. You might want to have a separate development system. So if you have any changes, you can test them out, you can play with them, you can do different things with that configuration, have your QA, maybe go through, make sure that it’s going to work well before you roll out to your live production system, and potentially risk changing things inside a production environment. So Ignition has added additional features to make this so that you can have a configuration for all of your overall pipeline there. You can configure for dev, you can configure for test, and you can configure for prod, all in one spot.

31:18
Speaker 1
And when you deploy, you don’t have to change any of those configurations. When you deploy from dev to test, you might be having a different database connection and different credentials behind the scenes, different IP addresses for what you’re connecting to. You can store all of that information just in the dev system, when you deploy to test, when you deploy to production, and all of that comes through with it. So there are no manual changes needed for each one of the deployment steps. Super nice. In Ignition 8.1, you can do this type of setup, but it takes a little bit of manual work. We wanted to take that manual work, just completely remove it. This is also for the programmers, engineers, and propeller heads in the audience. I say that fondly, I’m one of them. The API configurability is right here.

32:05
Speaker 1
This is with the open API, which used to be called Swagger. We created an open API definition behind the scenes where there’s a RESTful interface that basically anything can connect to, as long as it has the appropriate security, and do configuration and reconfiguration of the Ignition gateways on the fly. Come in, you can take a look and maybe from a central location. You say all of my databases across my entire enterprise are changing, and I have 12 Ignition gateways. You can automate all of those tasks with a tool like Ansible, for example, and change them on the fly or with any tool you create yourself. Secrets management is a way to have the secrets and the credentials inside Ignition. So passwords for example, or certificates stored away from the rest of the Ignition gateway.

32:53
Speaker 1
So you can have it internal and have it encrypted, or you can have an external secrets vault with something like Hashicorp Vault that keeps these secrets out of the configuration. So when you commit to Git or another version control system, you don’t have to worry about some of your secrets actually going through there and being committed to version control. They can be externalised to the overall application, or if you’re sharing a gateway backup with someone. Things like that redesigned interface. We did a lot of work on the actual visual of the web interface behind the scenes with Ignition. And I won’t spend too much time on this, but we did take a lot of feedback into account from everyone who provided it to us.

33:37
Speaker 1
And we tried to incorporate the ability to export different things in different ways, and the import has visibility combined from both the configuration and review standpoints. So it’s one place to do a lot of things if you want to work with your devices. You just go to devices. You don’t have to go to configuration devices or status devices. It’s all just there. And we made a lot of other changes, and we made everything that you could click on accessible in that open API as well. So anything that you can do through the web interface, you can also do through the web API reimagined Historical Data Foundation. We made significant changes to the way that our historical foundation works. This means that the storage behind the scenes, we wanted to upgrade what we have as the core layer inside Ignition of the historical pieces.

34:32
Speaker 1
So flexible storage. We’re storing metadata or have the ability to store metadata behind the scenes. So, in addition to storing Tags, they can store the additional properties behind individual tags without storing extra tags to store in history point renaming. So if somebody’s changing the names on things, you get that history that can follow it. The modification of stored data directly through Ignition. And we don’t have a UI for this. We’re working on it right now. We’re going to have it soon, but we have the ability to. In certain industries, you might need to say this value came through, and it showed a 0, or it showed a negative 4, because it’s a 4 to 20 milliamp signal that was scaled, and the sensor had a problem, but I need to show that it was actually a 23 at this time.

35:25
Speaker 1
You can go in, change that point, get a logging of who changed it, when it was changed, have the graph show the corrected point, but still be able to see the whole audit trail of where that came from so that you can be compliant with things like 21, CFR 11 and other regulations that require maintaining that whole history of anything that you’re storing behind the scenes. We’ve got annotations where you can click on a certain point, put in a note about a certain point in a graph or a chart. We’ve got support for that behind the scenes now. So there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work. And then we created this new Core Historian that implements most of these things. So it doesn’t implement everything yet, but it’s going to.

