Closing Keynote: Where Do We Go From Here?

Speakers

Colby Clegg

Chief Executive Officer

Inductive Automation

Carl Gould

Chief Technology Officer

Inductive Automation

James Hunt

Co-Director of Support Services

Inductive Automation

Marcus Bellamy

Co-Director of SW Support Services

Inductive Automation

Nick Barfuss

Product Manager II (CA)

Inductive Automation

In this final session of the conference, we'll look forward to what's next. Join Inductive Automation speakers for exciting presentations and an engaging Q&A panel about the road ahead for Ignition's development, the expansion of technical support, and the evolution of Inductive Automation's customer experience.

Transcript:

00:00
Colby Clegg: Well, well, well, well, here we are. Thank you; we made it. We made it to the end, huh? This has been an incredible week. It's so great to see you all here. These are the diehards. And so we are excited to share this last session with you. Over the last few days, we've had so many conversations. We've explored so many ideas, shared stories, reconnected, and really have explored how this community can continue to push the boundaries of automation forward, blending your ingenuity with modern technology, of course, with Ignition as a platform in the middle and binding those together.

00:39
Colby: Okay, but guess what? We're not done yet. In fact, this year, we have something extra special for you, which is why we're doing this closing keynote for the first time. See, over the last couple days, we couldn't pack everything that we wanted into two keynotes, so we've created this story arc concluding this afternoon. If you can remember, way back to two days ago, we introduced you to Ignition 8.3. We talked a lot about the product itself, but we also talked a little bit about the values and philosophies behind it that we continue to try to express through our product.

01:14
Colby: Yesterday, we reviewed the state of the Ignition community and the many, many incredible projects that you are all doing each day. We saw the way that Ignition is being put to use in a very vital way to impact our world. In between, you've seen many incredible sessions, and there've been subjects as diverse as our industry itself. I feel like we've had something for everyone, and I truly hope that every one of you is feeling inspired, invigorated, and ready to go back home and get back to work to create the future today. But how about that word future? We've talked about where we are; we talked about what's going on, but what about where we're going?

01:58
Colby: Well, that's exactly what we're gonna talk about this afternoon in this session entitled, "Where Do We Go From Here?" It's a fitting way to close because after this session, it's gonna be an entire year before we're back together for the first time in a new location. Also, knowing how much all of us leave this conference, so fired up to get out there and do more, we thought it'd be the perfect opportunity, the perfect place to conclude this week's discussions and launch into what comes after today.

02:26
Colby: Now, perhaps you're thinking that that refers to the software, and perhaps you're even thinking, "Now hold on, I just got my mind wrapped around Ignition 8.3, I can't handle anymore." Well, don't worry, Ignition 8.3 is part of it, but it's only a slice. Ignition 8.3, in fact, plays an important step in where we wanna go, and we'll talk about that. But there's a lot more that we want to talk about as well. I hope you've noticed that in everything we present, there's plenty of practical information, but it's built on a foundation of values and principles. And this is so important to us.

03:01
Colby: Steve and Wendi-Lynn Hechtman founded this company to bring their experience as an integration business into the industrial software space that had become transactional and, I guess if I'm gentle about it, just cynical. Now, we, the leaders of Inductive Automation, are committed to carrying those values forward, and we fully recognize the important role we play in improving the industry through our value-oriented approach.

03:28
Colby: We believe that our values make us unique, and they lead us to doing a lot of things in our own way. This has led us to... It's led me to create a little phrase that we've started to use inside of our company called "uniquely inductive." We use this to highlight the things that make us different, the way we do things in a special way, things that lead to an unprecedented user experience, to industry-leading technology, and a dedication to the future. Today, you're gonna hear that phrase probably said a few times, because we're gonna explore some of the unique things that we're doing for the future.

04:06
Colby: First, the software, yes. What Ignition 8.3 represents in the big picture, and most importantly, where we see that picture going. But next, another key product that we offer, support. We've been famous since the beginning for our support and training. And we know that it's a cornerstone of who we are and what we offer to the industry. So I'd like to have our Directors of Support Services come out and talk about some of the important milestones that we have in front of us.

04:33
Colby: Finally, we have a special surprise. I won't say too much about it right now, but I will say that I am extremely excited to finally share it with you because I think that it perfectly represents what I mean by saying that we continue to deliver our values through our products. So that might seem like a lot, but we'll get through it, and we'll make sure to leave some time for everyone's favorite part of ICC, our panel discussion.

05:00
Colby: All of our speakers this afternoon will be here to answer your questions. I don't know if you have any left after all these sessions and conversations we've been having, but we'll see. And it's your opportunity to catch Carl and I on stage together and see what you can throw at us. So we'll see how that goes. With that, let's get into it. Please help me welcome to stage Carl Gould.

05:25
Carl Gould: All right, thanks, Colby. Good afternoon, everybody. Returning attendees of ICC might recognize this as the part of the conference where I get to be on stage and prognosticate about somewhat vague future plans. And I intend to do exactly that. But first, a note about the future of 8.3 itself. So I want everybody to remember that when we release Ignition 8.3, that 8-3-0 will be the first of many 8.3 releases. Just like 8.1, we will continue to release incremental improvements to 8.3 roughly every five weeks using our so-called release train methodology. And these releases are commonly packed with fixes, yes, but also performance improvements, polishes to the UI. And we also use them to continually build the value of the product by adding functionality to the new features we add.

06:21
Carl: So in the case of 8.3, this means things like adding to the Form Component, for example, which has a lot of widgets right out of the box, but there's more widgets we have planned, because in order to make our release deadlines, we have to get pretty strict about defining what is the minimum viable product for release, but then we use the release train releases to expand on that minimum. Take the Power Historian as another example. On the initial release, it's not going to work right out of the box with the redundancy mode, but that is definitely something we plan on adding synchronization for in a point release in 8.3 something.

07:02
Carl: Event Streams is another great example here where we have tons of ideas for new sources and handlers. We've been sitting on a bunch of ideas, kind of waiting for Event Streams to arrive. New ideas for service connectors that will expand the possibilities of connectivity for Ignition. We have plans for an AWS connector that will allow you to connect to AWS, SNS, SQS, and S3 services. We plan on being able to consume OPC UA events and ingest them into Event Streams. I believe we mentioned before that the MongoDB Module is going to be adding support for change stream subscriptions. We're also looking at integrating with technologies like JMS and AMQP. There's all kinds of really compelling ideas to add the functionality for sources and handlers for Event Streams so that you can continue migrating a lot of your applications to be more event-driven and less reliant on polling so that they're more scalable.

08:04
Carl: And looking past 8.3, again, we're going to get back to a faster release cycle, two to three years, we think is probably about the sweet spot for major releases, and we're gonna fix this numbering scheme, but it won't be Ignition XP. I'm gonna hold the line on that one. But hopefully I don't have to ever explain why we skipped a version number again, 'cause that's getting tiresome.

