Integrator Panel: What Tech and Trends Are Breaking Through?

Speakers

Chris Fischer

Sales Program Manager - Integrators

Inductive Automation

Mo Moore

Director of Software Services

Industrial Networking Solutions

Remus Pop

Sr. Partner Solution Architect

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Leah Warren

Idaho Branch Manager

Tamaki Control

Brian McLaughlin

Systems Architect

SL Controls ltd

Anh-Tuan Tran

CPG Group Manager

RoviSys

Discover which pivotal new technologies and trends that are reshaping the future of automation for industrial organizations. In this engaging panel discussion, some of the Ignition community's most successful integration professionals will share their strategies in response to these evolving technologies.

Transcript:

00:02
Chris Fischer: Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to ICC 2024. Thank you for joining today's Integrator Panel, where we discuss industry trends, Ignition successes, and challenges, and the larger ecosystem as it exists today for integrators. The theme of today's discussion is, "What tech trends are breaking through?" We're looking forward to a great discussion. We'll have some time for Q&A towards the end. My name's Chris Fischer. I am the Integrator Program Manager and have been in Inductive Automation for about five years. I work with integrators of all sizes across a wide variety of industries that Ignition touches. We've got a great group of panelists, so let's go ahead and meet them.

00:45
Chris Fischer: First up, Leah Warren is an Automation Engineer and Idaho Branch Manager at Tamaki Control in Twin Falls, Idaho. She has over a decade of experience at Tamaki, where she's worked on designing Ignition projects and applications, control strategies for various processes, and implemented and managed many large-scale projects. When she's not programming, she enjoys family time with her toddler, where her troubleshooting skills are put to the test in entirely new ways.

01:20
Chris Fischer: Thanks, Leah, and welcome.

01:28
Chris Fischer: Moving on. Morris Moore, or Mo, is the Manager of Software Services and IoT at INS. He has 25 years of experience in the SCADA automation and IoT fields in almost every vertical from oil & gas, food & bev, renewable energy, warehouse & transportation, and more. INS software services specializes in data integration and edge-to-cloud technologies, and they're a Premier Integrator for the Inductive Automation Ignition platform. Mo's team are early adopters of the MQTT Sparkplug standard and are certified in several data lake technologies, such as the Cirrus Link IoT Bridge and Snowflake. Mo, welcome.

02:09
Chris Fischer: Moving right along. We've got Anh-Tuan Tran from RoviSys. Anh-Tuan has more than 18 years of automation experience, tackling customer challenges ranging from DCS, PLC, and HMI/SCADA system layers to complex MES implementations. Since discovering Ignition in 2017, Anh-Tuan has been a continuous advocate for Ignition, enhancing data usability for manufacturers through both out-of-the-box and customized platform solutions. As a manager at RoviSys, he leads a team of specializing in information data systems and OEE configuration for CPG companies. Anh-Tuan focuses heavily on solving customer problems to increase efficiency, enhance visibility, reduce downtime...

03:23
Chris Fischer: And ensure his team follows the DxOps transformation standards for successful implementations and improvement of overall profitability. Anh-Tuan, thank you and welcome. Moving right along. We've got Remus Pop. Remus is a Partner and CEO of Concept Reply. Remus is a recognized industry expert in Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation with a long background in manufacturing that spans several industries. Part of the Ignition community for a very long time. He's helped with enterprise manufacturing clients design strategies to deploy and scale smart factory initiatives across the globe.

03:39
Chris Fischer: In his current role as Partner and CEO, Remus is striving to build the integrator of the future by building a team of combined OT and IT professionals. Remus, welcome.

03:53
Mo Moore: Hey, Chris?

03:54
Chris Fischer: Yeah?

03:54
Mo Moore: I didn't know that Remus was such a San Francisco.

03:57
Remus Pop: Well, Mo, I'm actually not a San Francisco fan. I am a very big Detroit Lions fan, and last year I made a very unfortunate bet with [Inductive Automation Senior Account Executive] Lester Ares and [Opto 22 Vice President] Benson Hougland, and so now I have to wear this silly red shirt on stage in front of everybody.

04:12
Mo Moore: Sorry. I'm sorry, Remus.

04:14
Remus Pop: Hopefully Lester's here to collect on that bet.

04:16
Mo Moore: Sorry about that, Chris.

04:17
Remus Pop: Thanks, Mo.

04:17
Chris Fischer: Thanks for supporting the 49ers there, jersey, for us NorCal folk, Remus. All right, last but not least, we've got Brian McLaughlin. He's a System Architect with SL Controls/NNIT. He has over 12 years of experience in developing cutting-edge manufacturing automation systems across a wide range of industries. He's been in the forefront of designing and delivering advanced SCADA and MES solutions for top-tier clients in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, driving innovation and efficiency in highly regulated environments. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. Okay, as I said, we're gonna do a little barrage of questions here, then we're gonna do some Q&A, so let's kick things off. Leah, we're gonna start right here with you. First question, what advice would you give to a new integrator entering the industry?