36:06
Speaker 1
And this is if you were using Ignition in kind of a small to medium application. And you know that you want to be able to have just a single system; you don’t want to necessarily spin up another database. Maybe you don’t have recipes to do or other things that require databases that are outside of it. And you just want to have everything self-contained inside a single Ignition instance. You can spin up this Core Historian, and it’s going to work really well for those smaller to medium-sized applications. It’s built in, it’s in the same service, it’s in within Ignition itself. And it is. We think a lot of folks are going to be using this pretty extensively. We’re already seeing a lot of folks using it and are really happy with it.

36:47
Speaker 1
We did have an internal historian before that we recommended people never use. So this is better. And the internal historian was used inside Edge, and for really small data sets, it was fine. But you can see the comparison here. It’s eight times write performance versus that internal historian, and it’s 600 times read performance for that. So huge difference if you’re comparing it to a SQL Historian, it’s all in memory, or, you know, a lot of it’s in memory, but it’s all running inside the same system. So it has some advantages there. If you’re using an external SQL Historian, I’d also say that’s normally fine. There’s normally not too many performance bottlenecks there. If it’s working for you today, there’s no real reason to switch over to the Core Historian unless you really wanted to.

37:37
Speaker 1
But we are going to be releasing additional Historian engines that are going to be coming out. We’re calling them Historian types, and so we’ll have quite a few of them that are coming out. But timescale is an example of one. I think Influx DB is one that we’re considering adding other time series ones behind the scenes. Oh, and then also AWS and Azure have some of their cloud time series history and engines there or history databases. And so we’re looking at adding support for those as well. All built on the same new foundation that I just talked about. DataOps-ready event processing. This is one of the features that I’m really excited about. This is basically showing off event streams. And I think event streams is one of the biggest changes that we have inside Ignition to date.

38:28
Speaker 1
It’s one of the biggest new features in 8.3, and the way I’m seeing it is going to change the way that folks are thinking of Ignition when it comes to a higher level. All of what Ignition does already, Ignition is going to continue doing. But this just adds the ability to do things with Ignition where it’s sitting in a data ops space, where it’s taking data, and it’s transforming it in a standardised way. These event streams have the ability to have sources and handles handlers that are moving between different sections. And so you can go from Kafka, you can go from some of these IT technologies. It shows MongoDB, HTTP REST, and MQTT tag changes and you can go to other systems there as well and do it in a centralised, maintainable way.

39:16
Speaker 1
You could always do this with Ignition with scripting, but as we know, if you have a thousand scripts inside a system that are all trying to manage this type of data transmission, translation adjustments, it can be hard to maintain. It can be hard for a new engineer to come in and understand what’s going on, it can be a little bit brittle depending on who actually wrote it, or it can be fantastic. Right? There’s a whole range of quality that can be associated with this. It enforces a certain level of quality. It’s a centralised system that’s going to allow other engineers to go in, see what’s going on right away, and understand what these flows look like in the Ignition Designer. It’s just an entry in the designer.

39:59
Speaker 1
You can go to event streams, and you can see the different event streams set up by different structures there. We did add. All right, we did add the ability to do the drawing tools directly inside Ignition Perspective. We’ve had drawing tools in Vision for a really long time. Time we added them to Perspective, but we weren’t happy with just taking what we had envisioned already. We have to make everything bigger and better, and so we made it bigger and better in Perspective, and now it’s a separate drawing editor that’s part of it. You can do bindings directly inside the drawing tools. There’s a lot of flexibility there and a lot of power. We added Siemens’ new driver. So that’s a symbolic driver for Siemens.

40:47
Speaker 1
If you’re running an S7 1200 or 1500 and you’ve ever used the OPC UA server inside there so you could browse from Ignition, this is a better experience. It’s going to support more, it’s going to give you a full list of your tags, and it’s also more efficient. It’s going to allow you to subscribe to more, get more value changes per second through. And we’ve been really happy with it since we released it. We worked a really long time on it as well. So it’s largely for markets here and in Europe. Europe has a lot of places with Siemens devices. So that is out the gate with Ignition 8.3.0 from a month ago.

41:30
Speaker 1
And then we created a bunch of other features, and there would be way too much for me to go into here and still show you the last couple of things that I want to. But with the Gateway network, we added a type of encoding, protobuf, behind the scenes, that ends up making it much more efficient. If you’re transmitting things over, you could see anywhere from twice as efficient to even 10 times as efficient, depending on the kind of data that you’re sending over the wire. So it really matters if you’re doing cell signals or satellite signals and doing remote data collection or if you’re just doing a lot of it over a network that might be a little bit constrained. Improved the designer in a lot of different ways. Eight character keys with containerization orchestration. We can do proxying through other licensers, servers, and alarm aggregation metrics.