08:28
Carl: Okay, so with that out of the way about how 8.3 is gonna line out, I do wanna get into some ideas of what's in the future for Ignition past 8.3 in the next major version. A disclaimer: just because I'm up on stage here and have a microphone does not mean these are contractual obligations. We may not deliver all these in the next major release, but we're damn sure we are gonna try.

08:55
Carl: So let's start with the platform, as we always do. We spend a lot of time around here obsessing about Ignition as a platform. A huge, huge part of 8.3 was in renovating the platform to make sure it's really well poised and well suited to take advantage of today's architectural deployment approaches. But of course we never finished, so here are some things we wanna continue improving about the Ignition platform, and starting with scripting.

09:18 C
Carl: I was trying to get ahead of this question by putting it on the slides, but I've already answered it at least half a dozen times in the last few days, so oh well. Okay, let's talk about scripting. So we use Python 2 in Ignition, and I get asked all the time about plans to upgrade to Python 3. So a little bit of background for anyone who is not aware. The embedded scripting engine in Ignition is an implementation of Python 2 in Java called Jython. And it is a very powerful and effective approach. You all use scripting to great effect in your applications every day. Python 2 is objectively a great language. If Python 3 didn't exist, I don't think there would be too many complaints about Python 2.

10:05
Carl: The engine itself is very fast, very stable, and interestingly, the way that we've integrated it into Ignition, it allows you to, in your scripts, interact directly with Ignition's object structure because it's using a shared memory, which is pretty interesting and powerful. So if it's so great, why am I even talking about it? What's the motivation in the first place to think about moving to Python 3? I really think that it boils down to two major issues. Number one is that when you go to learn Python, you learn Python 3 by default, 'cause it has been the most recent version of Python for quite some time, and then you come to Ignition, and it's Python 2, and you have some cognitive dissonance there.

10:48
Carl: The other reason, the other motivation, is that you have found some external library for Python and you wanna bring it into Ignition. And these are usually libraries in the statistics or machine learning space, but it could be anything. There's a ton of great open-source libraries out there for Python, and then you bring them into Ignition, doesn't work.

11:09
Carl: So I'm sympathetic to these motivations. I think they are perfectly valid criticisms and... So why don't we just upgrade? Well, there's a few problems. Number one is that Python 3 is just a different language than Python 2, and apparently the Python folks aren't as into continuity as we are because they aren't backwards compatible languages. So if we were to just magically upgrade to Python 3, all your scripts would break, which we think is a bit of a problem. So that's one problem. There's another problem as well, which is that Python is a language, and then there's various runtimes, engines that run that language. And the one we run is Python and Jython. The one that you run externally, what if you were just to go use regular Python, is called CPython. And they're not the same thing. So even if there were a Jython 3 that we upgraded to, those external libraries that you found probably wouldn't work anyways, even though they're both Python 3, because most of those libraries are actually written in C.

12:12
Carl Gould: And then the real reason is that there isn't a version of Jython 3 for us to upgrade to anyhow. So these are all just excuses. But they're good ones.

12:21
Carl Gould: Okay, so how do we move forward? Is this just an impasse forever? No, it's not impasse forever. Here's the plan, so we are going to stick with the current Jython 2 scripting engine in Ignition for the foreseeable future because of backwards compatibility. So we plan on continuing to embed that engine in Ignition so that all your scripts you have now continue to work forever. We have forked this engine; it's an open-source project. We've forked it; we are comfortable maintaining it. It's stable; it's performant. I think it just needs a little bit of a rebranding makeover. We'll call it the Ignition Scripting Language or something.

13:01
Carl: But that's not all. What we wanna do in the next major version is add support for external scripting engines as a new extension point in Ignition. And so what this will allow us and other module authors to do is to gracefully integrate external scripting engines with Ignition, and this will allow us to have multiple scripting engines that could be supported. So, for example, CPython 3, absolutely. That's probably the first one we'll do. It seems like the most natural fit. But also, there's some really interesting other options that we are looking at that could offer some additional capabilities. Node.js might be really attractive. I think R has some really interesting possibilities as well. Rust Go, you can imagine any kind of external scripting language could be possible to integrate. I don't think we're gonna make first-party integrations for all those scripting engines because I think the support department would go mad, but we may pick one or two.

14:01
Carl: There's also some interesting benefits beyond different languages that you may have learned libraries in or expertise in already that offer additional capabilities. One is that by externalizing the scripting engine from the platform's process, we're able to offer, I think, stronger security guarantees. So the whole shared memory concept of our current scripting engine is incredibly powerful and flexible, but it also means that you need to have a lot of trust in the scripts that you run as you do because you write them. But there is some compelling security arguments to be made for the idea that in an externalized scripting engine, we could better sandbox the scripting environment, run it at a lower privileged user, and maybe sandbox its capabilities to access the various computing resources on the host. So that could offer some compelling security guarantees in some sorts of deployments.

15:04
Carl: Also, there is some stability reasons why externalizing the scripting engine might be beneficial. If you write a script that eats up a bunch of CPU or memory in the current system, you're eating up the CPU or memory share that the gateway is trying to use. If we externalize that scripting engine again, that isolation might help the stability of the platform. So that's some compelling reasons for us to consider these ideas, and we'll take those into effect as we implement this idea. So that's the plan for scripting. So I don't have to answer that anymore. Except for next year.

15:50
Carl: Now, if we add a whole bunch of new scripting languages, the development experience in the designer is not gonna get better. It's hard enough to create a compelling development experience for one language, not to mention three or four, right? So what we wanna do here is integrate support for LSP and the designer. LSP is a protocol, language server protocol, that allows for integration between a IDE code editing application and a code execution environment like Ignition of the designer. So the idea would be that you could really gracefully use an external editor like VS Code, which does support LSP for your development experience, write your scripts in VS Code. Some of you do this already today, but if we integrate with LSP, it will be a lot smoother, and that should be really nice.

16:46
Carl: Let's talk real quickly about embedded Java. So Ignition runs on Java. The version of Java that we embed in the gateway is currently Java version 17. Most of you probably don't ever think about this, which is great; that's how we like it. But some of you who write modules or embed Ignition on limited computing resources, embedded devices, might be thinking about this. And so in the next major version, we're looking at upgrading the version of Java to probably Java version 21, maybe version 25, depending on the timing of the release. There are some really exciting cutting-edge performance benefits in these newer versions of Java, like virtual threads that we are very excited about playing with, so we're looking forward to this improvement, and it should result in some improved performance for everybody, so that'll be nice. Okay.

17:36
Carl: Let's move on past the platform and talk a little bit about applications and some, I think, very exciting ideas we have for how applications work with Ignition. So we like to say, we often say that Ignition doesn't really do anything out of the box, right? It's a toolkit that you all use to build amazing industrial applications. And a big part of our strategy has been to make sure that we don't get bogged down by any one vertical industry's specific application needs. We really like to keep Ignition very broadly applicable to many, many different industries. And we definitely plan on staying absolutely true to that philosophy. But I think that once you either build or connect to a contextualized data model, hook up to a UNS, or build one directly in Ignition or a blend of both.