05:06
Leah Warren: So I kind of have two answers for this. Number one would be don't ignore cybersecurity. You don't want to be the reason you, like, we're an access point for a lot of these plans, and if you're the reason ransomware ends up somewhere, I mean, that can completely destroy a reputation. It can tank a company. So that's something to be taken very seriously. There's things like the NIST audits that you can do to kind of help with that. And then second would be to design a very cohesive UI, and that kind of starts with, I think, a lot of design up front and documentation of that, which all of us... It's the boring part, but it's the part that unifies the team, because engineer A and engineer B will design two things completely differently, and you want your operators to have a cohesive experience, especially if you're doing a large integration.

06:07
Chris Fischer: How about you, Mo?

06:10
Mo Moore: So I'll take a stab at that. I'm more of a... We do more enterprise-layer applications with the Ignition system, so when I get first introduced into the business.

06:21
Mo Moore: One of the things over the last 25 years I've noticed is that as a young engineer, I didn't listen well to problems, and I still slip into that today, but when I see integrators, I wanna say really listen to your customers' problems, because one of the fortunate things about using Ignition is that it has so many potentials to solve so many problems. So focusing on the customer and their problems, if you're solving a problem, you're usually A, making the customer happy, and B, it's financially, and gratifying as an integrator, 'cause we always wanna solve problems, right?

07:00
Anh-Tuan Tran: So my take is a little bit more philosophical. So if you're a new system integration company entering the industry, it's really important to establish that culture and that set of values that's going to take you building sort of like that culture where when you go into a project, you kind of understand what your goals are so that as you enter and do more projects and you grow as a company, you always have those values to look back in so that you don't lose sight of where you started.

07:40
Remus Pop: Yeah, awesome. Like Mo, I think, for me, in what we try to do at Reply is focus a little bit more on the IT professional, and by IT professional, I don't mean service desk and help desk and sysadmin-type role. I talk more about the idea of the cloud solution architect, the data scientist, the expert in understanding how systems play at a very large scale. When we work with manufacturing customers that have 150, 200, 300 facilities, understanding how to scale an application across all of those, while maintaining security, like Leah said, is incredibly important. So I think the trends of the industry are moving much towards that cloud environment, and so I would say to any new integrators or any integrators looking to expand, take advantage of the large market of available IT professionals and look at adding someone to your team that could bolster that side of the skill set.

08:23
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah, I completely agree with what Remus was saying. I think for any new integrators now, it's going to be essential for them to develop skills in different layers of the manufacturing pyramid. And I think within our Ignition portfolio in SL Controls, we may be, I'd say, half the hires we make have high-level programming skills like database and Python and SQL and stuff like that. I'd also say it's a growing trend with customers as well that they're looking for, as opposed to, say, years ago, they might have wanted, say, a number of different integrators to do different aspects of their projects, but now they're looking for one integrator to come in, do the PLCs, do the SCADA, do the MES, ERP, and project manage it and just deliver the solution and just execute it as a turnkey solution.

09:08
Chris Fischer: Thanks, Brian. Let's keep it with you for a minute there, Brian. Next question. How have customers' pain points changed since you became an integrator?

09:19
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah, so I think the main pain point across all our customers currently would be around essentially getting real-time data from their processes. So we'd work with a lot of customers that have, you might say, a machine that's producing the correct data, but that data's siloed. It's not getting to where it needs to be in the organization. It's not getting into, say, the managers or the decision-makers' hands. So we do a lot of projects around that and, I suppose, associated with that as well.

09:43
Brian McLaughlin: You've got the data integrity. So as you bring that data up through the manufacturing layers, it's ensuring that that data's correct and it's not getting manipulated or transformed as it makes its way to wherever it's needed to be. So Unified Namespaces is kind of a good way of doing that, and we're looking into that currently.

10:04
Remus Pop: Yeah, I think for me, I've always been, I think, on a little bit of the unique side of the Ignition integrator. In the 12 years I've been deploying Ignition projects, I've never once deployed it as a SCADA. So for me, it's always been a rapid deployment, a rapid data platform. And so our customers' changes typically have been coming around.

10:23
Remus Pop: What I was talking about earlier is, how do we scale this across a large enterprise? Or how do we gain more business value? Kind of like what Anh-Tuan was talking about. How do we gain efficiency? How do we gain more profitability within the company? How do we understand how technology can solve our problems? I think the challenges that we see today, I say a lot, like before COVID, we had to sell why companies needed to digitally transform. I think COVID solved that problem for us. And now it's more about selling how companies can digitally transform. Ignition becomes that platform for doing that.

