Speaker 1 0:07
What's up? Everyone? Welcome to this special Thursday afternoon edition of manufacturing hub. You guys, may or may not, if you're watching live, you can see I've got my ignition effect hat on. I found that especially for this show. Under my pile of other hats, we are talking all about inductive automation and ignition and how they did it. Prove it in just a few minutes. We will go ahead and jump back in time to day one of prove it, where we have Travis Cox on from inductive automation, talking about Pruvit and the conference, a little bit about what they were hoping to prove this is now current, real time in the future, and we have seen, or at least I was there for the presentation, where we got to see Travis and Arlen go through and prove it so Vlad and I've got a few minutes of commentary here. If you guys have any thoughts or questions for us on prove it as a conference on inductive automation and what they in serious link did for Pruvit or anything else. Please feel free to go ahead and drop those in the chat. Beyond that, we've got one or maybe two more episodes of prove it coming out over the course of April. Again, absolutely super fantastic show. I will make note. I believe that the vast majority, if not all, of the Pruvit videos from the Pruvit sessions have been released. I've been seeing those getting posted over the last week or so, which is awesome. I would 100% go and check those. And Vlad said that at least some of those are on the 4.0 Solutions YouTube channel. So you guys go ahead and check those out, before I jump into kind of my thoughts on the session. Vlad, we want to make sure that you get a chance to go talk to the people you Amanda, the people go talk to the people. What were your overall thoughts on? Prove it what we saw with the inductive automation. Folks, what are your thoughts there?
Speaker 2 2:03
Yeah. So look, I did not have any doubts about the team being able to showcase an interesting solution at Pruvit. I think you know you and I have spent many, many times with different individuals across the organization, so I really did not have a, how would I say it a low expectations or a low bar for them? So I'm not surprised to hear that they were one of the better presentations from the conference, and so I did not have a chance to look at it yet. I know it has been published, at least for the ticket holders, and they're slowly, I believe, releasing other sessions on the open they publish them looking at currently 14 videos, and we'll have a link to that as well under the session, or if you're watching in podcast form, in the description. But ultimately, I think it's, it's super interesting to see where ignition is going outside of, you know, the prove it session. I know that we've we've done the announcements of 8.3 I think both you and I encounter ignition in the real world, in manufacturing quite frequently. I know that I've talked to many people who are looking, if they don't already have an installation of ignition, they're looking at migrations from, you know, different OEMs and or vendors that they currently have. So I think it's not a surprise again, that they've done an excellent presentation and backed up by Arlen, of course, I think it makes a lot of sense. So that's, that's my general thought. I think we had a good conversation with Travis. I think, you know, to maybe go back to the ICC commentary as well. There's going to be an even bigger event this year, so certainly looking forward to what they have coming next.
Speaker 1 3:48
Absolutely 100% and if I can just dive into a little bit of the prove it session with Travis and Arlen, if you guys have seen the presentation, my favorite Arlen presentation, my favorite MQ, TT presentation, is that the first time you get on a call with Arlen and he's like, here, let me go take this ignition gateway with 60,000 MQTT tags, and then let me go dump it onto an additional other gateway with 60,000 MQTT tags, and let me do this in like three seconds, and you're just there, kind of awestruck. For me, I'm a bit jealous of the people who got to see it for the first time at Pruvit, right? So it was, it was super, super exciting, very interesting, fantastic presentation I liked. And I feel like Travis and Arlen were probably the most successful in going through and talking about how the UNs and how M q t, t is at every single layer of the solutions that they have, right? So they started at ignition edge. They had your normal ignition gateway, and they went to Ignition cloud. And they went and they showed how they could see everything in the UNs, through all across all of the M q t, t tags, um. On the broker. And then from that point, we did a couple of things where we changed and added udts. I think it was a pump. It was a pump or a valve or something that they went in towards the end visualized very quickly by building another one, I think it was at the edge, and then visualizing it in the cloud, or being able to go ahead and mirror that and see that in the cloud. Honestly, I think Travis probably is the best person that I saw who can both like furiously type in code while he's actively talking about things I my brain can't do it. We saw some people who were very good at it. Travis Absolutely, very good at it. Some of most other people, one person was talking and the other person was furiously typing. And so I thought that that would that was super interesting. But now again, as Vlad said, Of all of the groups