[0:00] Mark Hepburn ICONICS Vice President of Global Sales
Hello and welcome back to the mainstage here at the ICONICS customer event Connect 2021. It is really exciting to have you guys here. I could use from somebody out there the clicker when you have a chance and if you could advance me to the next screen, that would be great. It's really fun being live again; let me tell you and having an audience. Thank you, Ted. You can see a lot of these sessions are recorded which is nice to see the demos all pulled together in a very concise way. I think that really adds a lot to the experience. Thanks a lot, to our newsroom, to Paul Carter and Ryan Legg. And so welcome to our second keynote on Innovative Technologies to help you stay agile and resilient. Alright, I'm Mark Hepburn I lead the global ICONICS sales team based here in Foxborough, Massachusetts, near Boston. It's really a pleasure to join you here in person. And everybody virtually wherever you are; I understand there are 1000s of people online right now. Thank you for joining. It's a great experience for us. So, I've been with ICONICS for 18 years, a broad experience leading sales and marketing. I worked for GE for 15 years way back and had hands on industrial automation and programmable controllers back years and years ago. For the next 90 minutes I invite you to see the Innovative Software Technologies from ICONICS in action. We've got a lot of live demos and customer stories and a dynamic team to help share them with us. So, Chris Elsbree will illustrate key graphics technologies in action. Luke Gonyea will join us to highlight the new Hyper Alarm technologies with ICONICS digital twin called AssetWorX. Alex Bender is going to join remote from Australia. Thank you, Alex. He’ll share how all this can come together with Analytics-BI ICONICS tool to bring complex real time operation elements together in a very dynamic way. And Jim Desrosiers will join to review best practices for manufacturing and highlights a in case study with Catania Oils located right here in Massachusetts.
[2:33]
Okay, so why ICONICS? So, I think Ted answered that very well this morning. There are a couple things I'd like to highlight. First, because it's the most scalable, reliable, and customizable platform in the market for real time operations. Our software is open, yet secure. And it provides extensible connectivity to virtually any kind of system, OT systems, operational technology coming from all of the control systems, the mechatronics, the things that make the things that we operate work, and from the IT systems, the information technologies that are in the main Management Information Systems area, whether those be in your corporate data center, or in the cloud, or coming from a web service. ICONICS is a platform that brings these together into context, so that we can connect to and virtually control any system, whether it be through IoT, on the edge, or across our enterprise.
[3:38]
So, what is the ICONICS suite? We've heard a lot about this; we've heard the SUSTIE group thank us for GENESIS64. So, if we're using GENESIS64 ICONICS suite is a combination of what we think of as four elements. First of all, GENESIS64, Hyper Historian, AnalytiX, and IoT works, the commonality of one unique and singular platform service, as Ted Hill pointed out, coming from within the industry understands how valuable that is, not just for you today in your current applications, but as we look forward to the future proof elements of your systems. The single modular system allows us scalability and gives us flexibility. So just drilling down a little bit GENESIS64 is a sophisticated and complete system for supervisory control, data acquisition, visualization, alarm management, events management, notifications.
[4:47]
It's designed to scale from the smallest single machine applications, whether they be on the edge as we think about in this new environment. We think of cloud edge, edge to cloud, or just a standalone application, scaling down to something as small as a few tags of data, a few data elements to massive applications that are distributed across an enterprise or even across multiple enterprises with connections from edge to cloud. Hyper Historian: you heard a little bit about how it's used at Continental Tire and Paul Carter was talking during the break and how it's used to collect massive amounts of data. And then to preprocess that data, use statistical calculations and performance aggregation to provide it advanced characteristics for further analytics and great data archival and open connectivity, Hyper Historian. AnalytiX: a set of cross industry tools for data analysis, and then IoT works, which is the core ICONICS platform for gateway devices. So, it takes that piece platform services and puts it right down at the edge, easy to use, set it and forget it, and you can manage and provision from the cloud.
[6:06]
Okay, so ICONICS as a user, end user or a configurator systems integrator, it's important to know: Is it flexible? Is it competitive? Does it fit my needs? Can it be a fit where I am today? So ICONICS does scale very nicely. It's modular and flexible. It works very well in the sandbox with other automation systems. In fact, we've always said that ICONICS is like the Switzerland of automation. We connect everything. So, if you have multiple distributed control systems, and you want a unified visual interface, or a central alarm management, this is something you can do with ICONICS because it does talk to everything, but you can start very small. And this is really important. And I think when Jim Desrosiers comes up later, he'll talk about the importance of being able to start with one specific challenge and scale up an app. Ted mentioned that earlier as well. It's one of the key aspects of ICONICS. Start economically, and then run that base and solve whatever next problem you have. There's always a next problem.
[7:21]
Okay, so connectivity, to everything is really key to the ICONICS system. And As Ted mentioned, the ICONICS platform is designed to connect to all control systems, IT OT. So, there's open protocol, connectivity is really central. As Ted mentioned, we were among the first to embrace OPC, open standards communications; Olay for process control it was originally called. Unified architecture. And we were among the first to establish the board. Later this afternoon, Mr. Tom Burke joins the Connectivity and Security session. He was a founding member of the OPC Foundation, former president, now he is with ICONICS Mitsubishi Electric as our Global Alliance Manager. Please join to learn more about open connectivity and secure connectivity.
