[0:00] Mark Hepburn, ICONICS Vice President of Global Sales
Welcome, welcome to the ICONICS 2021 customer event. I’m Mark Hepburn with ICONICS. We are hybrid today in this new normal here physically in Foxborough, Massachusetts, that patriot place in the United States at the Renaissance Hotel, and virtually worldwide with 1000s of attendees joining live. Our aim is to educate and inform and inspired you on how to innovate and improve your operational performance. I’d like to remind everyone that all segments of this event are recorded so you can look at these later and at your convenience. Some logistics: first for our live audience, if you would please silence your devices and have a look at the emergency exits at the back and the side of the rooms just in case. Now a quick review of our agenda from now through 10am eastern time, our CEO Mr. Ted Hill will lead our Opening Keynote at 1030. I will return with the session on Innovative Technologies packed with demos and customer stories. So please, please join for that. Starting at 1pm, our breakout sessions begin; pick one session from group one and one session from group two. Again, all of the Connect 2021 sessions will be recorded so you can review them after the event. So, join us to learn about important topics around cybersecurity, data connectivity, around our connected workforce in this new normal, more important than ever, around streamlining our operations for sustainability, and about IT OT, and digital twins. Now, I'd like to introduce and welcome Mr. Ted Hill ICONICS new President and CEO. He joined us in May. It's been a great run so far. We're thrilled to have him; he's a visionary, highly experienced in the automation software industry, where IT meets OT - operational technology. Ted has 30 years of global experience, starting with hands-on systems integration of heavy industrial equipment. He understands our industry. Ted co-founded two startup cost software companies: Data Work Systems and Acuity, an enterprise management information software company. Acuity was sold to Rockwell Automation in 2008. Ted’s career in Rockwell Automation in executive roles spanned technology, sales, marketing, and business planning. Ted's experience brings global perspective to lead ICONICS at the center of our parent company, Mitsubishi Electric's operational intelligence software solutions. Please join me in welcoming Ted Hill.
[3:19] Ted Hill, ICONICS President and CEO
Thanks Mark. Good morning. Mark, thank you. It's really great to be here at Connect 2021. This is my first ICONICS customer event. And I'm really excited about what we'll be sharing with you this morning. I would love that we could be doing this with everybody in person. But with the current situation and our new normal, we thought the hybrid event was the right choice for this year. You know, the last 18 months has been fascinating. If I went back to January 2020, I don't think I could have even made up what we've all been through. I know that the impact caused by COVID has been different for all of us. For many industries, I think COVID just accelerated the inevitable, what likely would have happened over the next decade or two anyways, but at an astounding pace: more remote work, more collaboration with people not based at headquarters. Instantly, it became an equal playing field, regardless of where you worked, more work flexibility. Imagine if the pandemic had happened 10 or 15 years earlier before we all had access to broadband internet, before video, before Microsoft Teams, before Zoom, before WebEx, before we could do this. The impact on many businesses from COVID has been profound. I'm proud of how well ICONICS and our partners have adapted to continue helping our customers in this new normal. I've had a few people ask me, “Why did I join ICONICS? What was the attraction?” As Mark shared, I've had the opportunity to work in different parts of our industry, from systems integration to product management to business management. Well, for me, ICONICS was an easy decision. It was about our products; it was about the team. And it's the impact that I believe we'll have globally as part of Mitsubishi Electric. I'll be sharing more about all three; we have a full day planned. For our first session today on digitizing your future. I'll be sharing a little bit about Mitsubishi Electric, where we're headed at ICONICS with their product portfolio, you'll learn about sustainable development and some of the work that we're doing with the R&D team in Japan on the SUSTIE project, a zero emission building. We'll be joined by Microsoft; we'll be joined by one of our customers Spirax Sarco. We also have several parts of Mitsubishi presenting with us this morning: the US research lab which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They'll be sharing some of the research that they're doing in the area of data analytics. The power products business will be showing a new product called Power I. It really brings a new concept to SCADA and edge analytics. If you've seen the Boston Dynamics robot dog Spot, you have an idea of what I'm talking about. It's really a fascinating example of integrating different technologies. It's a little like Terminator mixed with SCADA. ICONICS was founded in 1986. This is our 35th year, so quite an accomplishment. It couldn't have happened without our founder, Russ Agrusa, and a few other ambitious entrepreneurs sitting in his basement all those years ago, wondering what they could create. I'll share a few photos later this morning just to remind you how much time has gone by. We're incredibly proud of ICONICS, of what our customers have been able to create using our software. And we wouldn't still be going strong 35 years later without you. Thank you and keep pushing us.
[3:37]
ICONICS has received recognition continually throughout our history from industry. Our software is deployed in more than 100 countries and is used in hundreds of 1000s of applications across virtually every industry. The ICONICS automation suite integrates information and operational technology to enable people in any business to achieve operational excellence. It's helped customers create solutions across virtually every industry, from automotive, to food and beverage, to utilities and energy; ICONICS is there. Our development and testing happen at four locations globally. Our original location was here in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and that Development Center began work in 1986. In 1994, we opened a development center in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. That's already more than 25 years ago. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend some time with the team in Pilsen. It was fun to hear them describe how they worked in their early days as part of ICONICS. They would sit in Pilsen and type code into their computer for about six months, copy it to a floppy disk, fly over to Foxborough, and spend a few months doing testing and integration, and go home and repeat. Today all of our development teams work globally together in real time on a common code base.
[5:04]
We have a development center in Genoa, Italy. I think subjectively they win the geography contest. They're based on the Mediterranean coast. A few years ago, I remember asking Russ innocently, “Why did you open a development center in Italy?” He looked at me and asked if I'd ever seen an Italian car. He said he didn't know why, but Italians are just good at design, and he wanted to bring that pazazz to ICONICS. I think it worked. Since joining Mitsubishi Electric, the ICONICS team has been working very closely with the engineering team in Nagoya, and we've also added resources there. Our software portfolio is comprehensive: it's integrated, it's open, and it's built on industry standards like OPC UA. Our mission is to design easy to use automation software that allows you to visualize, historize, analyze real time and historical data from any application on any device, enabling you to drive improvements in energy efficiency, productivity, product quality. Our IoT capabilities allow you to integrate data from 1000s of devices and exchange that data with the cloud of your choice. Everything can be visualized on the screen of your choice. We live in a mobile world: might be your portable, might be your phone, might be your watch. It's your data; it's your choice. It's essential that the platform you choose has the capabilities to support what you need to do. What you need to do now, and what you might need to do in the future. Our customers have proven over the years that if you can imagine it, you can build it with ICONICS. Creating solutions never ends; you'll start your journey to solve a specific problem. Maybe you need to make data available from disparate systems, or you want the ability to do analytics, help improve your product quality, add reporting. What happens when you solve that highest problem, your highest priority, your number one? Well, great for you. Your number two priority just became your number one; your work will continue. Who said your work as an engineer would ever be done? When you move to your next challenge, focusing on quality or energy consumption or fault diagnostics, you don't want to start again. You want to leverage that work that you've already done to solve that first problem. That's why an integrated suite of applications is so important to your long term success. And that's where we really stand out as ICONICS. When I look at the ICONICS portfolio and team, when I look at what has made ICONICS so successful over the last 35 years, to me it comes down to five key things.
[11:14]
It starts with our software architecture, our commitment to industry standards, our proven continuous innovation, the extensibility of our platform, and of course, our people, and our partners. The ICONICS architecture is scalable, supporting applications that run on the edge to the cloud. It starts with universal connectivity, the ability to acquire data from a wide range of data sources. If it's out there, you can get the data into ICONICS. The ability to manipulate and aggregate that data with our platform services, and add security, language aliasing, and things like workflow. Application servers in our architecture turn that data into meaningful information and provide capabilities like scheduling, data storage, alarming, fault diagnostics, etc. Client technologies allow you to work with that data on any platform you choose whether it be a desktop computer, a phone, or your watch. Integration across the architecture is what drives engineering efficiency with consistency and reusability. Industry standards protect your investment and make things easier for all of us in the long term. We've been involved and contributed to the OPC foundation since its founding and participated at the board level longer than any other company. We support HTML5 and MQTT. We're adding support for Sparkplug B. We support BACnet, BACnet SC. I could go on, but I won't; suffice to say if there's an important industry standard, it's part of ICONICS. We're proven innovators. We were a charter member of the OPC Foundation. We were the first 64 bits SCADA application. The first to introduce multi-touch support back in 2009, before the iPad. We developed the natural user interface based on Microsoft Kinect.