at Pruvit, the inductive and serious link group was one of those with super high expectations, right? You know that they're going to do a really good job presenting this, and I feel like they did an amazing and fantastic job presenting this. Having said that, I love the conversation that we got to have with Travis. We talked a little bit about ignition as one, as an IIoT platform. So for the folks who were not at Pruvit Walker, basically defines that there are three IIoT platforms, basically three platforms that you can, I'm just going to say, can use to go, kind of pull a bunch of your raw data in and visualize that. That being ignition from inductive automation frameworks, from tat soft and win CCLA from the Siemens team. All three of them were there. All three of them, I felt, had like fairly different presentations, which, in and of themselves, was was very interesting. So it was fantastic to go see each of those back to back to back. And we actually have conversations from all three of those groups. I don't, I don't think it was intentional when we set it up flat. I think it was, Hey, these are three of the groups that we want to go talk with, and we now have three of those, so there will probably be some sort of playback or something else of those videos that live all together. So you guys can go ahead and watch that again. Go ahead. Vlad,
Speaker 2 7:20
I did have a question for you, Dave, right? So when it comes to MQ, TT and OPC, right? So I still have a lot of conversations with I don't want to call them, you know, Legacy manufacturers, but manufacturers that use certain or specific control systems utilize a lot of OPC, right? And that's because either the platforms don't support fully in Qt or for other technical reasons. And so for me, the conversation is still, if we're going to look at a platform like ignition or the ones that you've mentioned, a lot of tag flow is still done over OPC, whether that's maybe because of scale, maybe because it's the platforms, but for me, that's the end user reality we live in. Do you see a lot of value in the entire scalability, or, I guess, ease of deployment, if you will, of M Qt or do you still work with a lot of customers that do utilize OPC over MQTT?
Speaker 1 8:18
Yeah. So I certainly the vast majority of groups that I work with are using OPC UA. Most of them have thankfully migrated off of OPC DA, but most of them are thankfully using OPC UA. I would honestly struggle so in the work that I do with a lot of food and beverage, with a lot of like OEM manufacturers, with a lot of groups who have a facility, and everything is in that facility, or maybe they've got two dozen facilities across the Americas that that is the majority of the work that I do. And for a variety of reasons, the controllers, be them Rockwell or otherwise, don't have native MQ TT protocols directly from the controllers, and being in the area that we are and that we live in, that basically means that there will be OPC UA, right? It may be we take something like an opto 22 and we put it at line side, and we convert the OPC UA to MQ, TT on the communication style, or maybe something less expensive, like a red line Data Station, plus, if we want to go convert some of those protocols, but there will be OPC UA. I would imagine 70 80% of the tags that I see are OPC UA. I would Yeah, I would imagine probably 70 or 80% if not more, of the tags that I see are OPC UA, having said that, I, especially in the last probably four or five years, continue to have more and more conversations around MQ, tt, and as I look at what I imagine, as Dave imagines the architecture the future is going to be, I imagine it's going to be some blend of both, right? Right? I imagine that there will be OPC UA servers strong into the future, especially as we look at the European counterparts, where the OPC UA foundation is so very strong. But I think for the vast majority of the applications, we will continue to see OPC UA, and then maybe we'll see MQ, TT for things like smart sensors, for things like we take our Opto 20 twos and we run a bunch of sensors back, and we are we've got an MQ, TT broker, and that's how we're communicating, because we decide, for a variety of reasons, that's how we're going to communicate our new tags moving forward. I certainly see that as a feasibility and a possibility, and I think that the majority of the work that I've certainly heard people talk about doing only m q t, or almost exclusively M q t, is very much in the oil and gas region, where we've got lots of pump units. I've seen some in like water wastewater, we've got lots of lift stations, so lots of lots of locations, especially lots of smaller locations that we need cellular and or radio communication in order to go send those back. There are absolutely an extremely important reasons to look at MQTT as the protocol of choice for that. I i i imagine, and I think a lot of the conversations that we were having at prove it was very much along the lines of, what does the blend look like? And I think that the majority of us have come to the conclusion that there will be a blend of OPC UA tags and MQ TT tags, or M q, T brokers in the field. And that's not to say that all of the OPC, UA tags cannot be converted to M q, T, T to go be in the broker. That is the unified namespace. Just that, in my opinion, for many groups, that's a phase 235, um before we go fix the structural foundation issues that they're running into. Um today?