11:00
Anh-Tuan Tran: For us, our customers, their biggest pain point is the IT group whenever they're trying to implement these Ignition projects. And that becomes our pain point when we're doing these projects. So we actually have to have a dedicated group that can speak the OT-IT talk. They know the jargon, they know the lingo. And then IT operates in a totally different timeline from the way we execute projects. So it becomes a major pain point for us to try to get them to spin up VMs or give us more resources when we need it.

11:22
Anh-Tuan Tran: Especially when we're trying to get a system to perform a certain way. So that's just the reality of things. And then their IT wants certain security settings and they wanna update systems on the controls layer automatically. And that breaks a lot of stuff. So there's a lot of planning that we have to do when we're working with customers now just to make sure that we make the IT gods not get too angry at us when we're implementing our solution.

11:54
Mo Moore: So I'd say INS has always been kind of a niche-y group in the integration space. Similar to Remus, we're more enterprise-layer application. But I think the challenges we've seen over the years was Remus made a really great point. Before COVID, Industry 4.0 was growing quickly. It was kind of doing its thing. But when COVID hit, it was very clear you had to be remote. You had to have remote data. INS kind of specializes in remote communications and things like that. So we were early adopters on MQTT because as these IoT gateways and stuff were getting into the industry, we needed low bandwidth capabilities, store and forward, report by exception.

12:35
Mo Moore: I feel like the Industry 4.0 has always really taken off over the years with the help of Inductive. But I think now the challenge points have escalated and grown and morphed into more of the cloud solutions and then how do you model data. Because the pain points have changed. We've got the data now. We've solved that problem. And everyone feels really good about the Industry 4.0 connectivity. But now it's how do we use the data and how do we model it right. And then we work with teams like Remus and them who really bring that together and stuff like that. And we work with teams like Leah and them who really execute at the plant-floor layer and then into the enterprise layer. So challenging stuff like that, but partnering with other integrators and then knowing that next level of how to get that communications working at the enterprise layer.

13:19
Leah Warren: Yep, I think Mo pretty much covered it. 10 years ago, our issue was, "Okay, how do we get the data?" And that's when we discovered Ignition 'cause you used to be limited on the number of historical tags you could have without paying a lot of extra money. And now it's really morphed into, "What do you do with that data? How do you use that data to make informed business decisions?" Which has really been a theme of this conference and we've seen a lot of the ways that people have done that and a lot of the new technologies that are coming out that will help us continue to do that.

13:50
Chris Fischer: Gotcha. Okay, here's an open question. Mo, I wanna start with you, though. When building an edge-to-cloud solution, what's a common misstep integrators make?

14:00
Mo Moore: Repeat it again.

14:03
Chris Fischer: When you're building an edge-to-cloud solution, what's a common misstep that integrators often make?

14:10
Mo Moore: I'm gonna go back to his point with the IT group, right? So, as integrators, especially in the SCADA space or the automation space, you find yourself in an IT-OT convergence. So, working really well with the IT teams. I mean, the cloud-hosted solutions bring their own networking challenges, virtual networking, virtual resources, using services instead of having VMs, necessarily.

14:32
Mo Moore: So, I think a common mistake is that we try and apply our traditional on-prem models to the same concepts and the IT teams will often say, "Well, why not this service?" or "Why not that service?" or they wanna go to containerization and that's a good model to have. So, sometimes an early mistake we made when we first started getting into cloud-hosted solutions was not working well with the IT teams to fully understand their management concerns and what they would have to do and then really researching and developing when to use a service for AWS or an Azure service versus your traditional VM localized server service or something like that. So, it was a growing pain for us, but it was a good challenge. It was something that helped us learn something to be unique with it and adopt, where the technology was going.

15:26
Chris Fischer: Gotcha. Anybody else have a...

15:30
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah, a common mistake that we're seeing is that edge devices are sitting at the plant floor and they need to be incredibly robust and a lot of times people, they see all these different vendors and they have all these fancy edge devices, but they're not tested enough. They're not tested in that environment. They didn't take the time to understand if this device is gonna work in a dusty environment that's really hot in a panel with no AC. So, a lot of times when you're putting in these edge devices, you really need to plan the location of where you're going to install it and then who's gonna manage it and then make sure you actually have spares if it does go down for data integrity purposes. So, when you're starting out and you're thinking about implementing edge, make sure that you use a product that has a lot of industry experience in terms of trust. So, that's my advice to you guys there.

16:19
Remus Pop: I'll build off what Anh-Tuan said. I think when you do that, when you do it well, also don't be afraid of failure. Sometimes the device you pick won't work for your application or just won't be good and then when you do fail, fail quickly, right? Be agile in your... One of the problems we see when people build this kind of strategy is they don't plan for the adaptability and understanding that every factory that we go to will be different than the last. Every machine that we talk to will be different than the last. Sometimes there is no PLC. Sometimes there is no network. So, be agile in the way you kind of look at these problems and be ready to adapt when something changes.

16:57
Chris Fischer: All right, very good. Okay, next question. This is an open question for anyone who wants to answer. What are the most relevant industry trends in your business today? Anybody.