[13:18]
We've added support for voice Machine Interface. We were the first automation company to adopt Azure digital twins. Our innovation has been constant, and it continues. Common wisdom says that the last 10% takes 90% of the time. It's true for a lot of things. It was true for the contractor renovating my house. It holds true for product development. A core capability of the ICONICS platform is that it's extensible. And that extensibility applies on many levels. If you need to do it, you can. It might be custom connectivity to an obscure data source, a custom calculation that you want to be able to historize or uses as an alarm condition. We support both. Almost anything can be accomplished with our standard products in simple expressions. If your project involves something more a little off the beaten path, our extensibility toolkit allows you to extend each layer of the architecture. Few of you will ever use this capability. But it's good to know that it's there. I expect that many of you who have joined us today have already worked with someone from the ICONICS team. Over our history, they proven to be a very capable and creative group. I consider myself lucky to be one of them. Our team, though, is much more than ICONICS. It's our network of distributors, system integrators, technical partners, and fellow Mitsubishi Electric employees. You'll be hearing from many of them throughout today. ICONICS is frequently recognized in the industry for our product innovation. We've been a Microsoft Partner of the Year 10 times. We've been awarded engineers choice for many of our products by Control Engineering Magazine. We've won awards from Start, from Control Magazine, from Plant Engineering, from the Environmental Business Journal. It's a lot, and it's frequent. If you've ever attended an ICONICS event, I know you know Russ. We're all here today because of Russ' vision back in 1986 when he founded the company. He successfully led it for its first 35 years. The talented team of people who are ICONICS today is really a tribute to Russ and what he accomplished. At the end of 2020, Russ decided to retire. He continues to be engaged with ICONICS as an advisor and represents Mitsubishi Electric on the OPC Foundation Board. Having ICONICS next phase be as part of Mitsubishi Electric, I think was Russ' crowning achievement. I don't think any other company could have been a better fit to leverage our capabilities. Russ, on behalf of our customers, our partners, and all of us that ICONICS, thank you and congratulations.
[16:07]
Let’s take a minute to hear about Mitsubishi Electric. (Mitsubishi video plays.)
At Mitsubishi Electric, there’s one thing that unites us: changes for the better, changes for a better lifestyle, smarter cities, a greener society, a more connected world. And behind every change, there's a story. Stories of innovation, society, business, and more. Stories that deserve to be told. Our stories are where we bring together these stories of change. Celebrating the people behind them, sharing them with the world, and inspiring a global movement of changes for the better. A movement that connects everyone. At Mitsubishi Electric, our stories are your stories: yours to read, yours to share, yours to tell.
[17:26]
So ICONICS became a group company of Mitsubishi Electric, about two years ago. Since I joined, I've had the opportunity to learn more about Mitsubishi Electric. Everyone seems to say MELCO. MELCO began as a standalone company in 1921 when it was first founded so as Mitsubishi Electric, we're celebrating our 100th anniversary this year. Being part of a company with a proud history in long term focus really makes it very easy for us at ICONICS to do what's best for our customers. And the more I've learned about MELCO, the more confident I am that it's a great fit for ICONICS and for our customers. Many global brands can trace their history to the original Mitsubishi companies. Today, there are more than 600 around the world. The companies share a common heritage, culture, values, but the companies themselves are all independent and there isn’t any shared ownership. Mitsubishi Electric which we are part of, is just one of them. In the last fiscal year, Mitsubishi Electric had revenue of just over 40 billion dollars US and was ranked the 300th largest company on the Fortune 500. We have 145,000 fellow employees at Mitsubishi Electric consolidated across 200 subsidiaries. MELCO includes more than 100 companies outside of Japan and 14 of them that are based here in North America. The portfolio in Mitsubishi Electric is incredibly broad, from transportation systems to elevators, to products that you'll find in your home air conditioning systems refrigerators, freezers, to turbine generators, power distribution systems, large display boards, to satellite systems that keep help keep us all connected wherever we are. If it runs on electricity, it's likely part of Mitsubishi Electric. Suffice to say, that's a lot. Well, what about us here at ICONICS? We're part of the factory automation business which includes our software controllers, operator panels, drive systems, CNC's, industrial robots, low voltage switchgear. Our automation portfolio is comprehensive, and its complete. Mitsubishi Electric our automation Group, we help customers with their toughest challenges across a wide range of industries, discrete manufacturing, automotive machine tools, hybrid industries like food processing beverage, tire rubber, plastics, process industries, like water, wastewater treatment, power distribution, mining, and infrastructure, warehouses, ports, harbors, buildings, facility management. The industries that the factory automation business serves, well, they're the same industries that ICONICS has been helping customers with for the last 35 years. We've all witnessed a lot of change over the last few decades, and every few weeks something seems to happen somewhere in the world that reminds us that the change is continuing. Mitsubishi is making a long term sustained effort to do its part to help solve global environmental issues. The Environmental Sustainability Vision 2050 defines environmental protection as even a greater corporate priority. And we're committed at ICONICS to doing our part to achieving this important goal. As part of achieving this vision, 17 sustainable development goals have been identified. Across all of the businesses in Mitsubishi Electric, initiatives have been put in place to ensure that we can achieve these goals. Several of the goals relate to sustainable cities and communities climate action in responsible consumption.
[21:27]
At Mitsubishi Electric, we're committed to what's referred to as net zero, so net zero greenhouse gas emissions across our entire value chain and addressing the energy consumed by buildings plays a big part in achieving this goal. According to the UN Environment Program, buildings consume 40% of the global energy, and 60% of the world's electricity, 25% of the water, and emit roughly 1/3 of all greenhouse gases. It's estimated that 30 to 80% of the energy consumption in buildings can be used can be reduced using proven and commercially available technologies.
[22:13]
As part of Mitsubishi Electric support for Sustainable Development Goals, its research and development group in Japan built the SUSTIE building. SUSTIE is a combination of the word sustainability and energy. And the purpose of the building is to do research and demonstrate technology that can save energy and improve the building's occupants health and comfort. The research is focused on accelerating development for Zeb compliant, zero energy buildings using energy savings technologies. A Zeb building is one that on an annual basis has net zero or almost zero primary energy consumption. This can be achieved while maintaining a comfortable environment for everybody that works in the building using renewable energy sources such as solar panels in through energy saving technologies in the building, such as solar shading high efficiency equipment. Later today, I'll share a little more insight about the scope and scale of the primary research that Mitsubishi Electric's engaged in; it's impressive. In the SUSTIE building, the research is primarily focused on high efficiency equipment, natural energy, building simulation technology, and ICONICS health and comfort. The ICONICS software platform was chosen to manage the SUSTIE building and validate its overall energy performance. I'm pleased this morning that Jin Kawasaki from the SUSTIE building will be sharing with us more about the research being done and the role that ICONICS place. Jin is the Head Researcher of Information Technology at SUSTIE. He'll be joining us remotely and sharing an overview of how he and his team use ICONICSS. Jin has more than 10 years of experience with the R&D team focused on building operations and maintenance. Currently, he's investigating how IoT platforms can help solve the challenges related to energy, efficiency, space utilization, and occupant wellbeing. After we hear from Jin, Jotham Kildea from the ICONICSS team, he's going to do a demo of the SUSTIE software, Jotham leads our Solution Sales Engineering team. That's the engineers that work with customers on how they can solve their project requirements with the ICONICS portfolio. Jotham's experience at ICONICS covers a wide range of industries including building management, large infrastructure projects like airports, and Jotham's direct engagement with customers makes him a valuable part of the team that helps guide our future development with the projects that the engineering team at ICONICS is working on. Jin, thanks for taking the time to join us today for Connect 2021. Over to you.