Speaker 2 12:10
Yeah, and look, the reason why I asked that question is not because I think the debate around MQ, TT or OPC, UA or DA is going to stop anytime soon? I think it's more, you know, reflecting back at the conference, because ultimately, I've had a couple of conversations with end users that do not come from oil and gas, where, as you mentioned, MQTT has, I think, taken a lot of foothold. And I can certainly appreciate that you can pull out millions, if not billions or trillions of tags simultaneously. I think it is not the main pain point of the average user, right? And so what I'm trying to get at is I've, I've been thinking, what does it take to showcase a solution for an audience that attended prove it right? And I would almost think that a showcase of a specific protocol is not necessarily the main selling point for any platform, right? Like, not to put any of the three into that list, but what truly is that selling point, right? And so I think it's maybe even a separate debate, or we can discuss that a little bit now, but when I essentially mention ignition, a lot of times. It is the ease of development. It is the fact that it's modular. It is the fact that it can be, not only, you know, on a very specialized can also be on a tablet, on a phone, whatever. So it's, I guess there's, there's a thought or a conversation to be had among whomever, as to how do we mass market or showcase a solution at a conference, like prove it or otherwise, and what features do we want to highlight? And you know, if there's vendors listening to us, I think it's important to to have that context right, what are the users ultimately trying to solve and what's the most important? Because again, like I asked you, and I think it confirms my suspicion, just like myself, the first selling point is not necessarily being able to scale mptt tags, but I though I agree that it is very impressive, right?
Speaker 1 14:13
Absolutely, I would say that on the vendor side, the people that did the best were people that solved actual issues and also had really good visuals. So we've talked about tulip and we've talked about how Mark and Eric did a fantastic job. They did it because they solved an issue and they had great visuals, and they had this is how we can go about doing it right. And I feel like Arlen and Travis also had a series of great visuals, and they showcased some amazing technology, again, exactly what you'd expect from those guys. And then there are some other folks who I didn't watch live, but like Remus pop, who I think Vlad is going to get on at some point later, and they're going to go into. Uh, super in depth, the solution that Remus and snowflake built, but Right? That they built a chat bot, right? And so they built a chat bot, and that that is tangible, right? So I think people want tangible. When I go and build demonstration solutions, I want to go through the process of building the thing that is tangible. And if the end user can see that solving a problem, they're much more likely to go, say, yes than if you were to, I don't know, write a work procedure for ice fishing, right? I mean, if you're working with someone, and if your end user is someone who loves ice fishing, and you get the procedures Right, absolutely going to connect with them. I just imagine that it's not going to connect with the vast majority of groups that they have out there. So from my opinion, I think the vast majority, if not everyone, at prove it solved a technical problem and did a good job solving that technical problem. I think the best ones did it with a compelling story and very good visuals.
Speaker 2 16:06
Yeah, absolutely good. I think we can probably get into the conversation we've had with Travis back approve it unless you have any other comments.