17:11
Remus Pop: I'll start that one. I'll say, I haven't heard it yet, so I'll start the buzz with AI, right? I think nobody sat in any meeting over the last year where AI hasn't come up, and so I think that's definitely been the biggest buzz. I can tell you on my team, every one of my developers has a ChatGPT Pro license. We use it on a daily basis, multiple times a day. It can be really good at repetitive tasks, answering emails, even code scripting, sample scripts. Obviously, you have to check the work. It's not completely guaranteed that it's gonna be great, but it can rapidly accelerate the time to doing certain tasks within an organization, so I think, for us, I think the biggest trend is AI.

17:47
Remus Pop: I think there is substance to a lot of it. I think a lot of us in this community are pretty used to buzzwords, and we can sometimes scoff at the idea of AI 'cause everybody's talking about it so much, but there is absolutely some real-world applications, and some people are doing some really interesting things in that space. Vision AI comes to mind, right? Like, vision checking problems have always been a problem, right? Lighting changes a little bit now. Our vision system doesn't work anymore. AI gives us that adaptability in our vision systems to accommodate changes in the environment, changes in lighting, changes in product, because they're taught what the good part looks like, and they can accommodate different things much quicker than a traditional vision system would.

18:24
Leah Warren: And then kind of going off like the AI, predictive maintenance is definitely something that a lot of our customers are very interested in. We've done a few machine learning applications that have essentially allowed them to not buy more very expensive monitoring equipment, 'cause we can kind of infer what's going to happen from the sensors that we already have. So, that's definitely been a trend that I've seen going forward.

18:49
Mo Moore: And I'll piggyback off both of them 'cause I'd like to do that. But and I'm gonna use a buzzword because you have heard it a lot this week, UNS, like, so data modeling it used to be, it was, we would, we would shove a lot of data in there. And I think a lot of us always kept kind of a ISA 95 standard as we were putting the data in, but thinking more outside the box of like multiple systems using the data now. So, like now that MQTT has grown a popularity, you have a lot more systems that can consume the pub/sub model. And so when you're talking about machine learning and with the AI stuff, a lot of that is contingent around a good data model so that it can process that data rapidly and utilize it.

19:35
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah. For my industry, I'm in the consumer packaged goods industry and really any industry, but AI is really popular, right? But a lot of our customers aren't quite at the level of data collection to get some of the accuracy in the modeling. So we're starting more on what we call center lining projects, which is an even easier stepping point than like an OEE or downtime tracking project because center lining allows you to kind of capture all the parameters that allows them to produce a product well. And so they're really working towards getting the analysis of building that golden batch.

20:07
Anh-Tuan Tran: And so our starting point is really just trying to figure out how to capture the right data so that they can get predictive product quality. And we find that to be the biggest ROI in terms of AI usage because if you can predict the quality of your product, then you could potentially stop a process before you have all that scrap. So the use case in AI in that space is huge. And immediately, if you can prove to your customer that you can predict the quality of a product, whether it's gonna go bad or it's gonna be produced well, the value is incredible.

20:42
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah. I completely agree with the guys on the AI looking at, it definitely an increasing trend. I think for a lot of our customers, the focus so far has been to getting data into the right hands, and it's kind of, they're getting some value outta that now. But a lot of the customers coming back and they're going, okay, what's the next thing? What's in a lot of cases, AI is that. Another trend we're seeing a lot of is sustainability. I think a lot of customers these days have goals around say ESG and sustainability, that the targets that they need to meet. And if they're investing in the solution, they want to know how that solution's gonna help them achieve those targets. I guess there's a lot of ways you can do it. Some ways we do that in an SL would be paper to glass solutions.

21:24
Brian McLaughlin: So basically, digitizing the current paper-based process to just that company's reliance on paper. And then that's in those cases, it also has, knock-on benefits as well. Like, so if you're, if say you're closing out a batch at the end of the batch, you don't have to wait till to get the paperwork and review it. And then for quality to review it and then release the data, they can, get all the benefits and like as soon as you hit the batch close or complete batch, that data's available for quality to review. So it, it kind of increases the factory's throughput, which is a big benefit to them also.

21:56
Chris Fischer: Okay. I want to, I want to keep another open question here. We've been thinking about open, or excuse me, new technologies, emerging trends. What do you see becoming less important, whether it's for the industry overall or for your customers' needs? Anybody at all? What's less important? Anything?

22:18
Leah Warren: I guess, for us it'd be like, I know people get really excited about VR applications and I heard one really cool one yesterday actually. But I'm primarily in the dairy industry. And when I think about training an operator using VR, it's just not realistic for that industry. So, I guess it would really depend on your application, but for me, when I hear that and people getting excited about that in dairy, I'm like, that might be a little, a little past what you need. Yeah.

22:48
Chris Fischer: Yeah.