18:33
Carl: I believe that we can start offering some directly usable application functionality right out of the box in Ignition. So, I'm tentatively calling this idea Zero Development Applications. It seems to be catching on. We'll see if it makes it to the final marketing of these things, but consider this a whatever codename for now. What does this mean? So, in addition to the ability for you to create your own custom applications, which is totally our bread and butter, that's not going anywhere. We also want to add some pre-made applications that you could choose to add to Ignition. And they would give you some application functionality that would work right out of the box with no development beyond creating or connecting to a data model. So we have three of these ZDAs currently identified, and I wanna briefly introduce them to you today. Number one is an ad hoc dashboarding application. So, of course, you can build custom dashboarding applications in Perspective. Many of you do that all the time.

19:31
Carl: But we wanna have a different kind of dashboarding application available. One where all of the functionality is completely pre-made. All of the widgets are pre-designed by us. All of the data handling and data binding logic is built into the product, as well as all of the logic for end users to be able to build their own and save custom real-time dashboards. So again, once you have a tag model, we really have all the information we need to be able to do this, and so you could install this module and have a dashboarding application up with absolutely no development.

20:09
Carl: The second ZDA is an alarm analysis application. So using Ignition's alarm status data model as well as the alarm journal data model, we plan on building an alarm analysis application that can offer status views as well as historical views and analytic reporting. So these are things like analysis of alarming KPIs, like root cause analysis and flood rates, and top-end alarms, finding chattering alarms, those sorts of things. And the last ZDA that we have planned to build in the next major version is a historian explorer. So this would be an advanced charting interface that has ad hoc charting, statistical charting, multivariate analysis, as well as things like time-over-time comparison charts. And the interesting thing about this historian-explorer idea is that it would be totally engine-agnostic. So it would be agnostic as to the storage engine of the history. Remember all the discussion about the the new tag history API that's in 8.3? Well, part of that design is to support this idea so this user interface could be laid on top of any type of historian backend. So how do these applications fit inside of Ignition? They will be their own modules. So they can be used standalone with Ignition, but they could be purchased à la carte and won't have dependencies on the Perspective or the Vision module, for example. They'll be their own standalone application module.

21:46
Carl: And they'll have their own login and session management, and navigation infrastructure. So they'll sort of create their own new application surface area. And if you have more than one ZDA installed on the same gateway, they'll sort of zipper together into their own little navigation structure. So if you had the alarm analysis ZDA and the historian explorer, you would be able to log into one application and have both of those bits of functionality in perhaps a TAV navigation structure or something like that. So I started off by talking about how this ZDA idea will be different from the applications that you build in the designer and that they stand on their own. But you can also use them inside of your application. So perhaps this is, I think, the most interesting part of this idea is that if you also have Perspective and are building your own application inside of Perspective, these ZDA modules will also expose their functionality as components in Perspective so that you can embed them directly in your applications and use them that way if that's a better fit for what you're doing.

23:00
Carl: So we're pretty excited about that idea. Of course, the thing we're focused on right now is actually getting 8.3 out the door. But we do have a lot of exciting plans, including the ones I just shared with you right now. So a little glimpse into the future, and we're pretty excited about it. And I'm sure some of you are excited as well. And with that, I'm gonna now pass it back to Colby, and we'll keep on going.

23:31
Colby: Carl and I have been doing this for a long time, literally since the beginning. So while I sometimes think that my memory is getting a little fuzzy these days, I do know for a fact that he and I have discussed every major idea, release, and strategy over that 21-year time period. And so I say that because I wanna say this, which is that I really have never been more excited for where we are than I am right now. He barely scratched the surface of some of the ideas that we have post 8.3. I think with the emphasis on getting 8.3 out, we don't dare to dream too much about presenting them, but it's a very exciting time. So whether you've been with us for those entire 20 years or you just learned about Ignition here this week, this is a very exciting time to be part of this community. Okay, so making software is great, but do you know where the real magic happens? In getting people to use it. So, if magic is performed by magicians, that makes our Support Services division the veritable Hogwarts of automation.

24:34
Colby: From conjuring up incredible solutions to exercising the demons of performance issues trans-mutating raw engineers into world-class Ignition experts, our Support Services division does that every day. Still, we know that we can continue to expand the level of service we offer, and we work constantly to try to find new ways to improve. To talk more about how we're doing that right now, I would like to have you help me welcome to the stage our Co-Directors of Support Services, the real wizards of Inductive Place, James Hunt and Marcus Bellamy.

25:20
Marcus Bellamy: Thank you for that very generous introduction, Colby. Good afternoon, everyone. As Colby mentioned, we're here to invite you into the dark arts of troubleshooting, the mysteries of Ignition, and to really get down to why that Perspective worker thread is showing a script transform 300 times in my thread dump. But all jokes aside, everyone, providing high-quality tech support is a very demanding job and necessitates a huge team of dedicated professionals. So today what James and I wanna do is invite you into our world, into support services, highlight our collaborative workflows, our reimagined onboarding process, technical development initiatives, and of course expanded access across many different channels. All of this, as you'll soon come to realize, is really about one mission, and that's to make sure that we're providing the best support experience to you no matter where you're at in your Ignition journey.

26:23
James Hunt: This really boils down to meaning that what we're about in terms of support services is constantly refining our ticket workflows to drive down response times.

26:31
Marcus: As well as finding ways to make more information accessible to more people across multiple communications channels.

26:37
James: We're constantly striving to break through any obstacles that stand between the success of your project.

26:43
Marcus: And to sum this all up, Support Services has your back, no matter the project, no matter the challenge.

26:51
James: One of the things that really defines support services and makes us uniquely inductive is our close relationship with development. And the vital aspect of that relationship is bringing the customer perspective to Ignition development. With 8.3 just around the corner and plans already forming with the next generation of what Ignition will be, this is where Support Services really shines. We're your advocate in that Ignition development lifecycle.

27:16
Marcus: That being said, we work very closely with development's product teams from the genesis of an idea to its creation and ultimately its public release that's made all available for you all. We have a bevy of senior software support services staff, and they come from software support, they come from training, they come from documentation, applications engineering, and that's just to name a few. They collaborate deeply with the product teams to make sure that we're giving all of you a best-in-class product experience.

27:48
James: Our work doesn't stop there. We're constantly contributing to basically the greater review process throughout release cycles by providing feedback and analysis at every stage of that release. To give you a peek under the hood of how we do what we do, I think we really need to start with what the defect analysis team is. And basically, their primary function is doing in-depth root cause analysis for bugs and many more issues. And they basically support and back-end our software support engineers, providing basically that ability to help you and basically doing that analysis, replicating an issue, and finding a solution for you every day.

28:26
Marcus: And then concurrent with that process, we also have an internal applications engineering team who's taking the insights that we derive from those interactions of DAs, support engineers, support engineers back to DAs, and they're making more robust internal diagnostics tools for our software support team. And when we have interactions with you, it streamlines our troubleshooting process greatly.