Speaker 1 16:16
No, absolutely everyone in the chat. It was great seeing you guys, if you have questions for Vlad or I or Travis during the conversations, please go ahead and let us know at this point I am going to fast forward us, or maybe rewind us back to day one of prove it, where I will go reintroduce the conversation with Travis. If you guys have any thoughts or questions, please feel free to drop them below. If not, we'll see everyone live four o'clock East Coast time next Wednesday for manufacturing hub. Everyone, welcome to manufacturing hub. We are back here at prove it day one, talking with Travis from inductive automation. Travis, I don't know how our listeners would manage to have watched 200 episodes without hearing you or one of the other many inductive folks that we've had on over the years. But if someone is watching Pruvit content and doesn't know inductive automation, can you tell us a little bit about you, a little bit about the company and what you're here to solve, please,
Speaker 3 17:15
absolutely. Thank you for that introduction, and thanks for having me here as well. So I'm Travis Cox, I'm the chief technology evangelist for inductive automation, and I've been with the company for over 20 years, and throughout my entire career, it's always been focused on helping customers build their plant for solutions and to talk about the art of the possible and to take advantage of what's there and to solve more pain points and challenges and to do more. And that's really what inductive automation is all about migration company, and it's does a software company to solve those pain points. And so that's, we create ignition, our software products that does that. And I'm super happy to be here at Pruitt to show case what ignition does in the digital infrastructure.
Speaker 2 17:54
And I guess in the context of Pruitt, right, you were given a certain data set of a real factory that was selected over a period of time. Maybe what can you talk to us a little bit more? What kind of a challenge Did you find to solve? How would you tackle it, and ultimately, what was the benefit for the end user?
Speaker 3 18:10
So honestly, I didn't find it to be challenging at all. We can go there, because ultimately they provide the infrastructure, which is really important. Because often when you talk to a customer, or you're going into a new system. They don't have any infrastructure, yep. And so you're helping them through. What does that look like? What should we have? And here it started with that. This is what we want. This is our digital strategy. How do you fit into this strategy? What benefits do you provide us in the strategy? I think it's pretty refreshing. So they provided OPC UA server, they provided MQ, TT broker, and they provided a SQL database, all three of which are native things that ignition has worked with for many years. Could you maybe
Speaker 2 18:47
elaborate on the comment, right not having the right infrastructure? Maybe, what does it take for your solution to shine? Or maybe, what are some of the early steps for someone who does not have the infrastructure that we're seeing? Yeah,
Speaker 3 19:01
when we looked at building a SCADA system or MES system, it's how people approach it has always been the same. It's like, I'm gonna go build a scaven system. So those domain experts figure out, Okay, here's the data we're gonna connect to, we're gonna bring it in, we're gonna build that. We're gonna accomplish those goals. We then go on to another system that says mes, and they have a different team. They go do the same stuff. And ultimately, the real mindset shift is this data is important to the business, yep, so let's make sure that we're focusing on what does the data mean to us? And the data comes from a scaven mes likely they're going to need data from each other, but ultimately data from both of those are going to be super insightful for the businesses, so they'll solve additional challenges later on. And so it's that infrastructure of basically, say, look, okay, I want to solve, I want to build this case system, but I also want to make sure that data is available to me. Same thing for me. Yes, I want. And so that common infrastructure that the UNs approach is it's really a mind that mindset change because. If I can get it into a common infrastructure now I can unlock the power of that data. Yep, and that it's you don't have to do a lot to build the infrastructure. We're not you can start really small, but it's a kind of idea of, let's decouple our data from the applications, from who needs to get that data and make it leverage open standards so that now people who need it have the means to do absolutely.