42:17
Speaker 1
Basically, if you want to see how many alarms exist in a certain area or a certain part of your tag tree, you get those metrics settings right there that are directly inside the Ignition Designer and under every single folder there. Super nice read. Only projects we added. Ability to do helm charts. I’ll circle back to that in a minute. Store and forward improvements. We changed the way that’s stored on disk so that it scales even more. More redundancy, sync, tag, import, export directly from the gateway and the list could go on and on here. Decided I had to cut it off somewhere. And we also made a big difference for our engineering team. So this is our software development team or our software engineering team on our software engineering team. And this is from a year ago.

43:06
Speaker 1
So there’s probably another 20 or 30 people since then. Then we’ve been continuing to grow, and you know, which has been fantastic. We’ve also been iterating our processes, and part of what we’ve done is taken our developer to QA ratio to 1. So we have one QA person for every developer that we have on the team. It used to be heavier on the developer side. We didn’t have as many QA and they weren’t able to get to quite as many tests as they wanted to do, or if they felt like there was something, there might be something here. Right. This, my built-out test, is working well.

43:42
Speaker 1
But let me explore X and Y and Z here and see if I can do something else that’s going to potentially have a problem so we can fix it right away and up front before it gets out. We’ve, they now have time to do that. We’ve also increased our test coverage by 50% which is huge. That’s automated test coverage. That’s basically every time that we release Ignition, even a nightly build, we’re going through and we’re running all of these automated tests that make sure that the things that we’re testing for are working well. And if they don’t, if they fail, then we don’t release that. That doesn’t go into a build. We’re also 9001 compliant now, which is a huge deal. We did a lot of work on that. That’s as of about a month ago.

44:24
Speaker 1
And then 62443, which, if you’re not familiar, 623-44-341 is the specific one that we’re compliant with, but that has to do with secure software development lifecycle practices that are externally accredited. So we worked with external organisations to say this is what we’re doing. Does this look good to you? Right. Is there any way that we can improve our processes? And went through, and we did improve a few things along the way. And we had a lot of things that were working well, and went through that whole process, and then they gave us the accreditation. So we’re set on both of those fronts, and we really invested a lot of time in trying to make sure that we’re doing a good job from a development standpoint and being good citizens to everyone who’s using Ignition.

45:12
Speaker 1
I’ll fly through some of these to get to some of the parts that I alluded to earlier, which are still coming. One of the things that our customers end up running into on a regular basis, Ignition goes in. There’s a single installation somewhere. People use that unlimited licensing that I was talking about. And they do a second application, a third application, and a fourth application, and they don’t have to pay us anymore. And you know, it’s just up and running, and people are happy with it. One facility gets Ignition, another facility. What do you have over there? I’m interested in that. And so they’ll pull Ignition into a second facility, and then there will be a third one and a fourth one. And before you know it, you don’t have a single Ignition gateway sitting there. You have a big-scale operation that’s running on Ignition.

46:06
Speaker 1
And so this is a great opportunity. But it’s also a challenge because if you’re trying to manage one Ignition gateway or two or three or four, you might log into the individual ones, do whatever changes you might need. If you’re trying to manage 100 at a time, if you have edge devices that are out there, if you have a lot of individual monitoring, if you have geographically separated processes, if you have, you know, water facilities or upstream oil and gas, or, you know, there’s a lot of different industries that have this and we have a lot of enterprise customers that are just worldwide as well, where they have facilities in 30 different countries. How do you manage all of those at the same time? Time? So I’m happy to say that we’ve added a lot of tools to Ignition over the years.

46:53
Speaker 1
8.1 does an okay job of this. 8.3 does an even better job of this. So there are these patterns that are used inside this space on a regular basis. Containerization, orchestration, infrastructure as code. DevOps is something similar and common. GitOps is a certain type of DevOps and has to do with how you deploy different things. Things. These types of technologies we support, we’re happy with our customers using, and we have released resources that are around all of these things to try to help make this scale problem. Not a problem, but an opportunity. Something that’s easy to press a button, deploy something and go out to all of the different facilities that are out there. So.