28:42
James: And this kind of leads into another key aspect of what we do is working closely with development. Our documentation team basically assesses how best to harness all of that technical knowledge and information that we have and basically deliver that to you through various resources like the User Manual, knowledge-based articles, Inductive University videos, and many more things. And then all of that kind of goes into really helping us upskill our teams internally and enhancing your learning experience.

29:17
Marcus: Many of you have been on the phone with us, have been through email with us, and you're on the call and we're referencing; I've got to ask back-end. I've got to ask front-end. So to round out this big picture that James is putting to you, we also have internal dedicated Slack channels where our support engineers can interact with product experts in real time while working with you so that we can suss out these really heavy troubleshooting issues. And I think that that collaboration, those collaborative workflows, really lend to the high-quality support that we're always trying to drive.

29:50
James: And this really plays into what we're trying to do in terms of trying to provide a responsive support experience. To assist you when you reach out to us. And this is really part of the greater picture in terms of us refining our onboarding process for old users and new. And really kind of bringing new ways to bring you into the Ignition ecosystem, which I think is fundamental in terms of really enhancing your skill levels and bringing everybody up to speed in terms of what's out, latest and greatest with Ignition. And I think this all kind of plays into what our one of our bigger goals is really kind of like... support services wants to put you in the driver's seat of your development.

30:28
Marcus: With that, you've got to know that we take your learning of Ignition very, very seriously, and where that comes from is because if we know that we can communicate how to use Ignition to you but then also layer that onto how to make you be more effective with Ignition, two things happen. One, you're freer to innovate, and two, you can dramatically enhance the operations of your plant, of your industry, whatever it may be.

30:58
James: Exactly. This all boils down to us really placing a high importance on empowering our customers. That's you guys. We want you guys to have a top-notch, omni-channel experience with us. And speaking of channels, we'd be remiss if we didn't say Inductive University is turning a big 10 this year.

31:17
Marcus: Happy birthday IU, happy birthday IU. So if you're like me, you're wondering what's next for IU. And I've got the big secret. In a big way, we're putting you all at the forefront of IU's next development phase. Our documentation team under Paul Scott is poised to bring IU into the future by addressing the needs of our diverse user base. What we're gonna be doing to achieve that is creating learning paths that are actually correspondent to skill level. And what this means is that users that are being newly onboarded to Ignition, as well as you veterans out there that have a lot of accumulated experience, will have a more personalized way to derive maximum benefit from the platform each and every day.

32:06
James: Also playing into that, expect to see a course that is really devoted to our newer users, basically helping bringing you into the Ignition ecosystem. On top of that, we're dedicating a track to really kind of focus on our intermediate users in terms of helping them upskill their knowledge in Ignition. And all of this centered around, I want you guys to know, don't worry, the existing content that we have is still gonna be there. We're still gonna have materials that cater to a broader audience. That's fundamental to what we do, but what we are doing is updating that library and really bringing it up, basically modernizing everything that we have there so it's current with the times, and we're expanding that course catalog so you can expect to see over 70 new videos in 2025.

32:52
Marcus: Thank you. You'll also note that we're gonna be putting a really hefty premium on the hands-on aspect of learning. By renovating existing courses with what we're now calling learning labs, those are gonna be tangible examples that you can learn alongside with. We believe that by providing that more hands-on experience, even more users are gonna be propelled into more and more advanced levels of proficiency with Ignition. So we're very proud of that new development and so proud that we feel empowered to be preparing for IU's 20th birthday before we've even finished celebrating the 10th, and it kind of feels parenting at this point with all of this advanced planning.

33:38
James: Yes, yes indeed. All right, at the end of the day, what our primary goal is, is we're always aiming to bring the best support experience possible in the business. That's fundamentally what defines this, but I think there's also some additional opportunities for us with our training system. I think this is an area that we can really maximize the potential in terms of building up your skill set with Ignition. And so, based on trends and customer feedback over the years, our training team overseen by Bobby McKenzie is in the midst of a grand rejuvenation of our courses. Fundamentally, what this consists of is we're doing some significant updates to our existing courses, and we're really emphasizing a focus on Perspective, as well as we're planning to grow our course catalog with four new classes on topics such as CSS and Perspective, advanced scripting, containerized deployments, and Git. Expect to see these new offerings towards the end of 2025. And really, the goal of these classes is to allow you to take Ignition to that next level. Remember, these are advanced courses. So this doesn't; our existing courses will be still there. The classic offerings will be available. Really, our goal with these new courses is basically next-level development for you to really kind of take you where you wanna go with Ignition. So please stay tuned.

35:01
Marcus: Now I know some of you out there have been in a phase where you have a new technology that you wanna integrate with Ignition. You want the thing to talk to Ignition. And you feel it's the best opportunity to call us right then. And so after that first hour of the call, you get to the second hour of the call, you get to the third hour of the call. And at about the three hour and 45 minute mark, you say to yourself, I stumped him again. I got him with this new technology that nobody in support has ever heard of, and I've got to find the manual on the wayback machine somewhere or something like that. Now technology is changing all the time, and we recognize that, so with a constantly evolving technical horizon, the software support team that we have those that you communicate with over phone and email traditionally we realize that we have to put a big premium on learning and embracing the things that you all are learning about to try and stay in step in the times with you all. So we wanna diversify the range of topics that we're studying internally just to keep up. We realize that this is gonna take an awareness of what you all are learning and to try to develop some level of expertise of the technologies that you're leveraging every day. Because at our base, what we wanna do is provide support to you no matter where your project takes you or whatever technical challenge that you confront.

36:30
James: In conjunction to that, we are in the process of implementing basically three key initiatives. They're really big focus areas for us in support services. The first one is building our own in-house PLC training lab. The goal really around that is to make those resources more easily accessible to our team and really help them to better understand the ins and outs of the devices you guys use every day. Coupled with that, we're also working on creating basically a much more dynamic and scalable testing architectures for our teams to use in the DA and software support group. And basically the goal of those new architectures is basically giving us the flexibility to replicate and test systems in a multitude of environments. And this is coupled with an additional initiative, which is basically.

37:13
James: We're constructing challenge gateways. These instances are basically different gateways and things that we've run into while supporting all of you that have been challenging. And so it produces an interesting, unique knowledge set. And so now we can actually take those things and have our team work in those environments, honing their troubleshooting skills and really building out their knowledge in various Ignition subsystems and beyond.

37:39
Marcus: And as you can all recognize, the picture that we're trying to paint with all of these initiatives is to fulfill a goal that we've had ever since I've been here and probably even since before. And that's to be able to continue to empower our user base to embrace and confront the technical challenges of today and tomorrow. And I think that our commitment to training and knowledge development is only gonna help us bring a more senior type of role within the software support role and provide a path for our engineers who are very excited about Ignition, excited about the technologies that you're using to ascend within the ranks to higher and higher levels of troubleshooting. And when we have that in place, we can continue to provide a larger range of support services for you all. And with the complexity that you present to us as far as your projects, we can speak to that and be really, really effective partners with you today and tomorrow.