Speaker 1 20:22
Let me ask talking about uns and the Pruvit conference here, one new customers are coming and talking to you. Travis, are they talking to you and discovering uns? Are they committed to the idea of a uns and then looking at ignition as one of their solutions? How does that typically work for you guys in the ignition ecosystem. We certainly
Speaker 3 20:42
see all the above. But more and more people and companies are getting educated on what uns is, yes, and we all know it's not a product, it's a strategy, it's a concept, it's something that they have to understand and figure out how to deploy for themselves. And so some are coming to us say, hey, we understand uns. What does that mean to you? How do you fit into it? And that's where we can go in the art of the possible. Of the possible kind of showcase what, for example, MQ, TT and spark plug has to offer in that there's a lot of customers, of course, that don't really have any idea what this is, and but they know, especially when CIOs are getting involved, they know they they have, they want to get into, get more insights, right, and to do more data. And so that's where I think it's that's important to kind of get the education out there is as to we can't just do building systems the way we've been building it for 25 years. We've got to think about it differently, and if, and ultimately, get oti and it working together to to accomplish that, but we're getting people from all different sides. But what's great to see is more and more people are understanding, or at least thinking about you and us, and absolutely that's an important thing. It's that shift away from proprietary into open frameworks. And pretty soon, companies are going to be like, Look, we're not going to use products that don't fit into our infrastructure or how we want to do things. And that's a big change right for our industry. I
Speaker 2 21:57
want to ask you a question again, around maybe the challenges of having that many vendors building on top of that, uns simultaneously, and obviously, without naming any names. But again, I think we've all seen integration. I'm going to say projects, there's going to be multiple hands in the proverbial jar. And so you run into issues, maybe. And so I'm curious, and even outside of prove it, maybe what kind of challenges you have seen on that side. And on that side. And I think the UNs solves that extremely well, but I would still say there probably are some challenges, if you could elaborate on some of those. Indeed. Yeah,
Speaker 3 22:30
first of all, you've got to establish what you want that naming conventions and that standard to be, because if you just let it be the Wild West, there will be tons of collisions, tons of problems. Data won't necessarily have the right context or mean what you want to mean. So who would do that? Look, sorry to interrupt, please, integrator, is that the end user. Ideally, it's the end user who is defining what they want their hierarchy and their namespace to be, because it's they're going to have process data in there, and they're going to have mes data there. They're going to have analytic data in there. They're going to have potential ERP data in there. And like maintenance management, all this information can get put in into this common infrastructure, this name space. But in order for them to, if I were to connect into it, in order for them to make sense, they have to be able to understand it, yes. So they need to define that. And honestly, right now, we're using the ISA 95 standard right for that, in terms of, that's what you're seeing here, the enterprise, the site, the areas, the lines of cells, organizing that way, and then even within that, breaking into what's process data, what's mes data, and what's the operator related data, all that you break in those different folders. And if you got to start somewhere, yes. So if you that's a great place for people to so we start the conversation, absolutely.
Speaker 1 23:39
And if I can add to Travis's comment, I think that the only way to be successful in contextualizing and building those strategies are at the corporate level, and it's as early as possible. Yeah, I think that once you have lines built, or lines in process of being built, without those requirements, without those kind of very base company standards, it you now assume a huge amount of tech debt. And not only do you have to go through as an organization of building those standards, but then you have to go back through the process of fixing those, hopefully under, hopefully only 1000s or 10s of 1000s of tags that are not created to those standards. And I have seen different I have seen different prime builders and things like that have a standard, and that standard is good for them. But as soon as you start adding outside vendors, and as soon as you start going and building systems, on top of all of that, by the time some of us come in, it's just a jumble of I can see that we saw we just built this, but it feels like we've got a decade worth of tech debt just on the naming conventions, just on the tag side and the structure side, and it's going to be months worth of work in order to go set that right after we've built an agreed upon standard.
Speaker 3 24:54
Yeah, and I totally agree. I think uns hits upon the true the true ot it conversions. Yeah. Yes, because obviously there's a lot of day in OT you want to make use of it in the business side. But you can't just approach it from listen, if we have one site use for starting there's one small use case that we're gonna if we approach it as an independent thing, we don't think about anything else, then it may not scale.
Speaker 1 25:16
Absolutely. It almost never scales. In my experience, it almost never scales. If you go build a one off, almost no one thinks about, okay, what happens if we build it from one line to the rest of the facilities, or, God forbid, this, this one line to 20 facilities in the region?