22:50
Remus Pop: I'll take a stab. I think, one of the things I've noticed is that people are more willing to accept, non-recognized brands. I think Ignition has been a big part of helping that out. But used to walk in a room and, and say, if you, what's the, the, the common saying, right? "Nobody ever got fired for recommending SAP." I think that is shifting quite a bit. It's less common for people to be reluctant to try and adapt to different technologies because technology startups have just ramped up so much recently. And I think, so people are more interested and more open to maybe piloting with a new startup or with a new capability that some companies trying to do. You know, probably 20-something years ago, it was the same, same with Ignition, right? It was probably really difficult to sell ignition in the customers that were down the road with a, with a Wonderware or something else. And I think this community and this company is a big part of.

23:43
Anh-Tuan Tran: The trend that I'm seeing is that a lot of our customers are not hiring that PLC manager for their facility, which is good for us as system integrators, but they see that automation guy is less important, you know? So as companies are building new facilities, it's becoming more automated, more autonomous, a lot of times it's kind of challenging for us to not have that point of contact when we're doing projects just because they don't have somebody. And then immediately on the IT side, they feel it's less important to have a large IT team. So they're outsourcing that service to another IT corporations to handle their IT service. And that creates challenges for us, because sometimes you don't get the right folks that really understand that customer. So we have challenges there, but at the same time, it also creates a lot of opportunities for us in terms of other project offerings that we can do. So that's, it's less important, but they're gravitating towards system integration anyway, so that's, that's okay for us...

24:42
Chris Fischer: Guys are making lemonade.

24:43
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah.

24:47
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah. I'd say what's becoming a low, like, say Unified Namespace and MQTT, they're, they're not, new technologies by any means. But a lot of our customers would be in, say, the regulated sectors like say pharma, medtech, and traditionally due to high levels of regulation, they're quite hard to, due to high levels of regulation, it's kind of, they're slower to adopt new technologies. But I definitely see a trend of that changing in the last, say, six to 12 months. And there's more and more customers asking about it. For regards to what will become less so in the future, I'd say maybe Windows-based communication like OPC, not maybe today or tomorrow, but maybe 10 years time like that.

25:26
Chris Fischer: Brian, let's hang with you for a minute. How do you manage the expectations of a customer who's stuck on a legacy brand?

25:34
Brian McLaughlin: Sorry, can you say the question again?

25:36
Chris Fischer: How do you manage the expectations of a customer who's stuck on a legacy brand?

25:43
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah. So I'd say... Sorry, you might just, kind of mind's going blank. You might skip over me.

25:51
Remus Pop: Yeah, I'll jump in. For us, we've developed this, this concept of a hackathon. And so in order to get customers over this reluctance to be able to adapt to new technologies, they wanna, there's a big idea of like, well, show me, right? So, we have this free offering that we do for our customers where we will show up in their factory, enabled with Ignition and sometimes some Opto 22 and some Snowflake capability, and we'll launch and build a pilot in real time in a matter of a couple of days.

26:16
Chris Fischer: Yeah.

26:17
Remus Pop: And so that, that's been a way that we've been able to kind of break through that reluctance of, "I don't wanna spend $200k on some new and system integration platform" or something, some project, before I know that it's gonna work, right? So everybody wants the comfort blanket of knowing that it's gonna work. So a hackathon is a good way to do that.

26:35
Leah Warren: Yeah, yeah. Demonstrations are extremely effective. I mean, we don't really have to sell much after we demo it, because the customers sometimes don't know what they don't have. So, when you show them like the potential and the opportunity, we've seen a lot less pushback.

26:54
Chris Fischer: Yeah.

26:54
Leah Warren: And then kind of going back to, I forgot who was saying it, but the adoption of technology that's maybe not as known or doesn't have the name brand. It used to be selling Ignition was hard 'cause they didn't trust the longevity, they didn't trust the support. It wasn't a name that they recognized. And we definitely have a lot less of that now. People aren't saying, you know, we're not having to convince people on Ignition, let's say they're telling us they want it, and we're saying, okay, this is what we can do with it.

27:27
Mo Moore: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, based off what Leah was saying, if you look at the cost factors and you look at the way like Inductive comes in and aren't charging by tags, the simplicity of selling it the simplicity of the support cost the wide range of integrators, right, that are out there now it really becomes a self selling solution. And you become more of a, "now how do I help you implement this?" less. We don't have to deal with a lot of legacy products at the application layer that we are in enterprise, but it really becomes much easier to sell it. And then I would say, like traditionally speaking, Inductive has kept up really well with security, with all of the IT convergence stuff that they need to, so it just becomes an easy adopter. Legacy products, just a lot of them just don't compete in that way.