47:40
Speaker 1
So as you can see on the left-hand side, this road can be a little bumpy, and technically you could get there before, but you don’t really want to be taking a Celica on one of these roads. If you take a look after 8:3, right. If you have a purpose-built vehicle for the terrain that you’re in, it helps things a lot. So we had a lot of people who were doing this type of thing, but it took a lot of effort before, and we’ve tried to ruin it, really smooth it out and give folks the tools that they need to be able to accomplish this on a truly wide scale. As far as I know, we’re the only company in this space who are doing these things to this extent as well.

48:23
Speaker 1
So we’ve focused on this big picture in addition to obviously focusing on the individual plants and the opportunities that are there, and all the tools that I just talked about that are in Ignition that apply regardless of scale. So this scale conversation means that once a project gets to a point that it needs to scale out, we’re there to support you, we’re there to be able to provide some advice and some guidance and the trail is already blazed. Right. This is not something that needs to be. The wheel needs to be reinvented. IT departments also like this a lot, and it is something that we are using IT-friendly technologies behind the scenes, really connected to these types of things, and they’re excited about scaling things in a way that they don’t have to maintain every single server for good reason.

49:17
Speaker 1
Often they’re resource-constrained, and the more you can do, the more multiplying effect that you have in terms of doing something once and deploying it everywhere, the easier it is to be able to have a maintainable system, a reliable system, an innovative system that continues to allow for movement as needed. All right, the beyond section Ignition. What’s next for Ignition after 8.3 Historian? We’re going to continue evolving. We’re adding redundancy to that core Historian, we’re adding more to our HTTP API, that open API. If you have other ideas for the Open API once you explore it inside Ignition 8.3, please let us know. It’s a brand new feature, as you know, and we’re actively looking for Feedback, and we’re happy to add additional endpoints as they make sense and all of that in the tier hierarchy.

50:11
Speaker 1
So the ability to go 1, 2, 3, 4n servers that you have working all together, alarming. Audit journals are going to be able to go into the Historian. As opposed to requiring a separate database, SQLite inside or you know, a separate external SQL database. We’re adding ETL tooling, improved charting and visualisation as well. So this is something that some of you may have used a module called Apex Chart in the past. This is something where we want to basically continue to improve things inside Ignition. So the charts that we provide by default are going to be great for everybody. And so you wouldn’t necessarily need to go outside of our built in charts to do things. You can probably do 90%, 95% of what you want right now inside our built-in charts.

51:01
Speaker 1
But there are certain things that can be a little bit difficult, and we’re continuing to iterate on those to try to make things even easier. So, a different type of time over time comparison where you have something that happened yesterday and you have something that happens today, you want to compare those graphs next to each other. Right now, you’ve got to do a little bit of scripting and put the data sets side by side. After we roll this out, it’d just be a click and move and drag and drop and just etcetera. Deeper data ops integration, so we’ll continue releasing new modules as I mentioned for different things with event streams, we’re enhancing SQL Bridge, we’re doing indirect groups. We have SFC enhancements as well.

51:42
Speaker 1
We’re adding a perspective SFC visualisation component so that you can see where charts are and how they’re operating inside your perspective. Screens and applications first-party Orchestration support. If you’ve heard of Kubernetes, I mentioned Helm charts, or earlier, we’re continuing to iterate on what’s available there. So we’re adding Ansible collections that are inductive automation sponsored and available and downloadable from our website, Kubernetes Operator. If you’re into Kubernetes, we’ve had this request from a number of folks, and we just wanted to add that, and then container platforms as well. Red Hat Azure, we’re putting into the platform, so that you can spin up Ignition there really easily. External scripting engines, Python, as you know, probably maybe Python inside Ignition is great.

52:32
Speaker 1
It’s also Python 2, and there’s a new language called Python 3 that is a different language from Python 2, which is frustrating for us because we would love to just upgrade to Python 3, but it would break everybody’s scripts. So what we’ve decided to do is add the ability to have a drop-down and pick your scripting engine inside Ignition. So we are adding Python 3, and you will be able to do all the Python 3 things, and you’ll be able to use external libraries Numpy and SciPy, and whatever you want. You can go crazy with this thing. This is going to be. We’re targeting the next version of Ignition for this. We’re adding LSP support so that you can externally use other script editors that plug right into the Ignition overall setup there.