[24:58] Jin Kawasaki, Head Researcher of the Information Technology R&D Center at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Thank you, Ted. Happy to attend Connect 2021. Hello, everyone. Thank you for your time. My name is Jin Kawasaki, and I'm Head Researcher of the Information Technology R&D Center at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. Here are the contents of today's presentation. Today I'm going to talk about our collaboration project with ICONICS. By the end of my presentation, hopefully, you'll have a better understand how we use GENESIS64 for our technology demonstration. In this first part of my presentation, I'd like to start with the objective of our project. We're a department of corporate R&D group at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. And we develop and evaluate technologies independently of our business units. In 2020, we started collaboration project with ICONICS as one of our research activities. The objectives of this project are technology demonstrations for future smart building solutions of our company. To achieve the objective, we have installed technologies from both sides into our test facility. In this presentation, I will explain this collaboration project. In this part of my presentation, I would like to explain our SUSTIE test facility; we call the facility SUSTIE. This is SUSTIE exterior. SUSTIE is an office building with four floors, and its construction was completed in October 2020. I will explain three points of SUSTIE: these are certification, equipment, and workplace. This slide shows certifications about safety and wellness of SUSTIE. SUSTIE has received two certifications: Bels and CASB wellness office. Bels sees a certification system for energy saving in Japan, and CASB wellness office is a certification system for health and comfort in Japan. SUSTIE has the highest rank of both classifications, and this is a first in Japan. Next point is equipment. This slide shows high efficiency equipment of SUSTIE. SUSTIE significantly reduced power consumption by installing Mitsubishi Electric's unique high efficiency equipment, for example, VRF air conditioner, heat recovery ventilation, LED lighting, the distribution system, hot water heat pump, and high efficient elevators. These occupants support power saving at SUSTIE. The last point is workplace. This slide shows workplaces of SUSTIE. SUSTIE seeks to create an office with energy saving and comfort; please look at left side picture. SUSTIE has large windows outside and huge open area. Therefore, office workers feel enough brightness and openness in the area. Additionally, there are a variety of office rooms with the activity based working concept. Office workers are able to freely choose where they want to work. So far, I've explained our new test facility. In the next part of my presentation, I will explain how we use GENESIS64 at the facility. As I mentioned earlier, the objective of this project is technology demonstrations for future smart building solutions. And we have installed technologies from both sides into SUSTIE to achieve the objective. So, we developed the three solutions by using GENESIS64 in this project: energy management, comfort monitoring, and occupancy and space utilization. Today, I'd like to show you these developed solutions. Before moving on these solutions, let me explain the overview of system. This slide shows the overview of SUSTIE system. GENESIS64 is integrated existing systems with standard protocols BACnet IP, SQL, and REST API of the construction of SUSTIE. SUSTIE core engine is one of the existing systems, and it is a R&D platform. The platform stores SUSTIE data, such as building models and historical data, and provide technologies such as simulations and controls. We develop technology demonstrations by this integrated system.
[30:02]
Now, I'd like to move on to solutions. First solution is energy management. Using this cool screen, operators can confirm hourly and daily electric power to realize their operation. This bar graph describes energy consumptions, and this line graph means energy generation. As you can see, these graphs show generation power is higher than consumption power. So, save operation is successful in this case. Second solution is comfort monitoring. Operators easily understand office comfort and air quality on floor plan by values and colors. There are over 300 points of environment sensors in SUSTIE, for example, CO2, CO, TVOC, temperature, pollen, illuminance, humidity, and so on. This is a new type of comfort monitoring solutions. Third solution is occupancy and space utilization. Operators can change building operations based on occupancy and space utilization data for energy and safety. Please look at this heat map. The heat map shows hourly utilization of a room to save energy or prevent infections. Operators can change temperature set points or ventilation volumes based on the utilization of the room. Additionally, we analyze data in some different way using GENESIS64 in this screen. I just covered the topic of how we use GENESIS64 in our collaboration project. In the last part of my presentation, I'd like to explain the reason why we choose GENESIS64. First, GENESIS64 has rich analysis and visualization functions. We can visualize SUSTIE data in the variety of ways to meet our requirements using these to the features. In the demonstration, energy management uses graphs; comfort monitoring uses layers; occupancy and utilization use icons and heat maps. And we can use these complex data analysis through lightweight data access. Second, GENESIS64 offers advanced asset management. We can use Object Management features of building in a variety of approaches. User can add multiple attributes such as positions, categories, users, and other things to one object. Lastly, GENESIS64 provides each process to easy install. To add GENESIS64 to existing SUSTIE system, we simply use the standard data connectivity, such as BACnet/IP, SQL, and REST API. What I like to emphasize is this: GENESIS64 features strongly support our technology the most for SUSTIE. Well, I'd like to conclude my presentation; we successfully developed and demonstrated solutions with our technologies and GENESIS64. So, we continue to use GENESIS64 as a part of our R&D platform and demonstrate future solutions for smart buildings and cities. Thank you very much.
[33:40] Jotham Kildea, ICONICS Solution Sales Engineering Supervisor
Good morning, everyone. This is Jotham Kildea here with ICONICS. I am on the Solution Sales team. I'm also one of the people that has been involved in working between ICONICS and ITCN putting together this SUSTIE project. So, I was asked to speak a little bit on details of what we've put together and happy to do so. This is the dashboard that we've been using for the application so far. We use the navigation on the left side for controlling what you see in the main display. Of course, behind the scenes, we use our standard asset model that organize all the information that's seen on the screen. That's still behind the scenes, uses that based upon all the different subsystems that we're pulling into the system to organize the data, organize the data logging, the alarming all of that, all that fun stuff. And then we just use the visualization that we see to extract data from that asset model. So let me show you in a little bit more detail what we've been doing on this project. I'm going to start off with the floorplan. Okay, so we're looking at the first floor of the building. How we build these displays is pretty standard. Actually, we take the BIM model, the building model for the SUSTIE building, strip it down into individual floors, take the ceiling off each level, so you can kind of see within the rooms and render it out as an isometric that we can use for the visualization here. Of course, if you're not familiar with this building, you might want something that gives a little context to where you are. So, it's different labeling and organization of this system. But this is by and large what we use to contextualize the data for the floorplan based information. So, one of the things I want to show you is this comfort widget. This is something that we use to represent some of the many data sources coming from the comfort sensors in the building. They’ve got a lot of great centralization going on. If I hover over this conference room, you can see the breakdown of how those different sensors are being monitored, of course, a lot of different types of data in one gauge. So usually, we use a color coding to indicate normal operations versus abnormal operations. Don't worry; the air quality is perfectly fine there. We deliberately set a very sensitive sensor on this because we really want to try to fine tune this in a lot of different ways. But I’m looking at different zones very easily. How do you see where the problem areas in your facility? A lot of fun stuff I could say about this type of visualization and control. We also do more traditional things with just kind of a heat map organization. So, looking at different types of data, cross sectionally. So here we've got temperature; we can look at humidity. We could look at carbon dioxide. So how fresh is the air in different spaces, the lighting in the area, all those different good stuff as far as how do you make use of a floor plan to convey information about the spaces.
[36:38]
One of the other things that we also use this for, and I wanted to use as the bridge to talk about it in particular, is occupancy. So, some of the larger workspaces, they have detailed occupancy sensors within them. And you can see here, there's a few different rooms that have variety of number of people in them. If I click into details on one of them, we'll see a lot more analysis on that room over time. So let me pull up the occupancy specific dashboard for that. And you can see that here. An interesting quirk of starting this project over time is that originally the project was designed around, you want to use this utilize this space as much as you can make efficient use of your assets, which is the building, you want to make sure it's at or near occupancy during working hours the day. Obviously COVID changed that a bit. So now we're looking at defining a target occupancy limit, in this case about 1/3 capacity. And trying to aim to stay within that category. We don't want to be go full occupancy because of course there's space concerns about people saying distance. So, it's a little bit of interesting adjustment to the dashboard over time. You can see that being played out in some of the things that we're monitoring such as if I switch over to looking at the average occupancy by hour of the day, you can see that they're saying well below the threshold was that blue line, but they can check how to track over time, did they have certain hotspots that exceeded the occupancy limits that might be a cause for triggering a notification to go out and say, “Hey, maybe we should adjust schedules, maybe we should adjust how we're using the space because we're exceeding the target occupancy at different times.” So interesting dashboards, it's pulling from real information over time. So, it's a great use of that data set. Just as an aside, this is coming from the AnalytiX-BI model.