28:16
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah. For us, we use a scorecard system. So, we're an independent integrator, we're technology agnostic. So what we do is we basically take the business drivers that they have, and then we have a scorecard, which is just a number of measurable criteria that they can look at. And so we can coach them through the pros and cons of each of the platforms that they can migrate to if they wanted to. But then we kind of give them a lot of clarity in terms of why they should select this, because it matches and it rates the highest based on what they're looking for. So, it's really based on their needs and then what technology makes the most sense for them.

28:51
Chris Fischer: Gotcha.

28:52
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah. I'd say also it's important to take a phased approach to the migration. Also, like, it's not very often you get a, an opportunity to go in with a big one big bang approach and replace everything. But if you just take small segments, kind of work through that and replace it with a system like say Ignition, then you can prove out the benefits. And I think from our experience, customers are more receptive to like an overall obsolescence plan than to replace their all their systems.

29:18
Chris Fischer: As a general reminder, if you have customers who are interested in switching over from a legacy brand, reach out to our Sales and our Sales Engineering department. We're happy to join those demos, help them get them on the right path with Ignition. Next question though. This one's sort of a two-parter. We often hear of integrators needing to turn down work because they're busy, they have too much going on. So how do you approach and vet business with a new customer in a competitive landscape? Anybody?

29:53
Anh-Tuan Tran: We don't turn down work.

29:56
Anh-Tuan Tran: Well, we rarely do. And if we do.

29:57
Remus Pop: Good answer.

30:00
Anh-Tuan Tran: Having a project that we feel we can't do it, we will actually collaborate with our other offices. We have 17 locations worldwide. So there have been a lot of instances where we've actually passed work over to another office so that they can handle that work. But it's really just collaboration. And then honestly, if the work doesn't make sense for our company as a business, we have a lot of partnerships that we'll leverage and then we'll give them that lead. And then if we can supplement in any way based on that project, we will collaborate with that team.

30:29
Mo Moore: Yeah. And I'll work with that one because I've worked with Leah before. I've worked with Remus before. There's a lot of things where INS doesn't play and recognizing that, and then you always want to promote the technology, right? So doing something you're not comfortable with or you're not skilled with doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means that you lean on good partnerships. You know, like we've worked with Tamaki multiple times in different solutions. I've been brought into different environments where I just didn't feel like INS had that.

30:58
Mo Moore: And so it wasn't as much as turning down the work, but recognizing what, like what you were saying, is that it may not be the right fit, but don't let them walk away with a bad taste for the technology, like they can't accomplish it. Partner with good integrators like you see here, that's what ICC is really about, right? So, get community to work with everybody and get, and make that happen for the customer.

31:17
Remus Pop: Yeah.

31:18
Leah Warren: Yeah. Partnership is a great way to handle that. For me, when I think of like 'cause a lot of what we do is the process control on the plant full floor. And Ignition is definitely our preferred platform, but one of the reasons for that is that we've built tools into Ignition that assist us in like the commissioning process. So we have the dynamic trending built in, we have plant replay on all our screens. And when I think about trying to commission a process without those tools, that I would prefer not to do that. So I guess if we're in the position, if we have the luxury of being too busy, then if a customer's insisting on using a platform that's not Ignition, I am probably going to reach out to another integrator that does installations on one of the other legacy platforms.

32:08
Remus Pop: Yeah. I think I'll just echo that right. Reply is a 20,000 person company. So we generally don't turn down work, but we know what we're good at and what we're not. And so I mentioned earlier that in the 12 years of working with Ignition, I've never deployed it as a SCADA. So if some, somehow somebody came to me to deploy Ignition as a SCADA, I'd recommend one of the many awesome integrators that we've worked with in the past. And I think just, I even, I think during COVID, right, during, during our watch party with Mo, we, we did a panel on what we called co-opetition. So it was three different integrators talking about this partnership idea and how we share even sometimes resources if the ability to work on a project that you wouldn't really wanna work on, but you don't have the team members available there, you can partner with another company to bring in some resources.

32:50
Remus Pop: So I think, just echoes the idea that the partnership is so strong in this, in this space that we're not worried about giving one of our competitors some opportunity to get to win some jobs.

33:04
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah, I'd say for us, I can't think of a time that we've actually had to turn down business or we couldn't, achieve a customer's what they wanted to achieve. What I would say is we kind of, we could try and be transparent from the start. So we have the initial engagement and we're scoping out the requirements of the project. We try and understand is it something they want to say very soon. Like, can I to say unlock a production backlog, or is it something that maybe it's like four or six months, like it's more of a long term. And then we, we try and work with them, tell them the resources that we have, and then maybe it's something we plan for six months down the line where we might have a resource cap. So we try and get that, that pipeline there that we can kind of try and everyone meets everyone's expectations and everyone's happy.

33:45
Remus Pop: Okay. There's probably a sales plug for a CRM system in there somewhere.

33:48
Chris Fischer: All right. Thank you, panel. Alright, well let's get into some Q&A here folks. So, we've got some runners circulating through the audience, they've got some microphones here for you. Anybody have any questions for these Ignition pros here? I think you're the first one.