38:36
James: In many different ways. One of our primary goals is making support services available to more users. That's fundamental. It's like, how can we cut down the barrier to getting access to us? And one of those examples is really centered around Core certification. Over the past year, basically, we were working towards streamlining and making that process much more accessible. And so, basically, what that means is that Core certification test is now available on our website. You guys can purchase it any time of day, start working on it, and submit it. And the cool part is, is when you submit it, it's graded immediately, and you get that grade back. So basically we're cutting down the amount of time for you to get those, basically that feedback on what you've learned. And we're tremendously proud of that project. I would also like to say thank you to all the community members that have given us feedback while we're refining that process and helping it make the product that it is today. We appreciate that.

39:32
Marcus: Another example of this expanded accessibility. This expanded access really relies with our software support offerings. What we're trying to do is take what you love about the support that you're receiving and expand it, and in this case, across continents. So as we wind things down, I wanna let everybody in on a big announcement. What we're doing locally, as always, is continuing to bring more support engineers to our Folsom offices here in the United States. And also, what we're doing in Australia is not only growing but having a really close collaborative training environment with our Australian colleagues. And so starting in Q1 of 2025, what this is going to mean for you all is a 50% increase of availability for support. Now what does that mean in real-time terms? I think most of, if not all of you know, that right now you can call or email in, and between the hours of 6:00 AM and 5:00 PM Pacific time, interact with us. So with this 50% increase, you're going to be able to do that same thing, but from 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM Pacific time, starting all in Q1 of 2025.

41:00
James: In closing. I just wanna make it clear: Support Services is firmly committed to unlocking value for all of you. And through everything we do, we strive to help you learn, leverage, and harness Ignition with the least amount of friction possible. Through dev support workflow processes, the onboarding experience, technical development of our team, and expanded support hours, it's all in service to our larger goal, which is fundamentally propelling all of you into the future of automation through the power of Ignition. Thank you.

41:38
Colby: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, James and Marcus, for everything that you and your team do every day for this Ignition community. You know when the leaders of this company get together and we talk about values, there is one word that comes up over and over again. You've heard it many times already this week. I heard Marcus just emphasize it himself, and that is empowerment. Support Services is obviously a key part to empowering a part of empowering our users every day. But at the end of the day, our goal is to empower you across everything to do, as we keep saying, to dream it, do it. So that core value of empowerment goes all the way back to the beginning. But I think back then we used to say it in a slightly simpler way to get out of your way. It was a very simple idea, but it turned out to be amazingly innovative for this industry. The idea that you should be able to access, learn, and develop everything you need on your own without any hindrance or need to talk to us unless you really wanted to. Think about it. You can download the software right now in minutes and install it very quickly.

42:44
Marcus: You can reset the demo as many times as you want. You can read the user manual, go through Inductive University, participate in the forms, learn everything you need to develop your project. And along the way, you'll know exactly what it's gonna cost you in the end because the prices are right there on the website. It was all designed to get out of your way. It was important to us then, and it's just as important to us now. But that doesn't mean we're perfect. Far from it. We know we can do better. And that's exactly what we're doing. So to tell you how, I'd like to introduce you to Nick Barfuss, the product manager on our project that's very special that he would like to tell you about.

43:30
Nick Barfuss: Thanks, Colby. We know that's you, real people who use Ignition to create our amazing projects. And that's why we've always supported you on your Ignition journey. We believe that it's access to these self-service tools that are a part of what makes the barrier of entry so easy for Ignition. And one way we've provided this access is through a free Inductive Automation account. With this account, new and existing users have access to free training through Inductive University, a free Maker Edition licenses to use on your personal projects. And as James and Marcus highlighted, access to knowledge via the forms, robust Ignition documentation, and, when needed, phone and web support. But what about the companies that you work for and the businesses that you work with? How can we put more self-service options in your organization's hands to empower your businesses to be even more self-driven? Let's quickly look at some easily identifiable organizations in our ecosystem and some of the issues that you all face. End users. You work with integrators and local distributors to make your projects reality, and you approach these external organizations with urgent questions, big ideas, and a desire to collaborate.

44:51
Nick: You use Ignition in various locations and lines and configurations, and you need access to information for auditing, budgeting, or reporting purposes. Currently, getting this information is difficult and usually results in a phone call to Inductive Automation. Integrators, you aren't just working for the customer; you're collaborating with them to build some really innovative and complex solutions. Whether during the design phase or the development or the deployment of your project, you often need to receive or pass the baton. You need tools to streamline license transfers and ownerships while maintaining the ability to access important information all along the way. Currently, this usually results in calling Inductive Automation and talking to a support or sales representative. Distributors, you understand the unique needs of your market. You are building a business culture with your customers and discovering pain points, solving issues with the same quality of service and support that Inductive Automation provides and that customers expect. You sell Ignition all over the world, and we think these sales should be able to be made 24/7 and in local currency. And of course, we are very mindful of our strategic solutions and alliance partner organizations. We want to continue removing obstacles to keep our relationships strong.

46:16
Nick: Your needs are varied. And while person-to-person communication is essential, we believe we can do a better job of putting data in your hands and metrics in the forefront. We wanna take a moment to let you all know that we see you. We are aware of the pain points and obstacles that are in your way. And in fact, we've spent the last several years researching, gathering feedback, and identifying many of these key issues that all of you face. And we've noticed a few things in common. Organizations need 24/7 real-time access to your information. Organizations are comprised of passionate people who, as Colby said, work best when we get out of the way. And organizations work together to make amazing things happen when they can connect. We've put a huge effort of providing self service access for individuals, and we wanna take the same approach for all of the organizations. This is why we're excited to announce the Inductive Automation Workspaces. This is our solution to provide self-service tools for your organization and the people in it, allowing even more collaboration in unprecedented ways. Think of it this way. If the IA account is designed for you, the individual, then the IA Workspace is designed for your organization.

47:41
Nick: Let's look at some of the features that our workspace will offer. With the Workspace, you'll be able to structure your organizations in a way that makes sense to you. Whether you're a complex organization or a single location business, you can create organizational units that can house a collection of people, licenses, and support plan information. We think this will allow your organization to become more autonomous and self-organized. And as your organization grows, you can continue to invite staff and assign them access to information they need. For example, you can create engineering roles to provide plant managers and developers the ability to access critical license information where they can diagnose problems without the need of having to contact support. Or you can create purchasing roles to empower trusted people in your organization the ability to upgrade, purchase, or renew support plans and licenses. So when we talk about purchasing, we're really excited to provide a wide range of features. Your organization can browse our entire product selection, from modules to support plans, to create any solution you can imagine. You'll be able to create estimates, quotes, turn those into orders, and share them with anyone. This could be finance or approval teams within your organization or even the customers that you're collaborating with.