[38:24]
If you're not familiar with AnalytiX-BI, it's really great at taking raw data streams and subscriptions which this is just data directly out of the sensors within the room and converting it into a data set and a data model that we can query in interesting ways. That's how we get data sets like the average occupancy by hour of the day or by day of the week looking at these peaks and aberrations. All that's because we can make intelligent queries to that data model. So, you'll see that come up in a lot of visualizations that we use in this project. So, I want to show you now a little bit more detail on the energy dashboards that we have. Okay, so I just pulled up one of the energy dashboards which is for our overall energy consumption, just give you the tour. On the top, we've got the heatmap or data diagram that shows the energy usage by hour of the day by past month effectively. This is a great at a glance view to see: when was my best and worst performers over time, am I fitting to the model I'm expecting typically for an office space, you'd expect a five day work week, you'd have hotspots during that time, you should have pretty low energy usage on the nights and on the weekends. You can see how that plays out. Anytime you have equipment that's running overnight, when it shouldn't be or things not shutting off during holidays, it becomes very, very obvious very quickly with a visualization like this which is why we like using it quite a bit. On the bottom, we also see the average energy usage by hour of the day. This is a good breakdown, again to see when particularly if you have high energy load systems like furnaces or HVAC systems that kick out in the morning, you can pretty clearly see: when is my scheduling of the energy spend and utilization to make sure it's being well managed throughout the day.
[40:22]
Let me show you one of the other things in the energy analysis. Alright, let's just take a quick look at this visualization which is again breaking the system down into different subsystems. So, apologies for the Japanese, but we've got HVAC systems. We've got the plug load. We've got lighting. We've got elevator systems, the ventilation, all sorts of different systems within the building. And we're monitoring how is that comprising the overall energy spent. You can see that on the bottom, where out of the 100%, you can see elevators is less than 1%. That's that purple here, not a big worry to prioritize and optimize that. But things like the ventilation here, absolutely something you want to try to optimize where you can because that's about a quarter of your overall building energy load. So, a great way to add a glance see where's that being used by hour of the day? And what is the aggregate spend for different systems. Last thing I wanted to draw your attention to on this is the green line there. That's the photovoltaic generation. Because entire buildings lined with solar panels on the top, they are trying to be achieving a net zero energy building. So, you can see, hour by hour of the day when is the best energy production and how well does that correlate to meeting the demands of the building, of course, there's never going to be a truly one for one comparison. So, it's going to be positive and negative over time. Of course, being net zero, the goal is to net that out to zero or a positive game. It’s a great at a glance view to see, at least as the building performance married up well with what it's generating. So, it's been a very minimal burden on the grid as a whole.
[42:02]
Last thing I wanted to show you are some of the things that are more traditional building control related in the equipment. So, if I look at this, they use a lot of packaged air conditioner units within the facility. So, these are units that sit up in the ceiling and provide heating and cooling directly to that zone. You can see at a glance; we call this a list view. It's a quick, easy way to see the performance of a lot of similar types of equipment. We can use this as I said, at a glance to see where the problems are. But I can also click into that if I wanted to get a really drill down nuanced view at any particular equipment. So here I've pulled up a PAC unit; I can see the high level overview. I can also see the details of the equipment, all the nitty gritty point details, as well as a historical trend. So, nothing too crazy here. But this is a standard visualization that we use in a lot of applications, gives a lot of consistency because we can use this for really any type of equipment where we have this overview point details, trends, alarms, faults, all of that information can be organized in a consistent fashion. So as an operator, you don't have to jump around to a lot of different visualization modalities, you just kind of stick with: This is the proper way to look at and analyze the data, regardless of the subsystem you're looking at. So that's the quick overview of what I want to show you today. Thanks for your time, and I'm sure hopefully we'll hear from more from you later in my session. So, thanks all.
[43:33] Ted Hill
Thanks, Jotham. You know, the work that the SUSTIE building is doing is really impressive, and it's great to see the impact that this type of research and validation can have. If you'd like to learn more about sustainability, we have a session later today, titled Streamlining Operations for a Sustainable Future that's going to go into this in a little more detail. We're really pleased that we're going to be joined by Dean Tallman from the International Union of Operating Engineers, the IOUE. Dean will be sharing the work that they're doing to help facility operators better manage their impact on the environment. I hope you found it interesting how SUSTIE is leveraging ICONICSS. I wanted to share a few examples of how some of our other customers are using ICONICS today. Let's start with Continental Tire. Continental is the fourth largest tire manufacturer in the world. In 2019, they produce just over 140 million tires for best passenger cars at their facilities around the world. ICONICS is deployed at 22 of their manufacturing sites. They use Hyper Historian to log all of their process data across their sites. They're capturing data from over 4 million process variables. That's about 52 million data values that they're capturing and storing every minute. It's about 3 billion an hour, 72 billion a day, or 27 trillion a year. It's a lot of data that Continental can turn into information. Hyper Historian includes the ability to define custom calculations. Continental uses this feature for various performance and quality metrics that they track and analyze with their production. It's a really powerful solution that the data associated with the manufacturing of an individual tire can be correlated with the continuous process data from when that specific tire was made. It allows them to continuously compare real time production metrics with their ideal, allowing them to adjust their process in real time. Continental also has the ability for quality auditing to look at a specific tire’s production parameters. So, the in the event of a failure, they can confirm what was happening with that tire and its quality when it left the plant. In almost any industry, asset utilization, minimizing downtime, minimizing the time to recovery when downtime happens, it's critical for competitive operations; it holds true in mining. This customer wanted the ability to monitor their critical equipment centrally. They're using ICONICS to monitor, to detect, and to predict asset performance and faults. The solution was developed jointly with Microsoft and leverages ICONICS alarming fault diagnostics and our rich data visualization capabilities. It's really a very practical example of IoT, moving data from a physical asset to the cloud in order to improve visibility into the process and making that information accessible to anyone. The data that's collected is published to an ICONICS system that runs on Azure that allows centralized monitoring of the individual assets in the overall mine operation. Condition monitoring rules are defined that provide continuous monitoring of the assets and operations, ensuring early detection and any resolution of issues as they develop, which leads to an overall increase in the mines production efficiency. Very different type of customer Scholle IPN. They were first started business in 1947. They're one of the world's leading manufacturers of what's known as flexible packaging products and automated filling equipment so very often referred to as form and fill. So, if you think of bag in a box or any type of pouch packaging, essentially packaging for a global product. That's the type of machines that Scholle builds. Scholle wanted to have real time visibility into the performance of their machines to improve product quality using SPC, to track overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and they wanted to have common metrics to drive continuous improvements across all of their sites. The solution that they created using ICONICS is deployed at 12 Scholle sites. It uses Hyper Historian to collect and process the data of the filling machines. Performance calculations are configured to calculate production metrics, OEE, and quality analytics is used for SPC.
[48:14]
You know, we just heard about how the R&D team at Mitsubishi Electric's is using ICONICS as part of the work they're doing in the SUSTIE building. This global car manufacturer had very similar goals. They wanted to reduce the energy consumed at their facilities. They use ICONICS to monitor energy usage across all of their manufacturing and related office buildings. They monitor the energy usage of each production line through some pretty complex meter calculations. As we all know that the data is not always easily acceptable or accessible and they use our ability to do custom calculations with Hyper Historian to help solve that problem. They use AssetWorX to logically organize all of that data that's associated with each building with each production line, with each machine, with each key piece of equipment to make it easy, navigable, and understandable by everybody in the organization. Hyper Historian captures the data, and then the custom calculations calculate all the energy that's used. Then all of the data is accessible to everybody through dashboards that are available on the web. We have a session later today on rethinking solutions for your connected worker. One of the customer examples that we'll be sharing in detail in that session is Lake City's Municipal Utility Authority in Texas; they wanted to improve the information that was available for their field service workers. So CFSWorX is a notification system designed to streamline the efficiency of your field service organization. It combines the real time monitoring of connected equipment with information about your field service team. At Lake Cities, it allows them to dispatch Field Service Workers based on schedule, their training, their proximity to a particular fault. And then the field service team can also get notifications based on alarm conditions, predictive faults or from their dispatcher. So, the solution has done a lot to drive the efficiency of the field service team, and you'll learn more about it in the session later today. So, what's next for ICONICS? What does our future hold? Well, as I said earlier, I don't think any of us could have predicted what we've been dealing with for the last 18 months, two years ago. I certainly didn't. Personally, I've learned that change happens when you least expect it. It happens faster than ever before. And our supply chain is global. We're all interdependent on each other. We all feel the effects of events happening around the world more acutely than ever before. So, what is the new normal? According to Pew Research, before the COVID pandemic, close to 50% of the employees who had jobs that could be done remotely, so they could work remote, they never did. And another 20% of them did it less than one day a week. So about 70% of the people who could be remote, were never remote more than one day a week. Post COVID, 19 44% of employees are working remote all of the time that can and another 10% are working remote, three or four days of the week. So, we have more than 50% of the people still that can work remote are, so they're rarely at the office. That's a staggering change in how we work and for many of us, including those of us that ICONICS, it literally happened overnight. It wasn't planned. It just happened. Who thought a stuck ship could cause so much impact? Sure, was carrying 20,000 containers. It's a 200,000 ton container ship, one of the largest ships in the world. It blocked the Suez Canal for six days holding an estimated $9.6 billion of trade up every day. 12% of the global trade goes through the Suez Canal every year, so it's easy to see why it had such an impact on supply chains globally. It caused delays in manufacturing from automotive parts to clothing globally. We see an impact from weather events where they've never happened before. It feels like the 100 year flood, or 500 year storm happens every season. As remnants of Hurricane Ida swept over New York City earlier in September, Central Park recorded 3.15 inches of rain in a single hour causing extensive flooding throughout the city. It was the single highest hour of rainfall ever recorded in Central Park. It was 62% higher than the previous peak, which was recorded the previous month when Hurricane Henry went up the East Coast.