[8:16]
So, connectivity, of course, must be in our system, and it's native to the ICONICS licensing, built right in OPC UA to the core, Modbus, BACnet, BACnet Secure Connect. We'll learn more about that in that session that Tom and Oliver Gruner are hosting this afternoon. MQTT so Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, so this has been adopted by IT and is a way of connecting systems together. It's originally developed back in the oil patch for connecting SCADA systems for telemetry. And now with Sparkplug B as Paul Carter mentioned during the break, is a great way to integrate data sources through a Message Broker which makes it very scalable and resilient. Really, IT technology in operational techniques in OT, SNMP, web services, data publishing, IoT publishing, the ability to connect any database natively, and of course, factory automation connectors. With ICONICS we've integrated the Device Explorer OPC Server into the ICONICS suite. This allows us to connect to over 200 different types of controllers from more than 70 vendors. That's a lot of controllers. All from within the ICONICS installation, click and install, browse natively; OPC is built right into the ICONICS suite. And with Takebishi who is are a very prominent automation software provider and a close partner of our parent company, Mitsubishi Electric in Japan. They've added some advanced servers like DNP3 and IEC60850, and MTConnect, like Paul Carter mentioned that at the break. Thank you, Paul. And these are important for these specialized applications like utility and energy and machine tool, right, of course, standard connectivity to the most popular manufacturers, Siemens, Rockwell, of course, the Modbus standard built in natively anyway, but all this in Takebishi and built in connectivity for our parent company devices with the Mitsubishi Electric FA Connector to all the popular PLCs and graphical operator terminals, etc. I mentioned IoTWorX. Please join us this afternoon for a session on it IoT Riding the Wave to learn more about how IoTWorX helps you to manage a fleet of devices and importantly, to connect the existing control system where we have billions and trillions of data points already connected through control systems, securely and contextually to the cloud.
[11:18]
ICONICS is a partner led company; we sell through partners. And it's important for our partners and prospective partners to know why ICONICS is the best choice for operational intelligence. I mentioned flexibility, scalable licensing, a unified platform, extensibility, resiliency; you can count on ICONICS. It runs some of the most critical infrastructure in the world. And we're SI friendly; systems integrators build the systems. Almost all of the systems deployed by ICONICS are done by third party systems integrators or specialty systems integrators within the businesses. Of course we have our own professional services group that helps the SIs and the end users come up with their own architecture. Mitsubishi Electric globally has several service organizations that work together with our third party integrators.
[12:14]
We've made things easier and better for our systems integrators, just a couple things I want to share. First of all, sign up is free, no charge. Now, second, self-training; we've added 338 so far, and counting; short instructional videos on the ICONICS Institute, please check out the ICONICS Institute. It's open to everybody. It's organized very logically; you can flow through these two to five minute videos in a series, or you can go back and refer to them one at a time. We have several of the people here in the audience who have created them. Thank you, Cynthia. Thank you, Jotham. Luke, Thanks, John. We got a whole community of people who put these together for you to make it easy and fast to learn. Open documentation, so on docs.iconics.com, it's all there. Everything you need to learn and run the ICONICS system. Ted mentioned, the Azure Marketplace. So, we've got the installation for the ICONICS suite; you press a button on the Azure Marketplace. It spins up an Azure VM on your tenant, and you're up and running in just minutes. We have a great certification program for our partners. So those that have demonstrated competence and experience are recognized as certified and gold certified. And as Ted mentioned, we're extensible through the Microsoft applications in Windows, the edge, SQL Server, all the things we're familiar with, and Azure services and Azure data lakes, and importantly through our ToolWorX. So, the extensibility ToolWorX, the power tool for the advanced systems integrator and original equipment manufacturers that want to extend their system out with our software development toolkit.
[13:33]
Okay, so I'd like to pivot now and talk a little bit about client technologies, and soon I'll invite our Chief Software Architect, Mr. Chris Elsbree, to highlight some of these key features. I want to pick out three of the hundreds of amazing visual features that are in the ICONICS platform, of course, we've been long recognized for advanced visualization tools, and first with an OPC UA client, first with 3D in our industry, first with many, many firsts in visualizations. First with mobile and web, so when we think about accessibility, and everybody talks about visualization anywhere on any device, we introduced this idea of web HMI back in in 2000, with mobile HMI and, and then in 2013, with any glass technology built on HTML5. So HTML5 visualization command and control securely on any device is a hallmark native to the ICONICS system designed for one place in the GraphWorX editor and deploy, whether it be thick client or thin client. And now 3D HTML5. GEO SCADA. This is one of the ways to put massive amounts of information into context and bring out exceptions, and ICONICS introduced the GEO SCADA with the ICONICS. Suite when the 64 bit platform was launched back in 2008. GEO SCADA continues to be one of the most important elements to bring context, location based context, into an application. Another key feature that I'd like to point out, something we added just a couple years ago, is dynamic cloning. This advanced visualization technique helps speed deployment and improve qualities of projects. So, it's amazing. It's almost like wizardry.