49:02
Nick: And we're really excited to announce that you will be able to buy in your local currency directly from your distributor or integrator and gain instant access with payment integrations that will allow you to purchase with credit card or to set up a billing profile. We know getting real-time information about your licenses is critical. With a Workspace, you can inspect, organize, share, move, and report on the licenses that you own. You'll be able to name and tag the licenses so that your organization can easily find them and search for them and discover properties like module configuration, activation history, and support options. And just like licenses, you'll have even more clarity and visibility into the support plans than ever before. Wondering when your support plan is up for renewal or if you can take advantage of priority or total couch support? A workspace will help you manage your plans without the need of having to call Inductive Automation or track billing cycles in clunky ways. These are just some of the features that we're building, but we have many more planned, like a dashboard where you'll have access to contextual insights to inform your organization of what's changing and certification tracking features that will provide you visibility into the credential and certification journey of the people in your organization.

50:19
Nick: We can't wait to build upon this framework and provide you more tools and services. So now that you know about the features of the Workspace, let's look at the way we've been currently operating. We'll call this mode of operations Managed Service. Our sales teams consist of amazing people, and they've built a great relationship with you. But they aren't always available to help you get the information you need. Time zones, asynchronous delays, and other factors can slow you down. And for the most part, you don't have direct access to much of the information that you want access to. Now let's compare this with the self-service mode. With a Workspace, organizations can rely less on Inductive Automation sales or support staff when the need to keep moving is paramount. People in your organization can sign in at their convenience to find and update information, diagnose and analyze problems, and collaborate with anyone that you're doing business with. The real beauty of a Workspace is that your sales and support staff aren't going away. In fact, they'll both be able to assist you better than ever before. With assisted service, your sales contacts can provide more clarity, efficiency, and transparency to the purchasing process. You'll be able to work together to share quotes with others in your organization and bring your ideas from solutions to reality. The mission for Workspace is to get out of your way, put data in your hands, and help you connect.

51:46
Nick: And here are three ways that we wanna do that. We want to unify. A Workspace offers a simple, unified, browser-based interface for your organizations to consistently access and manage your information. We strive to empower. A Workspace empowers organizations to independently analyze and control their data via self-service or assisted service modes, and we aim to be scalable. Our Workspace sets our ecosystem on the path to growth by redesigning old architectures, restructuring our legacy models, and rebuilding these interfaces to align with the evolving and modern needs of organizations all across the globe. So when can you access a Workspace? Well, in the coming weeks you're going to be noticing changes to the way you sign into your Inductive Automation account, offering you much more security. And then later in the year you'll see improvement to your Inductive Automation account interface experience. And then in 2025, we'll continue our work, and we'll be sure to let you know when you can create your organization and join a Workspace. In closing, I would like to recap on a few points. And to do this, I want to use a little inspiration from past ICC themes. A Workspace is a browser-based interface designed to help you build a synergistic ecosystem.

53:13
Nick: A Workspace will elevate the entire Ignition experience by providing ways for you to manage your licenses, support plans, people, organizational structures, and more in ways that are unique to each and every one of your businesses. And our Workspace will transform the selling and purchasing process, allowing your organization to create estimates, share quotes, and order products when you want to and in your local currency. And just like your IA account, an IA Workspace will be free, allowing your organization to break through any obstacles that keep you currently from achieving. We can't wait for you to start using Workspaces, and we look forward to offering this for you next year. Thank you.

54:07
Colby: Pretty incredible, huh? Once again, our vision is to get out of your way to empower you to do what you need on your own terms. And I think that Workspaces is gonna go a long way to continuing that. So you remember my phrase from a little bit ago, uniquely inductive? Well, to me, Workspaces is uniquely inductive. We could have built a simple online store, but instead we're building an entire e-commerce platform to perfectly serve the needs of this community and the future that we wanna build. Just like we could have put training videos up on YouTube, but instead we created Inductive University, which is still regarded as one of the finest training resources available. Our dedication to support, the fact that all of our staff are in our offices here and in Australia, with direct access to all of the relevant systems and people that they need to solve your problems, that is uniquely inductive. Our approach to software, to pushing the boundaries for this automation industry to be innovative, but also in a way that's secure, consistent, and stable that leverages open technology and open standards, but while making them easy to use and reliable for the future. That is uniquely inductive. And finally, perhaps the most important unique trait of all, this community. Our ability to gather here together each year, collaborate, share ideas, and imagine, and then keep that spirit going throughout the rest of the year.

55:29
Colby: Well, I just don't think it gets any more uniquely inductive than that. So I just wanted to mention all that because I think what we have going on is incredibly unique. And I am convinced that working together, we can keep it going for a long time to come. So now, without further ado or philosophical stalling, let's get to the final portion of our day. Something that's always been pretty darn unique about ICC, our live Q&A. So please help me to welcome back to the stage all of our speakers. Okay, we've talked about so much over the last few days. And possibly with all the conversations and the sessions and whatnot, you have absolutely no questions at all. That would be great. We'd get out of here. But perhaps with all the content we just showed, something will come to mind. We have mic runners. Feel free to raise your hands. This is your opportunity to ask us whatever you want before we wrap this up. Don't hold back. If things get too wild, I have a car in back. I can run out there. It's no problem.

56:36
Audience Member 1: Hey guys, quick question. So we have different roles for different servers. So we have like, for example, the primary server, the backup server, IO servers. Is there any plans in the future to have a role basis on development server versus production server in an easy migration or promotion method bill to the architecture?

57:01
James: Different than the deployment modes we talked about in 8.3? Like.

57:06
Audience Member 1: Yeah, like a role-based.

57:11
James: I mean, I would say the purpose of deployment modes is to define various roles. So I guess that was our plan, and we did it.

57:21
Audience Member 1: Alright. Looking forward to it.

57:25
Colby: Are you asking about breaking gateways apart perhaps, or?

57:28
Audience Member 1: I'm sorry.

57:29
Colby: Do you mean like breaking gateways apart, breaking up functionality?

57:31
Audience Member 1: Yes.

57:33
Colby: The resource system will help with that, I think a lot.

57:36
Nick : I agree. I also think that's part of the idea behind the modular architecture is to be able to split up functionality by module.

57:48
Audience Member 1: And promoting like the, from the development mode to the...

57:50
Nick : Oh, you mean the actual deployment from one place to another.

57:54
Audience Member 1: Yes, sir.

57:55
Nick: There's a bunch of ways to do that. I do think that Colby, I think, answered it already, which is that by having the configuration entirely housed in the file system, it helps a lot. Now, that doesn't mean it's a feature of the software itself, it just allows you to integrate...

58:10
Audience Member 1: It's like a manual kind of process. But I was just wondering if there was gonna be any kind of architectural change or role-based kind of features for that architecture.

58:20
Nick: Possibly. I think EAM would probably be the right place for that to live.

58:26
Audience Member 1: Awesome.

58:28
Nick: All right. Front.

58:36
Audience Member 2: So there was talk about changes to the Core certification that were made this year. Are there any plans to update the Gold certification exam process and along with the new training that's coming out at the end of next year? Is there gonna be a higher than Gold certification to go with that?