53:22
Speaker 1
So you don’t have to do the scripting engine scripting editor inside Ignition itself. You can. We’ll still have that, but if you want to use an external one, you can. And then external. Other external engines. So if somebody wanted to add LUA support, for example, or JavaScript support or other ones, we’re making it so it’s an API so anybody can basically extend it and add to it. And the last thing I wanted to show you is AI. We had something exciting happen at ICC, and I wanted to pull in a little bit of this Ignition community conference once again, in September. If you want to come next year, we’d love to have you out. It is a 54-hour travel day, but it’s worth it. Hopefully, your experience is not mine.

54:10
Speaker 1
I was stuck on the tarmac for three hours, and then they deplaned all of us. So then we got to get it. It should have been 24 hours or something like that. So anyway, if you make it out great, we’d love to have you, but I wanted to pull a little bit of ICC and here. So we created a Project. It looks a little like this, and I am going to pop over and actually just show this live. So this little guy up here is. We call him Iggy is our company mascot, if you will. He actually lives out in Folsom, California, and he bounces around the office, and we wanted to embody him here. And I am just going to kick it off by saying hi, Iggy, can you introduce yourself? Oh, he’s a little bit crazy. So not everybody can read that.

55:20
Speaker 1
That’s okay. I’m going to actually do this again, but I’m going to have IT talk to you. Hi Iggy, can you say hello? It’s not pre-scripted prompts, right? It’s actually understanding what I’m saying.

55:36
Speaker 3
Hello, Is it who you’re looking for? Because I’m here, I’m ready, and I’m saying a big enthusiastic hello to each and every one of you amazing people. Let’s go. Waiting partying.

55:47
Speaker 1
It’s a little enthusiastic right now. I have Iggy connected up to an Ignition system, and in fact, if you can see the top browser bar, this is Ignition, this is the perspective that this is all running in. So we’ve got this tightly integrated here. I’m going to say, hey Iggy, can you tell me what data points are available, what tags are available inside my Ignition system?

56:22
Speaker 3
Alright, check it out. We’ve got some sweet tags here for you. Fault alarm toggle, default motor rpm, default motor setting, default writable tag. Pretty neat, huh? What do you want to dive it in next?

56:33
Speaker 1
All right, so we’ve got access to the tags. I am going to ask it. What do you guys want me to ask it? Actually, just anybody want to shout something out? Okay. Hey Iggy, which tags are in alarm?

57:03
Speaker 3
All right, my friends, it looks like we’ve got one alarm blaring right now. The culprit is coming from the default alarm toggle. Looks like someone needs to go check that out. What’s next on the agenda for this awesome crowd?

57:15
Speaker 1
All right, all right, so I’m going to turn off the vocals here so it gets a little bit overwhelming. But yeah, so that actually pulled in the alarm state right there. I’ll pull in a couple of other things. Hey Iggy, can you tell me what the current value of the motor rpm is? And it’s using the mic here locally. It is sending this out to the cloud, it’s getting information from an LLM, it’s hitting the Ignition gateway and it tells me that motor RPM is 19. I’ll come in and say, Iggy, can you write a value of 23 to the motor set point? And it will if it’s kind, go out and write that value, and then it’ll pull back, it’ll do a read back so that it can verify what the current value is of that.

58:24
Speaker 1
So in addition to that, and this is all based on the Internet, too. It looks like it’s going a little bit slow for this one. Let me hit stop, and I’ll do another request here because you can actually get this to generate some things inside perspective for you on the fly, too. Hey Iggy, can you show me the motor RPM for the last five minutes? And we’ll see if this is successful. Yeah, there you go. And this is, as I said, all in perspective, so this is interactable. This is an actual chart here. I can go in, I can do my X trace if I want to. I can come in and select different points. And this is all generated on the fly. You can do more exciting things on the fly as well.