34:07
Audience Member 1: Can you hear me? There we go. It's a question for Anh-Tuan. I was interested in your response about in the CPG industry, for using center lining for identification of golden batch, using AI for that. Can you speak to like what types of AI data, data analytics, that are you commonly use for that? And if there are certain sources of data that are most helpful for that?

34:28
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah. I can speak a little bit. I'll kind of give you a use case so that makes a little bit more sense. Say for example, you have a customer that's cooking a product and if the outside temperature humidity changes, it impacts their cooking settings, right? A lot of times you're relying on tribal knowledge of the folks who operates that equipment to get the right machine setting so that you can continue to cook the right product quality. And the duration in terms of how long it takes them to get that right machine setting, could be hours.

35:01
Anh-Tuan Tran: And so in that period, everything you cook, you scrap. So if we can take all the information that's coming in from the machine setting as well as the parameters of all of the process parameters, including the humidity data and model off of that information to figure out what the product quality output should be, you can operationalize that model in the production space, so that you can predict the product quality and what the right machine settings needs to be to give you the right outputs.

35:31
Anh-Tuan Tran: So a good example is you know, like, like a SaaS engine has a lot of the modeling tool that we will partner up with SaaS and give them the information cleanse, right? And then they can give us the model and then we can operationalize it and then pull in the live data and then it could feed us the machine setting predictions. And then when you implement it and you could actually see the product quality getting to the right state quicker, and then immediately you can see the value in having something like that. Especially if you're losing guys that have been there in 20 years and they know how to work those machines, you lose that knowledge, the newbies, it takes them a lot of time to actually get the equipment up to speed in terms of like the quality that they're looking for. So that's like an example of a use case where the data is important.

36:20
Remus Pop: Yeah. If I can add on, I think from a strictly tools perspective, I'd look a lot at like AWS SageMaker, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI has an open API that you can use to do ChatGPT-like functionality within an application. Obviously Microsoft Copilot. Copilot's doing a ton of stuff in this space. If you wanna go the Microsoft route, again, the OpenAI platform, but and even right outside in the hallway, Snowflake, right? Snowflake has a ton of AI and ML tools built into the platform. And because of the Cirrus Link and the connection between Ignition and Snowflake and think it, it'd be a really good place to start.

36:54
Chris Fischer: Alright. Yeah. It looks like we might have a wait now. Yep. There we go. Right there.

37:01
Audience Member 2: Alright. Remus, you mentioned how COVID opened up the remote access door for us and that is very true. But now they're cooperative to a point, but every IT company or every IT group wants a different VPN and I'm dying of VPN overload. Any thoughts on where we might get to some sort of cohesive approach?

37:24
Remus Pop: I think unfortunately we're gonna be stuck in the world of some sales guy that convinced some IT guy that this is the best VPN on the planet. I, unfortunately, don't see an end game unless somebody comes out with some kind of unifying API connector, for VPN connectivity, right? So everybody can kind of have their own and almost like a MuleSoft does with managing APIs. Some, there'll be somebody that makes a software that manages the thousand different VPNs you gotta deal with. But unfortunately, I live it daily in my life, right? Every single IT company that we work with has some sort of way they want you to connect to their systems.

38:00
Mo Moore: Yeah. I'll go with what Remus was saying, but I am starting to see a trend, 'cause all of my engineers are saying the same thing, "I don't want another VPN client." So, they have a thousand VMs spun up to handle each customer, right? But what I am starting to see a trend in, especially in the cloud technologies, is these bastions, right? So they're AWS and Azure offer these bastions, which is actually quite nice in the sense that you don't have to install anything and you don't have another virtual NIC on your machine.

38:27
Mo Moore: So that's becoming a lot more popular for the VPN solutions. And IT feels a lot better about the bastion solution 'cause they control the client. So as long as they have an open way to be able to add software to that bastion and things like that, it's been working better for me and our team anyway because, and we'll actually ask them, "Have you attempted this? Have you seen that?" And sometimes you can steer the customer to that solution. And then with the federated model and like identity providers, it makes it a lot easier to say, just add our group at our profile to your bastion setup so that we don't have to have a thousand accounts.

39:07
Audience Member 2: So it sounds like we have to do a little teaching, we have to teach them how to do this.

39:10
Mo Moore: Absolutely, that's a solid point. That's a good way to put it.

39:13
Chris Fischer: Okay, next. Thank you. Alright. Anybody else? We have to, we missing anybody?

39:26
Audience Member 3: Yeah. Yeah. I so given all of the, excuse me, IoT and digitalization efforts that everybody's referred to, it means more connections and more networking and then more vulnerabilities. And so I just wanted to, if the maybe each of the panelists could say what kind of cybersecurity best practices do you guys employ yourselves and with your clients? And then what advice would you have for others who are not as far along the learning curve?