59:00
Marcus: Well, currently the, yes, there are plans to renovate the Gold certification process. Training is hard at work on that. As far as new levels though, we did not have that planned. I think it's an idea that I definitely would like to explore with you; maybe after the panel, see exactly what you're looking for and like what needs that would address. But yeah, we are at work also trying to renovate the Gold cert process.

59:23
Audience Member 2: Thank you.

59:24
Audience Member 3: In relation to the increased training online, do you guys have any intent to add more in-person training resources for the certification? I know you guys have that on your own path, but at times there, it's difficult to get people to in-person training or scheduled training 'cause they're delayed by months. Is there any idea or thought process to increase the training abilities?

59:49
James: Well, I can say this is, we're constantly growing the training team. So, I mean, was there a particular class that you wanted to have in person? I guess maybe I'm trying to understand is: what's the key aspect of the in-person training that you find most valuable?

1:00:07
Audience Member 3: It's a little bit more formal training, right? In-person, right? So instead of having someone kind of go at their pace and then you have to really, I don't know, manage time a little bit better. The structured courses you guys offer give a lot better, more in-depth time, time to ask an expert really be there? So I guess it fast tracks training a little bit.

1:00:26
Colby: Are you asking about like increased capacity for that? So like...

1:00:30
Audience Member 3: Yeah, so we have people that we try to send through training, and sometimes there's three-month wait time to get someone signed up.

1:00:35
Colby: Yeah. They can blame me because I have a request for like multiple training hires I've been stalling on. But we'll get on that.

1:00:45
James: I mean, while true...

1:00:48
Colby: They're not used to this, but I am.

1:00:50
James: I mean another fundamental, like, catalyst for that is really demand, and a lot of times, the in-person training classes take longer to fill than our virtual. So that does kind of affect the cadence. But we are trying to expand that.

1:01:04
Audience Member 4: Will Workspace replace the integrator tools we have now? Like the license portal?

1:01:18
Colby: Yes.

1:01:22
Marcus: So the license portal, yes. This is really just a continuation and expansion of the license portal to make it more accessible to your organization. And then some of the, in other integrator tools that you have access to, like the integrator portal, where you're probably managing some of the information, the idea is really to have a unified experience to do that. So none of that stuff is going away. It's actually just all gonna be enhanced and unified into a better, more cohesive experience.

1:01:46
Audience Member 5: So I guess a bit of a two-part question. One was the LSP and the editor. I think personally I've had a few issues with, functionality of the editor versus say your favorite IDE. Is that one sort of a recognition that there won't be that much more development for the designer editor and to just sort of offload that to, like JetBrains or something like that, that the LSP would leverage? And second is with the scripting engine; I think like an insane proposition you just put forward, 'cause I just think of all the possibilities. Is it something that like only you guys could introduce a new language to? Or is it more like a something that has like a transpiler or a virtual machine that you could like potentially without IA needing to do it port, my favorite pet language to, because I want to, I'm insane, and I just hate future support, and I have my own custom language in there.

1:02:56
Nick: Gotcha. So part one of the question was, does integration with LSP mean we're gonna abandon the DevX experience of the designer? No. I don't want having an external editor to become a requirement. So I do think it's on us to still make our best effort to always improve the developer experience of our first party tools. But can we compete with JetBrains for developed editor experience in all languages? Of course we can't. And why would we try? So there's a balance there. And the second part was, could a third party integrate their own engine? Absolutely. So I use the word extension point, which I realize is sort of inside baseball. But modules, the way modules add functionality into Ignition is through this concept called extension points. And so it would require a module to be written, but that will be part of the public API.

1:04:01
Audience Member 6: Hi. Piggybacking on the first question, well, at least in my head, talking about the development and pushing into a production environment, have you ever considered a development license? For example, I would like to have an on-prem, not in the cloud, and resetting the trial version every two hours. It's cumbersome. So at one point, I did ask my sales engineer about that or sales rep. Sorry. But yeah, what about a dev license? It's because purchasing a fully full fledged license might be sometimes well, a considerable investment. So what about a dev license?

1:04:48
Colby: What did your sales engineer say?

1:04:51
Audience Member 6: Well, he's retired, so probably I can say...

1:05:00
Audience Member 6: Alright, well, the answer I got is just purchase another...

1:05:04
Colby: Ah, yeah, I can't see your shirt. So are you an integrator or an end user?

1:05:08
Audience Member 6: I'm an end user.

1:05:09
Colby: End user. Too bad. If you're not aware, integrators in the IA account right now can go in and request dev licenses. So just, that's why I mentioned that. Did you have something you wanted...

1:05:21
Carl: No, I mean, the question was, have we ever considered it? Yeah, it's something we actually, we do. It's a conversation to be had.

1:05:30
Colby: Dev licenses are one thing, but let's perhaps pivot off that to talk about the licensing. I know it's not finalized, but some might... We do envision some sort of a licensing link between these different deployment modes. It's a little earlier, but...

1:05:40
Carl: It's a whiteboard idea, but it... Yeah, I do think there's a... So this would be a similar idea where if you, one because logical system that has three separate environments is at just three X, the license cost, probably not what we want to do. We've toyed around with ideas of having something similar to the way we do redundancy where the redundant node is priced at 50% of the primary node or something like that. Maybe we do something similar for dev and staging licenses, but we don't have any formalized approach to that. But it's something we talked about.

1:06:18
Colby: Yeah, I wanted to touch on though, because I hear in the question that if you're thinking about these multi-stage environments, what's it gonna cost? So we're thinking about that. Alright, how about on here?

1:06:29
Audience Member 7: Yeah, I have one really weird question and then one sort of not weird. The first one is the in 8.3, like in 8.1, the scripting engine on the non-master or non-active node is kind of dumb. It doesn't run. In 8.3, is there gonna be any way to have event scripts or some kind of thing run on the inactive node to maybe do some cleanup after a failover or do certain things that only would be done on the inactive node? That's question number one. And to question number two, I'm a registered professional engineer, and I have to do a continuing education. I would love to not have to go out to a company and spend several thousand dollars for absolutely worthless training material just so I can keep my license up to date. I'd like to go to Inductive Automation University and is...

1:07:30
Siri: That's not nice.

1:07:36
Audience Member 8: Siri Just said that was not nice that I said that about those training people. This is my life. Anyway, so my question is, is there any... I have no idea. From a training perspective, you guys are the professionals. Is there any way to get some of your training materials certified for professional societies to use? Like I'm just like, Cisco has training stuff and network training, network security. There are certain things you can do that is applicable everywhere. Is that any possibility?

1:08:12
Carl: I guess that's definitely further out, but there's a lot of things that we're considering in terms of, like what it means to really provide training resource and materials versus just like explicitly a class. You know? And I mean obviously, a lot of that's done with, like, Inductive University through the videos, user manual. Like there's those things, but I see what you mean in terms of like actually having almost like a course that you could just purchase the course and then go facilitate that. That is definitely on the books. But in the future, we're working that out.