Speaker 3 25:33
Yeah, we need to have common philosophy and framework across all of your entire organization. I think the biggest thing, though, is leadership does have to set the tone. Yes, that in order for us to digitally transform, this has to be part of our DNA. Yes, everybody is going to contribute to this. And so because, if, because everybody is aware, from operators all the way up to sea level, yes, everybody understands that this is going to help drive business decisions, going to help drive our objectives, and that we should all take it seriously and so that we get more collaboration, that's where you're going to start winning, oh, 100% that's the part that I think a lot of companies are neglecting. It's like, I have, we have people that are smart here. We're going to build this infrastructure right, this one site becomes this model citizen, but then we can't take it anywhere else, because we don't have the leadership that's driving it absolutely
Speaker 1 26:22
and if I may, one more time. Vlad, he's chomping at the bit. Travis, I would 100% agree, I think that we're in an interesting time in manufacturing, because we are now to the point of having tools and technologies and softwares and a relatively small number of people, but tools times and technologies that will allow us to build and scale a solution. I feel like, every so often you go and you talk to a medium to large organization, and they're like, I have five sites. All five of my sites did this completely different. We've got two off the shelf solutions, we've got two sites that are pen and paper, and we've got this one bespoke solution, and we've got five full time developers trying to bubble gum it together, and they love their bespoke solution, but it will not scale, and absolutely none of them will scale. So we're at a really interesting time where that is becoming possible for groups smaller than Fortune, 50 fortune, 100 companies, and that's
Speaker 3 27:15
honestly the part that those are the companies that we really want to provide solutions to absolutely small and medium size, because they're not going to have the resources, yep, or potentially the budget, right, to be able to do this. But the technology is so accessible. There's so much of it. We're seeing it all here. Yes, Matt, prove it, and it's all converging.
Speaker 2 27:34
If I could do a follow up on both of this stuff, sure, but I think that to some extent, people understand the value of a critical state assistant, right? So when you go to sell a SCADA, I think there's no question in most customers minds that you need something that's robust, that's going to provide value for the plant floor. I think on the data side, we're still seeing, as you mentioned, there's maybe a need for a catalyst or a push for them to see the value, whether it's for something as simple as employee metric, or something a bit more advanced, like troubleshooting. So I guess my question for you, Travis, would be, what are you seeing with festivals that ignites that spark that, yes, like, we actually get this, and they're going to change what they've been doing in the past and are looking to adopt more data solutions versus, again, maybe some traditional scavenge
Speaker 3 28:18
Yeah, and I think it's identifying an actual use case. Or if we're gonna start small, you can't eat the whole of it. We gotta start some me, we can identify use case. And honestly, it's been said here already, but that's the energy's use case. We want to be energy reduction, become more green, or at least, want to understand what our energy profiles look maybe it's on one asset that we start with. And you start there, you get them all, get the data where it needs to go, so you can start getting some insights off of that and get a win. If you can get the win, that will be a catalyst for future projects to take off. So it's important is that you not only have to identify the use case that you then have to, even if it's a small one, you gotta lay the right foundation architecture to accomplish that, because then the next use case comes in, it should be very easy to just implement that, yes, because you have the infrastructure in place. So I think those two are incredibly important. Is
Speaker 2 29:07
the challenge, usually on the technical side or on the people and change management side, 100%
Speaker 3 29:11
on the people and change side, like the technology is, there's so much out there. And what I found interesting is more and more IT departments want to get involved. Historically, there's been that, if you will, that rift between OT and it, but there's a recognition that, like, hey, we have a lot of knowledge. We know how to build infrastructures. We know especially now containerization and Kubernetes and all this is this a great and we want to be able to bring that in and fully take advantage of it. So it's the technology is amazing, but people, it's hard to chase people's mindsets. I
Speaker 1 29:42
agree. I always say, and almost all of our guests disagree with me. Travis is that it in my best, most successful projects, it are core partners. If they're not core partners, you run into this. It ot convergence. You run into groups hating each other. You run into shadow it on the best, most successful. Projects. It is at the table at the very beginning, where sometimes they're the ones driving this, yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 3 30:06
no, I totally agree. So maybe our first, your first one on here is to do agree. Complete with that, I think the most successful companies are the ones that I've taken the OT professionals and the IT professionals have created it into one team, okay, right where they're both say, Look, we have our domain knowledge. You have your domain knowledge together. We're going to accomplish some of these goals that the company has. Let's work on these things together. It shouldn't be that like these. There's me, if you will, if I'm having a meeting, that's ot by themselves. No, it in there or or vice versa. It in there with no OT, because that's where the problems come this ot people's its do making decisions without me, and we have to run a line, our lines keep running, and vice versa, like it, people is like, why don't want you make making decisions for us, or using shadow IT, or using tools that we don't support. So if they are making those decisions together, I think they're gonna have a lot more success.