[53:11]
Many of you in the US will remember the ransomware cyber-attack that targeted Colonial Pipeline this past May. Fuel shortages began to occur a couple of days after the attack. By May 11, more than 70% of the fuel stations in Charlotte were out of fuel. A couple of days later, in Washington, DC, 87% of the gas stations were out of fuel. American Airlines changed their flight schedules to avoid Charlotte Douglas International Airport because they were low on fuel. Ransomware attacks are increasing. Between 2019 and 2020, they increased 158% for companies in North America. In 2020, the FBI received 2500 complaints from companies about ransomware attacks. There are other changes; some might not consider them quite as impactful. But would any of us identified that as a vegetable a couple years ago. The new normal is change. We should expect it, and we should plan for it. As we look forward, there's really a few key things that will drive our priorities in product development at ICONICS. We want to be able to run ICONICS anywhere on the edge, on premise, in the cloud. We want to have a common platform and code base for visualization, command and control, historical data collection, and analytics. Being able to connect any source of data on any device from anywhere ensuring that you can continue to use ICONICS as you do today, giving you the ability to add hundreds and 1000s and 10s of 1000s of devices to your solution. Enabling analysis across all of your sources of data, giving you access to the information wherever you need it: on your portable, on your phone, on your watch. We want to help you make it easy to create a digital twin, to speed implementation, to reduce downtime, to increase your efficiency, to give you better context of the data helping you turn that data into information, breaking down those silos of data and creating a common understanding of the data across your organization. And we need to continue to do everything that we can to help you keep your system secure. For ICONICS, this is our new normal week. We've continuously invested in keeping the technology of the ICONICS platform current; that's not changing. We've made GENESIS64 available from the Azure Market place. You can have the instance of the software up and running in about 10 minute, which is a tremendous benefit when you're developing and testing your application.
[56:03]
IoTWorX is the start of our work to migrate our core services to dotnet standard. One advantage this provides is the ability to run the software on both Microsoft and Linux operating systems. It also adds unique features like remote deployment and remote support. Our next step is to move more of our code base to dotnet standard, to cross platform Microsoft framework. We now support Docker containerization with IoT works and will continue on this path for the main parts of the ICONICS suite. This will allow our software to be deployed anywhere: on the edge running on Linux, to natively running on a cloud platform of your choice. We'll be adding web to configuration for all of ICONICS which will allow you to do your configuration from any browser. Connectivity will continue to be paramount. And we're continuing our commitment to OPC UA. We recently added support for MQTT routing support with our next release for Sparkplug B. We're working with our partner Takebishi on integrating their device explorer to provide an even more comprehensive set of data connectivity to industrial equipment. Our goal is to give you the option to run all of ICONICS however it best fits your application, from on premise, to the edge, to the cloud, or a hybrid model that spans all three. We will continue to offer ICONICS as we do today, for on premise usage models. But we'll also be adding ICONICS in the form of a platform as a service and software as a service, depending on your requirements. And you'll hear some examples of both of those later today. Nothing's more important than providing you with the most secure product possible. ICONICS is architected to be secure at every level; we have to be. We're used in data centers, train control systems, airports; the Department of Defense uses their software. We have to meet their requirements and follow the standards issued by the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. We work with the industrial control system cyber security response team, more commonly known as ICS Cert. You know, it seems like a long time ago, that security meant simply I was the only person in the plant with the computer. There's a session later today, titled Safeguarding Against Cybersecurity Threats with Secure Data Connectivity which will go into this critical topic in more detail. Since ICONICS became part of Mitsubishi Electric, we've been working across the businesses on a shared technology that we call unified visualization. I'm pleased that our first products leveraging this capability will be released next year. You know, a foundation of ICONICS has been “Make the invisible visible”. Being able to visualize all of your data in your operations is core to what we do. Unified visualization will allow you to use the same graphic symbol to run on a PC, a tablet, a phone, or an operator panel. The unified symbol combines the data values or registers where we're getting values, visual elements that control the display events in logics. And you'll have the flexibility to use the same visual elements that you designed to represent your equipment, your work cell or press cell on any visualization platform that you choose. We're currently working on adding an augmented reality capability that will work from your phone or your tablet. So, this will allow a technician in the field to see what's happening inside something, what's happening inside a controller, what's happening inside a drive, what's happening inside a critical piece of equipment. So, I'm going to show a short video that Zhi Wei Li from our engineering team put together that just demonstrates an early prototype of this capability.
[1:00:10] Zhi Wei Li, ICONICS Director of Innovation and Engineering, US
“The Video: Making the Invisible Visible with Augmented Reality”
Hi, everyone. I'm looking here at Mitsubishi Electric PLC in our test lab. Traditionally, if I wanted to view the faceplate of this PLC, I will need to open a browser, enter some IP address, or use an HMI interface connected to it. With the AR technology ICONICS is developing, it simplifies all of that. All I have to do is point my phone running the AR app to the PLC, and it recognizes PLC and brings up the faceplate displays associated to it that what we're looking at here. It is pretty standard faceplate setup. The cool thing obviously is that it's showing up as an augmented reality display as if it's actually in front of us. This faceplate display is four panels as you can see. Here on the first panel, we have a faceplate showing us the various real time status and levels of variables from the control logic of the PLC. Changes in any of the variables are reflected and animated here in real time. On the second panel are some status buttons. The user could interact with these change any state program and the logic.
[1:01:28]
On the third panel, we have other status and control buttons. These can be used to change the START/STOP status at the PLC or mark certain steps as complete or trigger some other activity. The associated to these buttons.
[1:05:50]
On the fourth panel, we have a trend view showing a trend of the variable from the PLC, and the real time value of some other variables. As the value of the plot variable changes, it is reflected on the plot in near real time, as you can see, pretty cool.
[1:02:10]
This proof of concept display that I'm showing serves to illustrate the possibilities of our future where interaction with our equipment doesn't have to be cumbersome, and where data and information seamlessly augments our reality.
[1:02:33] Ted Hill
Thanks Zhi. You know, the only question you get now from everybody is when's that going to be available because it looks really cool. Let's take a minute and just take a closer look at Mitsubishi Electric's vision to connect everything to bring you information and insights.
(Mitsubishi video plays.)
[1:08:00]
I'm really pleased that Microsoft is going to be joining us next. ICONICS and Microsoft, we've worked very closely together for a long time. We've worked on development together; we've done some joint customer projects together. Microsoft uses ICONICS to manage all of their facilities globally. ICONICS has been a Microsoft Partner of the Year Award winner 10 times. In this past July, we were the runner up in the category of Sustainability Change Maker, and that was out of 4400 companies that had been nominated. We're going to be joined by Shawn Hartnett. Shawn leads the US industry Advisor Team for Smart Buildings. He and his team work with clients and partners on their digital strategies, solutions, and processes to help them optimally manage all the assets they have, their space, and their people. Shawn, really appreciate you taking time to join us at Connect 2021. Welcome.