1:08:50
Colby: That's a great question, actually. And I haven't heard the subject of trying to get our courses accredited in that way brought up. So we'll certainly go research that. I think that's great.

1:08:58
Carl: The first part of the question was about redundancy.

1:08:58
Colby: Oh yeah, redundancy. There's...

1:09:01
Carl: So having some logic that runs on the redundant node it's certainly something that we could consider doing. We would have to do it on purpose, as in the whole point of the redundancy setup is that you are supposed to only think about one cohesive set of functionality that then is the configuration is synchronized and then only becomes active when needed. So it's not that the scripting engine is dumb; it's that we're just intentionally not duplicating your configuration and running it twice, right? So in order to do something like that, we would have to add some sort of scripting resource that is intentionally trying to run on the backup, which could play into like the warm, cold, hot modes or something. So it's a neat idea. I don't; I haven't heard that one before, but...

1:09:49
Marcus: Yeah, no, I haven't either. And I was gonna say, it doesn't; to me, that's not a question that depends on the version. You could request that today. Now, I'm not saying we'll get around to it before that timeline. We're kind of busy, but as Carl said, it would be a purposeful thing, and it makes sense. So. Alright, in the top perhaps.

1:10:07
Rafy: Up here. Rafy from Kenard Engineering. With the extended hours of support coming through later, is there a plan to take it to 24 hours a day later sometime?

1:10:21
Marcus: Yes. It's either really cold or I'm nervous about that question.

1:10:27
Colby: Will you come to the conference next year? And...

1:10:30
Marcus: But...

1:10:33
Rafy: Yes.

1:10:37
Marcus: As far as plans go, as we've articulated, we're definitely committed to expanding access. As far as the concrete timeline that we could give you and the different things that we need to get together on our side, it's multiple pieces, but definitely believe that we have been having that discussion, and it's definitely hot on our mind. So I can't give any more concrete details than that; except for that, we are definitely planning for a future where we are fully accessible to you all.

1:11:04
Colby: Yeah.

1:11:16
Audience Member 9: Hi. As far as the work space and comparing to the existing integrator dashboard, is there gonna be a way to manage who within the organization have access to change stuff on Workspace and...

1:11:32
Colby: Absolutely. Oh, sorry.

1:11:35
Audience Member 9: Yeah. And also, for right now, there is no correlation between the Inductive University users and the Workspace. So is there any way to manage who can get from there to there, and also, when somebody from the organization leaves, how we can manage that to make sure that they don't have access to these kind of stuff?

1:11:58
Nick: Okay. So, okay, I'll kind of go backwards. So one kind of crucial part of this is your certification belongs to you, right? Like as you get certified and maybe you move on, we want that certification belong to you and not the organization. So your organization is comprised of a bunch of certified individuals. So absolutely, that certification will stick with your IA account and progress with you; let's say you move on. You'll be able to track your employees or all of your staff's certifications. Like I mentioned, that's one of our future things that we're gonna be doing, but very, very hot on our minds of is being able to expose all of your individual's certifications, right? You want to be able to see who in your organization is certified at what level.

1:12:42
Nick: So you can track that in a lot more clear way. Maybe you wanna build groups so you can see different departments and different structures of where those people are organized. So there's a lot of organization or features for that certification journey there. And then, as far as the roles go, yeah, like this is gonna be fully role-based systems. So you'll be able to assign roles to managers. Let's say managers might have access to see all those people with their certifications. You can even divide that within your organization into a bunch of different structures. Maybe you create a finance department or you have a certain line or a location you wanna assign people to. You'll be able to apply, assign roles to, has access to say even see licenses, be able to make orders, be able to fully access all parts of your organization. So yeah, fully robust roles and permission system on Workspaces

1:13:31
Audience Member 9: Thank you.

1:13:32
Colby: To go even further. That's actually the organizational structure is one of the places we've put the most work, and why it's kind of such a unique product, right? There's so many unique relationships in our community. You have integrators that have a relationship with end users, but that comes and goes or evolves over time. End users come in as a location, and they grow. And so you have different business units, different areas of your enterprise. So we've put so much work into modeling that for this use case.

1:14:01
Audience Member 10: Yeah. By offering this external IDE, is that one way we can get sort of the dark mode?

1:14:23
Colby: I am sure you'll be able to get it in the external IDE.

1:14:34
Brennan Jewett: Hey folks. Brennan Jewett with Flexware Innovation here. I have a question pertaining to support. I'm really excited that we're gonna have these extended hours and following up on the earlier question about 24-hour support. I'm curious if you have thought about maybe leveraging external resources. So, I heard you know that there's some integrators that have been helping you guys with awesome instruction for the certification courses. I think back to last year, there were some integrators walking around here with shirts that said, Hey, ask me about 24/7 support. So my question is, have you considered maybe offering different tiers of support where maybe integrators who are doing this kind of work every day could potentially help out with some of those initial kind of questions or support calls and maybe leverage a wider network to get that 24 hour support? And then if someone gets stumped, maybe that goes on to tier two, 'cause when I think back to learning Ignition seven years ago, I had silly little questions that could be answered in 20 minutes, and then I had questions that might take three hours, or I have to get on the phone the next day with you guys when somebody comes back in the office. So just curious if that's something you've thought about, and if not, I hope that you maybe consider it.

1:15:51
James: I mean, we've definitely thought about that. I mean, just to kinda put this in context, I mean, we average, I mean, what is it? Like 3,500 tickets a month we're average working on. I mean, so in terms of like our workload, it's always a pretty hectic environment in terms of what we're looking, working on. So considering, like, how best to serve all of you and give you guys access to resources and making that something that basically lowers the barrier of access. I mean, yeah, we've definitely considered those things. There would be a lot of different pieces that we'd have to figure out to even implement something like that. So while it makes a lot of sense, there's definitely some concerns around quality control and then consistency in terms of what information is communicated and stuff like that. So, not to say that it's off the table, but there's definitely a lot of consideration in terms of how we would implement something like that to ensure that people are getting the help we would expect.

1:16:49
Marcus: Yeah, because the customer's experience is really key. And to the extent that we can have an influence on our brand of hospitality and our brand of care, that's been instilled through like the generations of support, we want to stay really close to that to make sure that the people on the other end, though they might not be seeing us, they definitely feel like it's our touch that's been added there. Not to say that any other support couldn't add its own, but we're very, very protective of the customer experience and want to make sure that it stays not only consistent, but that it actually accelerates and evolves and even gets better. We have a lot of lessons to learn. So if in the future, that plan could make for some partnership or some evolution of a higher-level customer experience. Who knows. But for now, we're sticking as close to it as possible.

1:17:49
Colby: So unfortunately, we are at the end of our time. And so I think I was gonna say one more question, but this could go on all day. So unfortunately, I do think we should probably wrap it up. I wanna thank everyone up here for being here.

1:18:13
Colby: Thank you for your wonderful questions, and above all, thank you all for coming this year. It's been so incredible. We can't wait for our new location next year to welcome you all back and many more. And so until then, thanks again. Have a great trip home, and we'll see you next time.