39:55
Remus Pop: I'll start, I'd say, so I am by no means a cybersecurity expert and that's why I hired one. And so I call him on the phone and I say, "Hey, we're gonna build this platform. Can you be part of the architect team to make sure that everything we do is secure?" There's a lot of public documentation. You know, I think [Inductive Automation CTO] Carl [Gould] was up on stage talking the other day about some of the security things that they go through. Leverage the understanding that most of the companies are doing that on their own and try to leverage companies that are already taking advantage of that on their end.

40:25
Anh-Tuan Tran: Biggest one, oh, sorry. Go ahead.

40:26
Anh-Tuan Tran: The biggest one for us is just buy managed switches. Stop buying unmanaged switches guys.

40:32
Mo Moore: Thank you. That's a great. That's... Thank you.

40:35
Anh-Tuan Tran: Yeah. And you're installing it in panels, but they, they're a smaller form factor managed switches and it just makes our lives so much easier, especially from being able to lock certain things down, having more control. So really, I mean, that's a best practice going forward is like, if you're still buying unmanaged switches, you guys should stop, just stop.

40:53
Mo Moore: Yeah. I'll say that, we get approached with this a lot, because our company does a lot of industrial networks, and so the first thing we start with is the concept of the zero trust, of course. Right? So you need to, it's really hard on the plant floor to enforce operators to have logins. It's, it's not common because it's too, it adds a lot of complexity, right? So, we usually start with a layer of putting in network management tools and security monitoring tools into the industrial network so that it can look for changes in things like PLC code change or this device was never on the network before and it has remote access. Why was this here? By working with the IT groups and putting that layer of that network monitoring in there and having built-in security that's looking for like you know, changes in packet styles and things like that that adds that layer.

41:45
Mo Moore: And then it allows the IT department to feel like that DMZ layer into the OT layer is more secure and that you're watching it. And that you're not gonna have intrusions coming in from that angle. And then the second part of that, of course, is doing the right thing to have the zero trust model, multi-factor authentication. Those are things that just have to be enforced these days because it's not an if it's when, and if you go and look the minute you put something out on the internet, it's immediately hit by bots and other things from different places looking for vulnerabilities. So, you just have to have that authentication model in place.

42:22
Chris Fischer: Good. There we go.

42:28
Audience Member 4: Just curious if you have customers, potentially some of the more price-sensitive ones, that are having multiple applications in one Ignition server, multiple vendors working in one Ignition server, and what, what your experiences have been in that environment, and if you're coaching, guiding those customers on any better practices to have vendors play together or not have one knockout a server of some way, shape or form?

42:54
Mo Moore: Yeah. I mean, I think Remus you've seen this too, like, containerizations become a good part, big part of that, because then you can layer in your resources on the containerization layer. And because you can have things like Kubernetes and, and really orchestrate your containerization deployments and monitor it, it allows you to have them play in the same spaces fairly nicely as services on server level like an ESXi host or something like that. You get the same principle, right? You gotta make sure that everyone gets their slice of resources and how they're gonna work together on that. On the IoT gateways, the containerization is kind of really important too, because then you can set the resources and not go over the over bounds and then you also set the security level of what the operating system can do and access the containers and what they can do and not do that. So that's kind of...

43:40
Remus Pop: Yeah. I think what the release of [Ignition] 8.3, the majority of that problem will go away.

43:43
Mo Moore: Yeah. Yeah.

43:44
Remus Pop: Right? Now with everything in the file system, you can leverage GitHub or any flavor of version control that you like. With the deployment modes, I think the majority of that problem is likely gonna go away in the next little bit, right? Just pull a branch, do what you need to do, submit it back and away we go.

43:57
Anh-Tuan Tran: So now it's just a waiting game. Yeah. January, I think is what you said.

44:02
Mo Moore: We need April...

44:05
Anh-Tuan Tran: December beta.

44:06
Remus Pop: Yeah, December beta. I definitely just wait until 8.3 and you're, you're good.

44:09
Leah Warren: That'll play a big role. And maybe on like a lower level, kind of what I hit on earlier, is just documentation and having a site-documented standard that any integrator that is in that project is utilizing. So we've helped a lot of sites that we've worked at define a standard document, the standard, and then enforce a standard that all integrators are, are using when it comes to working on their project.

44:33
Mo Moore: Yeah, it helps a lot.

44:36
Leah Warren: Yeah.

44:36
Brian McLaughlin: Yeah. We work across say the dev, QA, and prod environment, which it can't help say if you have multiple developers on dev looking, if they can, if they have an adverse effect on something, there's less risk of it, having an adverse effect on production then. And also we use a lot of containerization as well, so that definitely helps our life.

44:57
Chris Fischer: All right. Well that pretty much puts us at time, folks. Please do give a big hand for our panelists here. We've got Leah, Mo, Anh-Tuan, Remus, and Brian. Thanks everyone for coming. Enjoy your lunch.