[1:09:02] Sean Hartnett, Microsoft US Industry Advisor Team for Smart Buildings
Thanks, Ted. I'm excited to be here at ICONICS Connect 2021. And you know what, it's amazing how much are two companies are aligned on our sustainability roadmaps and positions. So, I'll get into that right now. And I'm here to share how Microsoft is positioned for sustainability, our future goals, and how we can help our customers be successful using our technology and our partners’ technology like ICONICS. And we're going to get into some of these examples today and really highlight what we've done together on our campus to achieve sustainability. So, let's get started. We see climate change and humanity's response to it as one of the greatest challenges of our lifetime. According to the August 2021 report of the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, climate change is affecting every region on the earth in multiple ways. Carbon dioxide, CO2, is one of the main drivers of climate change. The report that strong sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. And the report confirms that unless there are immediate, rapid, and large scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to one and a half, or even two degrees Celsius, will be big enough. But we believe it's not too late to put together a future that allows everyone not only survive, but also thrive. And for that, we need to work at the intersection of technology and science. So, we can better understand what's happening, and respond with tools to better manage our environmental resources and mitigate risks on local and global scales.
[1:11:07]
At Microsoft, sustainability is not just something we do for an operational standpoint; it's at the core of our business. And we're committed to harnessing the power of technology to help everyone everywhere build a more sustainable future. And today, I'm happy to share with you how we've done that ourselves and with our partner ICONICS. Plus, I will talk about how we can collectively work together to achieve more. Because we believe it's not only the responsibility of every company to manage change and think sustainably, but we also think it's everyone's opportunity to change. At Microsoft, we've invested in building the world's leading platform for technology solutions to enable environmental challenges. Many companies including ours map their sustainability and corporate responsibility strategies to the UN Sustainability Development Goals, adopted by all 190 UN states as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainability Development. We support all of the UN goals, but we are focusing today on environmental sustainability in four key areas of carbon, waste, water, and ecosystems. Our goal is to use the whole of Microsoft's business power to affect change in those areas by minimizing the negative impacts of our operations and maximizing the positive impacts of our technology. While we've long been focused on operating our business as effectively as possible, increasingly we're taking responsibility for our carbon, water waste, and land footprints across our product and facilities including our supply chain. We are developing new products and services driven by data, AI, and digital technology to empower environmental sustainability. We're developing new features and benefits to help customers and partners like ICONICS better understand and manage their potential environmental impacts. We will use our voice on the climate related public policy issues and support new policy initiatives to help us all move faster. It's our most important asset. Our people are the ones developing these technologies. And collectively, they are the powerful voice for change. They've continued to push us in new directions. And we know that they will continue to do so. Of the four environmental areas, we are focused on carbon as the area where we've invested the most. And every industry has a carbon footprint that they will increasingly have to manage. Keep in mind this approach and focus we built at doesn't evolve overnight. It's been a long journey.
[1:14:06]
In fact, we started our sustainability journey over a decade ago. So, it is not new. We've landed important work ever since we set our first carbon emission reduction goal back in 2009. We've made steady progress. We've realized that given size of this planetary challenge, we need to up our ambition. And in 2020 we made significant commitments to guide our environmental sustainability work over the next decade and beyond. Because we know that by 2030, society will be on our way to mitigating and adapting rapidly changing climates, reducing the amount of waste we generate, ensuring resilient water supplies, and even reversing the ongoing catastrophic denigration of ecosystems. So, in January 2020, we announced the bold commitment and detailed plan to operate with 100% renewable energy by 2025 and be carbon negative by 2030. We built on the pledge with a series of industry leading commitments to be water positive, a zero waste company by 2030, and develop a new planetary computer to better monitor, model, and manage the world's ecosystems and protect more land than we use. Across the company, our teams are driving these ambitious goals internally and helping set best practices and new standards for business around the world. For our corporate sustainability commitments to make the broadest impact, we need to ensure that the world is working from a common taxonomy and common units and common methods of measurement. We're targeting 2030 as the milestone for standardizing digitized sustainability data. Again, Microsoft has prioritized carbon as our top area for action. In January of 2020, we announced greater goals for reducing our carbon emissions and established a new target. We said that Microsoft would no longer be simply carbon neutral. We will become carbon negative by 2030. By that we mean that we intend to reduce emissions and our operations as low as possible by using renewable energy and by switching to an electrical vehicle fleet. By 2025, we plan to nearly eliminate our scope one and two emissions through energy efficiency work. We'll use zero carbon power and diesel free generation, zero carbon transport with vehicle electrification, and smart building solutions that maximize efficiency. We will continually improve energy efficiency and datacenters, shifting to low carbon standby power systems, including battery storage and low carbon fuel such as hydrogen. We will collectively purchase enough renewable energy to match our data centers, buildings and campus electricity use worldwide. We will reduce scope three emissions by more than half by 2030. We'll do this by importing supplier missions, data tracking and reporting. Applying our existing carbon free which is successful to date and optimizing energy efficiency and devices and software like ICONICS. We are piloting even new tools to help us shift to more virtual events and other ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We plan to remove our historical emissions by the year 2050. Accounting for direct and electricity consumption related emissions back to 1975. I wasn't even alive. To achieve this, we will pioneer the use of carbon dioxide removal technologies to negate all the emissions we cannot abate. Along the way will sustain our innovative partnerships and projects such as renewable energy matching solutions, distributed energy pilots, and grid interactive energy storage batteries. We've made great headway. And here are some of the highlights that we reported back in January 2021. We've reduced our carbon emissions across all scopes by more than 580 metric tons and FY20, we've invested over $50 million in energy impact partners and other sustainability investments. And in 2021, we're focused on continuing the progress against our carbon negative agenda, scaling up our supply chain, and engaging deeply with top suppliers to reduce their emissions and collect carbon data from their activities. Expanding innovation and technology based carbon removal as we shift our carbon removal portfolio towards a balance of nature and technology based solutions. And new functionalities will be added to our Microsoft sustainability calculator and building new sustainable solution accelerators and technology features in the future. All the while we plan to scale and accelerate our climate mitigation activities through a phased approach. We'll continue to use our voice, expand our global R&D, and to seek to remove regulatory barriers. And empower consumers through transparency on universal standards.
[1:19:29]
We will also drive climate equity through prioritizing and funding, ensuring accountability for those projects and under resourced communities. And we'll continue to expand this across all of our buildings and our campuses. And in fact, our first sustainability project here at Microsoft was an energy smart building solution that we partnered with ICONICS to utilize here on our campus which utilized Azure, IoT analytics, and AI. ICONICS in their software that enabled Microsoft to collect and analyze the IoT sensor data from building management systems giving us the visibility into the properties health, so we can improve energy efficiency and lower costs. And ICONICS is also using Azure digital twins to boost the software's capabilities and rapidly deliver solutions to our customers such as occupancy and spatial analytics. And it's pretty amazing. Back when we started this here on our campus, our initial effort was focused on about 125 buildings in Redmond at the time, and we had about 15 million square feet of our office space and land space on 500 acres. And we were servicing more than 60,000 employees across the campus. And there were multiple disparate building systems and other IoT devices. And ultimately, we were spending about $60 million annually on our utility spend. So, we had a pretty big challenge in front of us. And we utilized and partnered ICONICS to help us leverage and manage the data from these different systems to effectively reduce our emissions and energy costs. We put the software sensors on everything from fire extinguishers to HVAC blowers to lights in conference rooms. Were able to see all of our buildings in one single unified view and understand where the problems were happening. And in some cases, were able to actually solve those business problems before they even started. By analyzing the nearly 500 million real time transactions a day, we were able to automate processes and reduce energy consumption, while also identifying and predicting issues and equipment failure. As a result of that initial effort, Microsoft achieved a 10 to 25% reduction depending on the building on average energy usage with an implementation payback in less than 18 months. We most recently have continued to expand on that project and incorporated more AI tools such as Project Bonzai. And we've seen another 15% reduction in our energy consumption. We will continue to work with ICONICS and our partner ecosystem to help customers optimize their operations, saving energy, saving money, all the smart building strategies. Using IoT and AI, we can collect data and open visibility into these operations and identify anomalies that need to be addressed and autonomously controlled and ultimately lead to increased sustainability. Soon Microsoft will be launching the new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. This is the future. And it will be a comprehensive integrated automated sustainability management platform for organizations at any stage of the sustainability journey. It is designed to streamline the processes for businesses to collect data, analyze the data, and ultimately turn it into insights.