Unknown Speaker 30:54
What group would that be under?
Unknown Speaker 30:57
Gosh, I don't know what we call that. That's the
Speaker 1 31:00
question. I have seen some groups who have it, folks in their on their ot side, mostly in the operation side, under the like the COO. I have seen a shocking number of groups, honestly, one would be shocking, but a shocking number of groups that have the SCADA mes and development teams under it, because when they structured, the first time it was software, software is under it. Yeah, I don't know what that unified group would be, but I 100% agree you need to be able to have the conversations with the people buying, inspecting the servers in the network architecture across the entirety of the organization. And
Speaker 3 31:31
if I may, I'll add one more thing, which I think is really important. It's that on the IT side, especially the CIOs come coming in, recognize that they want to set a name right, and they want to solve some major problems, but if they don't unders understand the manufacturing environment, they're not making the effort to go and to live in the day of the life of an operator of people on the plant floor, then it's going to be really hard for these sides to come together. And ultimately, I 100% believe that in order for a company to be successful, that you have to look at the ground up. Those operations folks, the people running it, are so critical in all these decisions that you need to understand their challenges. You dissolve their challenges, but do it in a way so that it unlocks the potentials that I that we can get in it. They can't just be like, Oh, I'm gonna go to a Magic Quadrant and just pick a solution, just because it's in a particular area, and say, we're going to use that you've got, you've really got to look at holistically. Where
Speaker 2 32:29
have you seen the most continuing to get like conversation it and OT champions that would push these solutions. To me, it's always, or usually, a person that really understands the process at a deep level that can dry something home again, like make the first proof of concept. But ultimately, have you seen maybe it films? Be more excited on the software side and secret data when we have those two positions. Yeah, you definitely
Speaker 3 32:49
get, you get champions from from either end. There are, first of all, you have to have to get a champion. You gotta get somebody who's gonna be able to drive that and can understand the value and the ROI you're gonna get out of these, but I've seen it from it, because ultimately, they understand the data science world. They understand how to get insights into the data, and they just want, they want access to it and to help. But I think more often though, it comes from the plant floor, if there's champions there that really fundamentally understand, they may not have all the answers. They don't have to technically understand all the pieces, but if they can drive that and connect the right people, then they know what they're going to get from an operation standpoint, the efficiencies they'll gain on that. Because, heck, it's been said for a lot of projects, if you can gain just two 2% you know, then efficiency. What's that mean in terms your your revenue and all that?
Speaker 1 33:39
I want to talk about that a little bit. Vlad made a really good point, I think, yesterday, when we were talking with some groups about how some groups are going to talk about small to medium sized manufacturers. But some groups, especially some groups here are super enterprise manufacturers, right? And when we talk about OEE, you love to show the figures of, hey, we found a 30% or a 50% additional OEE. And for some groups, that is reasonable and possible, but for all of the major enterprises out there, Vlad is like in some of his past lives, like two tenths of a percent is a billion dollars of revenue. So how do you from the software side, from the ignition side, go figure out, are you talking to mostly the small to medium groups. Does that messaging change when you talk to enterprise where a 10th of a percent is a billion dollars? What does that look like? How do you go make those decisions to the different groups, and how you go send that message out? Yeah,
Speaker 4 34:33
that's interesting. The way you bring that, because we're talking as the small
Speaker 3 34:38
the small ones, they don't have any data at all. They're everything's manual, and often there's no HMI might be the only thing they have on the floor. So the there's so much opportunity for digital transformation with the small it's once they're aware for the technologies that they could bring in. But the medium ones, there's, I think, so large. Focus on we in the medium, yes, and that's because it's now approachable. Okay, we do have sensors, we've got data, and we understand our process, but you need to, you could do better, right? There's ways that we could do better, just with what we already have. We don't to introduce new lines and machines. We could just do it there. And it's so OE is still so critical as a solution. I don't hear it as much with the large one, because they've walked the walk with a lot of it, even though it's still incredibly important. But I think what it does is it's the conversation has shifted to, how do we leverage AI or ml to eke out more efficiency, which is really just, oh, we eat a different way. Oh, say, in my head, like you
Speaker 5 35:38
said the part out loud. Travis, sorry, you said the quiet part out loud. Yeah,
Speaker 2 35:44
absolutely. I would like to ask you maybe a more forward looking question, right? So I think that we're seeing a lot of different partners and different solutions here at COVID, right? What are you maybe excited about as complimentary technologies to ignition? Are you excited to see more advanced PLCs, more advanced brokers, more advanced historians, like more advanced messaging. You know what? I mean, what are you looking at and say, Oh, wait, that's an interesting advancement that will allow us maybe to leverage this better for the end views.