59:22
Speaker 1
Some of the more complex things does take him a minute or two to actually go through. When I say him, I mean the large language model behind the scenes that I’m personifying by Iggy. But we saved a couple of these conversations earlier, and I wanted to show a couple of those things too. So this is one that’s from configuration. This prompt was a quick test. Write up a new form config that has each widget spread randomly across four columns. Save it as an artefact. It created this on the fly. So this is an actual form I can come in. I can type in different things. There’s a password number, a text area, and dropdowns here. I can submit this. This will save to your Ignition gateway behind the scenes as well.

01:00:08
Speaker 1
So if you are an engineer and you want to come in and create a view and then use that view, make some modifications, it might not always be exactly as you want when the LLM creates it, but it’ll create things that you can use as a foundation. You’ve got that accessible image to form here. This is. We uploaded an image, and we said Create a form out of this. Did just that. First name, last name, email address, extracted that from here, and made the password an actual password field. Gave it some, must be at least eight characters, because I saw it in the image here that it said must be at least eight characters. So it added that text as part of that, probably added the validation there too. And then this is an example of creating an entire view.

01:00:57
Speaker 1
So we gave it a lot more instructions here. Create a view that includes a header, bar, menu, nav8 labels and a context area. Use the following columns and colours. Use this area for the background in different ways. And this is created on the fly. This is a full application header template that is inside Ignition. Now you can see this view path right up here. This is where it dropped it in the Ignition project. So if you’re looking for that and you’re designing a project, you can just go in, grab that, give it whatever name you want, be off and running with whatever you need to do. So very fun, very exciting idea. How soon can you actually do this? How soon can you put this in your projects and start working with it?

01:01:45
Speaker 1
Well, the answer there, let me go back to my slide deck, is that to do this it requires something called the MCP module that is used by AI large language modules, models, and we are planning on releasing that Q1 this coming year. So, within three or four months, here we are going to have that MCP module released. That is our current target. That’s what we announced at ICC, that’s what we’re going for. And that is going to plug into everything that you just saw here. You’ll be able to use it in your own applications. We also put everything that we have here up on GitHub so anybody can download it, play with it, use it, and test it out.

01:02:33
Speaker 1
The Gemini LLM is what we’re using right now, the Google one, but you can use any LLM; it’s not tied to Google, and this is what the architecture looks like. So Gemini is connected to MCP. It’s connected to a technology called N8N, which has some database connections behind the scenes. And then we’ve got some speech-to-text that’s happening or text-to-speech where it gives you all the hype. So I know I’m a few minutes over, but I did want to mention, really quickly, that we have updated the release train. Sow, We’ve done Ignition 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, and 8.3 is out right now, and we’ve decided we are ditching our current naming convention for Ignition.

01:03:23
Speaker 1
So the next version is not going to be 8.4 or 8.5 or 9.8, know, it’s going to start to be iterated based on the year that it’s released to make it real easy to understand when something was released and be able to iterate on it from a target of having new features in each new yearly release. So our first one isn’t going to be, you know, three months from now in 2026. Our first one is going to be Ignition 2027, and that’ll be coming out in February 2027, and then we’ll have an Ignition 2028, 2029, Ignition 2030, et cetera, etc, so very understandable, expected, you know, a reliable release cycle. And what we’re going to do for each one of those releases is we’re going to have, we’re changing the way that long-term support works, how that’s defined basically.

01:04:13
Speaker 1
And so we’re going to have Ignition 2027 that won’t be a long-term support release right out of the gate. Then we’ll have about six months of updates, new features that we add, bug fixes, all of that. And once we get to a point that we’re down the road and we feel really confident inside it in terms of applicability for the next five years. Use this as a foundation for your next project. That really requires longevity. At that point, we’re going to label it with LTS. Then we’ll end up with 2027 LTS and then we won’t be adding new features to LTS. It’ll only have bug fixes and security fixes that go into it. So it’ll have really high stability. What happens when we label it as LTS just going into the future? So some folks we expect will stay on the main release branches.

01:05:03
Speaker 1
Some folks we expect in some critical industries will end up going into an LTS release and just sticking with those LTS releases. That’s the last thing that I had here. I know we’re going to change the AV a little bit while we do that. I did want to ask, and as Jaco comes back up here, did anybody have any quick questions that they wanted to ask?