[1:23:22]
The new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will enable you to more effectively record, report and reduce your emissions on the path to net zero with future plans to support water and waste tracking. The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will help those organizations again, collected data, accelerate integration, enable more reporting, and enable them to ultimately track against those sustainability goals here in the future. For more information, please feel free to go to microsoft.com/sustainability to get additional insights and how you can accelerate your goals to net zero. I look forward to talking with all of you, and I hope we've learned a lot today. And what we've done with our partner ecosystem, with our partner ICONICS here, and that we've helped you reimagine how your business can achieve sustainability through this new lens. And again, together we can transform the business to meet new demands and markets to help you build more sustainable futures by harnessing the power of technology. Ted, it's been great presenting here at ICONICS Connect 2021. I look forward to participating in the rest of the today's events.
[1:24:37] Ted Hill
Shawn, thank you. Hopefully next time you'll be able to join us in person when we can have an in- person event. This next story it's really interesting. It's about adding value to your customers through connected services to help them better utilize the equipment that you've provided to them. It's an IoT application from Microsoft that uses Azure, Azure IoT Hub. It also uses Event Hub Data Lake. For ICONICS, it uses our visualization Hyper Historian and IoTWorX at the edge in order to move data from that machine up to the cloud. Spirax Sarco is a division of Spirax Sarco Engineering PLC. The company was founded in 1888 and has operations in 130 countries around the world. Their business is focused on specialties around steam, electric thermal solutions, and pumps and different fluid path technologies. ICONICSS UK and Spirax Sarco, they've been working closely together for about 15 years providing traditional SCADA systems. Two years ago, Spirax Sarco conducted a comprehensive market evaluation to find a technology partner to work with. They had a vision for something they called steam specialties cloud and were looking for a partner that could help them create it. They chose ICONICSS UK, and the team's been working closely together ever since. This is a really exciting opportunity for both companies with plans to deploy this application globally. Alister Monk is the Global Product Owner for Spirax Sarco steam specialty business. Alister was unable to join us live today, but we had the opportunity to interview him about his vision for connected services at Spirax Sarco. Alister has extensive experience in product development. He previously led the development of Spirax in weirs, IoT enabled range of smart products and instruments. He knows how important putting the right team together is having been a professional footballer earlier in his life. Let's hear from Alister
[1:26:52] Allister Monk, Global Product Owner for Spirax Sarco
We're a global engineering company. We employ 8000 people worldwide. We're a leader in our chosen industrial markets, looking after heating and thermal solutions. I work within the steam business, and we provide a range of OEM products and services to our end user customers in industry and a range of commercial applications. My role is very simply heading up connected services which is really about developing a range of smart products and services whereby we connect those products and services that we currently have today, and we make them that much smarter and better.
[1:27:39]
Customers increasingly recognize that the benefits of IoT enabled remote monitoring, so it provides them with visibility that they've never had before, over the industrial steam systems. And what it really enables us to do is to be able to support them more effectively with our application expertise with that additional insight.
[1:28:03]
ICONICS role is pivotal. They provide us with the foundational piece for IoT, so what that enables us to do is to capture that insight in real time 24/7. And we bring that into a broader ecosystem which looks at the board asset management of our equipment.
[1:28:28]
The way in which we're approaching it is to look across the steam system at any issues that relate to the performance of the system: How do you optimize the energy efficiency? How do you make sure that the system is reliable, making sure that it's safe. And ultimately, what customers are looking for is making sure that the system performs to the best of its ability and does it in a reliable way and basically does it in a controlled and safe environment. So, they're really the pivotal drivers for our customers. Well, ICONICS was really the natural choice for us; it really comes down to the industrial automation experience and the heritage of the ICONICS brand. So, you've got that in depth experience of working with our operational customers. So, the maintenance managers, the reliability engineers, the plant managers, so these are people that are our end user customers and ultimately what that enables us to do, is to really focus on building on the next level of value for them. So, you've got that user experience embedded within your platform that aligns to the requirements of those users with the alerts and notifications, the way you get the data. And what it enables us to then do is focus on how do we leverage that to then build out specialist theme applications that can enhance our services. So that part is really, really important. There's also the fact that when we think about the broader ecosystem, you work in the Microsoft as your environment as well. And that's really, really important for us. Microsoft is also our cloud provider; we have utilized a lot of services from them as well. So having the ability to seamlessly move between those different platforms is also really, really important. But the big piece for us was really about the industrial automation heritage.
[1:30:29]
The best way to think about it is ICONICS is essentially part of family. And what I mean by that is that we're working with ICONICS each and every day. They're embedded within our development team, so we work through our sprint planning with them, they're part of our agile squad helping us with the development and configuration of the ICONICS platform. And really, what that enables us to do is then focus on doing what we do best as a business which is infusing our knowledge about steam systems and building out those specialist applications.
[1:31:04]
We mentioned the point earlier where you have to go to site, you're doing inspection, you capture some information physically. Now to be able to do that remotely, have that information in real time 24/7, means that we can be got data at scale. We've got the data when we need it, so we know when the problems are happening. We've got visibility of them; it starts off with most businesses are reactive, they work on a time service intervals. And really what that means is to the point you're inferring that people might be going to site when the problem is not happening. And ultimately what you want to do is make best use of that precious resource and direct it to where the issues are. And so that really is about driving that journey of moving from reactive to preventive maintenance which is really what we're working through right now towards predictive so that’s a big part of the future and really enabling us to better service our customers.
[1:32:05]
Sustainability is something that is absolutely front and center for us all right now, isn't it? I mean, we're all global citizens. We recognize the climate emergency that we're in. And that's reflected in what we do and our purpose as a business. We have a one planet corporate strategy which is really about putting that issue at the center of the organization. And within the IoT is a huge enabler, and it comes back down to some of the points that we've already mentioned. So, what we do know about our customers steam systems is that often the suboptimal in terms of their energy efficiency, performance. And so, if the 80-85% energy efficient, and what we can do is we can start to drive that number up. And customers targets are very much sort of 95% plus. And so, we can work with them, remotely monitor their systems, look at the boiler, identify areas of inefficiencies, look at where we might have steam loss through that system or leakages, and really start to address that through the power of IoT, for the power of remote monitoring, and the analytics and insight that our services team can provide alongside that capability.
[1:33:22]
How do you create an autonomous, self-regulating steam system that adapts to its conditions? We talked about the drivers to be, that 100% efficient steam system. If you're going to achieve that you need something that can self-regulate itself, almost a system that's aware. So maybe a valve that looks and says,” Okay, we're suboptimal in terms of delivery of steam to our customers process right now. So, what can I do to improve that? I'm going to open slightly at this particular point in time and close in another.” So it's getting to that sort of situation where you have that self-regulating autonomous system that ultimately drive our ability to be able to deliver against that sustainability mission that we were just talking to. So, it's a really exciting journey to be on with ICONICS.
[1:34:17] Ted Hill
I hope you found that a very interesting application of the technology that's available and what can be done today. Earlier, we heard from a piece of the research and development organization that's Mitsubishi Electric and on the work they're doing in the SUSTIE building. Next, we're going to share some work that happens a lot closer to home to us here at ICONICS at least geography wise, Mitsubishi Electric, their research lab is just down the road in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's generically referred to as MERL. MELCO as a company, we invest almost $1.9 billion annually in primary research every year, and it's a huge benefit to ICONICS and what we'll be able to put into our products and the value that we'll be able to bring to customers. They have several research locations in Japan. They also have R&D Labs in France, and the UK. And then here in Cambridge in the US. The US lab MERL, their research is focused on physical modeling and simulation, signal processing, control, optimization, and artificial intelligence. And it's really exciting how applicable their researches to our work here at ICONICS.