Speaker 3 36:12
I think there's two sides of the coin there, three. I'll mention three. So one is, look, if we don't have to connect to a PLC to get data, it just comes into Ignition. I'm happy with that. Yep. And honestly, that's the way it needs to be our the big focus is building applications, building a SCADA system, building an alarming system, building MES system. You want to be able to do that and access the data. Shouldn't be difficult,
Speaker 2 36:32
yep. But if the PLC is better, which you say it's easier to access the data, or it's still, oh,
Speaker 3 36:38
okay, depends on how you've approached it, but it should. If that's a single source of truth for the data, and the data is already contextualized there, then that makes our job really easy. If it's not, then we have to do that additional work, right? We've got to add that context. So I think that's one area where it will change dramatically. Look at a green field situation, it's gonna, what you deploy is gonna is there's amazing stuff, right? That's going to completely be different. I also look at it from a storage point of the storing data. We would traditionally store that in historians on premise, or SQL databases or whatever, and those tools, while it's important for like local trends and app, but I'm more excited for storing that data with context in these data warehouses that are set up for sharing data set up for easier access to analytics off that data, because you can run those and get results right back into the system, right the actual but I gotta say, what I'm really excited about would be a chat bot for an operator. Is that's pretty exciting, right? To imagine I'm operating, I just say, hey, natural language, what's going on with line three? It takes all the information that's been collected, all the drawings of the machines and the documentations and their past experiences, and it can give them a really good responses to, hey, we're having these issues. Maybe we should try this or this, absolutely, that's going to be an incredible day.
Speaker 1 38:00
I agree. I have always been on the operator or operations level will give us the most forward, immediate value, because most people don't think that have never paged through 1000 page maintenance manual to find a particular answer, and then there's like a grease smudge over it, or an oil drip over the thing that you need to read. Travis, this has been amazing. I want to go and mention to all of our listeners at home, most of the fact that I think, like half the groups here are using ethnician Like, not just in the infrastructure, not how as built, like virtual factory I was paging through. And you may or may not have also seen it. Travis is what pieces of technology are using, what other pieces of technology are using. And I'm like, Man, I'm like, I think almost all of these groups, or half the groups, are using ignition, which I think is just a testament to the cornerstone that is to to the industry, and especially to the providers here. But I do want to ask you one last question, Travis, if the viewers at home are looking to take away one thing from you, from ignition, from prove it, what is the one thing you want them to think about? And remember,
Speaker 3 39:04
that's a really good question. At the end of the day, we really believe in the ecosystem and community, and we have an amazing product for the plant floor, and that's where we want to we want to revolutionize the plant floor. You can do that. Then there's so much more that gets unlocked. And honestly, there's this thing could hand pick, technology that you could just play with and use that's our focus, is to really deliver the most and to continue to solve additional pain points and make it easy for people to build these kind of systems at the end of the day. But it won't happen without open standards. It won't happen without community in terms of being able to choose Best in class. Absolutely,
Speaker 1 39:42
I love that, Travis. Thank you so much as always, for hanging out with us, everyone. Thank you for watching this. I hope you're enjoying this and our continued Pruvit coverage. Please stick around. Go check the chat in the show notes, we'll have all of the information that we talked about with ignition and the other services. Mostly that's 100% on. Vlad, so thank you for continuing to do that, Vlad. You make our show notes amazing. Be sure to catch us normal times, Wednesdays, four o'clock East Coast time on manufacturing hub with Vlad and I and our normal guests. And continue.