[1:35:48]
I'm pleased to introduce Daniel Nikovski from MERL. Daniel holds a PhD degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and joined MERL in 2002. He's the Group Manager of the Data Analytics Team, and their team does primary research in algorithms. Daniel has been published in over 150 papers and holds 44 US patents; it's a little intimidating to introduce him. Today, Daniel is going to be sharing some of the work that his team did, specifically a few years ago with the University of California on fault detection from time series data. And for anyone that works with ICONICS knows that we have stored an awful lot of time series data. So, I think it's pretty exciting some of the things that we're investigating that we can do together. We're looking at how we can add some of the capabilities that Daniel is going to talk about to our Hyper Historian in analytics products. Daniel, welcome to Connect 2021. It's great to have somebody here live. Thank you.
[1:36:55 Dr. Daniel Nikovski, Group Manager of the Data Analytics Team for Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL)
Yes, thank you. Thank you, Ted for the introduction and also for the invitation to speak here at this ICONICS event today. Good morning, everybody here in Foxborough and also all over the world. My name is Daniel Nikovski. Today, I will be talking about a class of data analytics technologies that is very applicable to the analysis of large data sets in the form of time series. They're called advanced primitives for time series analysis. So, at this point, you might be wondering how something can be both primitive and advanced. And I'd be very happy to explain what I mean by this. But before that, let me give you an overview of the kind of work that we do in our lab, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, or MERL. It is by and large, a computational research lab. And we're working on artificial intelligence, including machine learning, optimization control, signal processing, and physical modeling and simulation. We have about 62 researchers here in the Cambridge location, but we are part of the central R&D Division of our company, which is 2000 researchers strong. And we work very closely with our collaborators in the domestic labs in Japan. At the same time, we are one of the most academically oriented labs, and we're very well connected to various university labs where we take a lot of technology, and we develop it further for the benefit of Mitsubishi Electric and its subsidiary companies. We are publishing a lot, more than 150 publications per year, more than 100 patents filed every year. MERL is one of the top 10 producers of IP in the state of Massachusetts, even though we have over 62 people who do this. And this year, we're celebrating the 30th year since the establishment of the lab. So, it has been 30 years of great innovation. Specifically, my group, we work on technologies, essentially for making better decisions from data. And all of this work revolves around data models in decisions. The two main classes of technologies are in predictive modeling, where we analyze the data in built models, and then decision and optimization where we take these models and based on them, we make optimal decisions about the performance of equipment.
[1:39:40]
And time series analysis, the topic that I'll be talking about today is in the former category of predictive modeling. So today Ted talked about applications; 375,000 of them deployed by ICONICS. And in many of these cases, the way to build these applications is to store your data in a suitable data storage system. It could be a relational database management system; it would be better if it's a historian for time series data. In many cases, though, the actual application is built right on top of the data system and is the responsibility of the system developer to access this data in an efficient manner. And this could be very laborious and very costly. At the same time, it's quite possible that many methods are reinvented and reimplemented which results in inefficiencies. These 307,000 applications, they must have some commonalities, which can possibly be leveraged to do this application development process more efficient. So, a better way is to recognize these commonalities and try to reduce the applications to prototypical classes of tasks. And in many of these examples that Ted gave, some of these tasks came up: it's fault detection, fault diagnostics, and fault prognostics. They were in the Continental example; they were in the car manufacturer example. I think they were also in the previous application from the previous speaker. So, when we recognize these commonalities, we can map them to prototypical analytics tasks. So, for example, fault detection can be mapped to anomaly detection. Fault diagnostics is mapped to classifications; we want to know which one of several classes of faults we're dealing with, and fault prognostics is well, prognostics. Now, these tasks classification, anomaly detection, prognostics have been studied in the field of AI and machine learning as a general abstract problem. So, if we can come up with general purpose advanced solutions, we can improve tremendously the speed of analysis, and the efficiency of these algorithms. At the same time, we are increasing the size of the datasets that we can possibly handle. And also, it allows for this domain independent technology optimization where we can use maybe advanced hardware in addition to advanced algorithms. Now, how exactly can we do this in the case of time series analysis?
[1:42:40]
It turns out that a very good way to compute analytics efficiently is to use so-called time series analysis primitives. So, these primitives are lower level tasks and data structures and algorithms for their discovery that we can use to solve the actual analytics problems. And moreover, each of these primitives can be handled by dedicated very high performance algorithms. Many research labs in academia and also in industry are working hard to optimize these algorithms. And some examples of such primitives are shapelets, discords, and motifs. And the reason I'm calling them primitives is that they are below the level of actual application, so they are more basic, more primitive, and at the same time so much work has gone into optimizing their computation that the current technology is very advanced. So, some examples are shapelets. So, what are shapelets? Shapelets are patterns within time series that are maximally distinctive, and they can help distinguish between two classes of time series. Here on the left hand side graph, you see time series from two different devices: a dishwasher and an oven cooker. These are power consumption; you can see that the power consumption has some common elements that distinguishes one device from the other. They're not exactly the same. They're similar, but they're not exactly the same. So, the question is, how can we find these shapelets, these patterns in the fastest possible manner. So, a lot of work has gone into this. They were proposed originally by Professor Ayman Keogh from the University of California at Riverside, and his students more than a decade ago. And since then, they have been used on all kinds of classification, anomaly detection, and clustering tasks. So that's why it's so primitive it can be used for so many different things. And we have been able to extend it in collaboration with this lab; one of the students in this lab came to our lab as an intern to the case of prognostics where the problem is harder. So, it is a kind of a classification, but from weakly labelled data. So, this arises when we have multiple time series from a device that is run to failure. It is very common, you record the data and at some point, your device fails. Another device of the same model is run again, and it fails. So, we'd like to know what subsequence in this time series is predictive of this failure. And we know that they failed. But it's a weak classification label because we don't know what part of this time series was normal and what was not normal. If we knew what the normal part was, we apply shapelets the standard algorithm and discover what distinguishes one from the other. However, in this case, we do not know it. If we knew what the predictive pattern is, then we can do the separation of the time series also trivially by where that pattern is and where it is not. However, we have to solve the two problem at the same time. It's not a trivial problem, we were able to solve it again in collaboration with this university lab.
[1:46:28]
And we got awarded a patent for this technology in 2015. So, this is an example of how we take precompetitive research from some of the top labs in the country and in the world, and we develop it creating IP that we can then contribute to the subsidiaries of Mitsubishi Electric. Another class of primitives are motifs and discords. So, a discord of a time series is its most dissimilar pattern with respect to the same or maybe a different time series. Here on the left hand side graph, you see that there is a subsequence which looks strange, right? It is the one that's in red; it is not similar to anything else that's happening in this time series. Most humans would agree this is anomalous. So how do we make the computer recognize this as an anomaly. So, in this case, we would like to find very quickly what subsequence in this time series is most dissimilar. It's obviously very useful for anomaly detection. Discords are just the opposite thing. This is the pair of subsequences which are most similar. And here on the right hand side, you see that there are three patterns, three sub sequences. The ones that are colored, that are quite similar to each other; they're not the same. They're not the same. But they're similar to each other and distinct different from everything else. So how do we find these in the fastest possible way. If you do the usual brute force approach, then it's very, very computation inefficient, and you cannot really apply it to long time series. So, a lot of algorithms for the fast computation of motifs and discords have been proposed in the last maybe about 20 years. Well, until about five years ago, you needed the separate algorithm for each primitive, and even had dozens of algorithms for each one of these primitives. And that's a good way of doing things. But there might be a better way which was again, proposed by the same lab at the University of California in Riverside. So, an innovation was the discovery and the implementation of the so called matrix profile of a time series which can be applied for the computation of many primitives. You can think of it as the Swiss Army knife of the time series analysis domain, and it has been widely considered to be one of the top developments in the field of time series analysis in the last 10 years. It was introduced about five years ago. So, what is the matrix profile of a time series? It is a companion time series of approximately the same length that stores the distance from each subsequence; you decide on the length of the subsequence. In this case, it's M samples. So, the nearest distance from this subsequence to any such subsequence of this length anywhere in this time series, or it could be in a different time series if you want to do it across time series. And you also store exactly which of these other time series the nearest neighbor is. So, it can be used to discover motifs, discords, and also other primitives. And you can see why it's so easy if you have the matrix profile to do this. The discord of a time series is simply the point with the highest value in the matrix profile.
[1:50:29]
Because the meaning of this matrix profile is how similar a subsequence is to the closest neighbor in the time series. If this value is high, this is a discord; it's not similar to anything else. And then the motif is just the opposite. The motif is the lowest value of the matrix profile. So, once you have this magical time series, the Matrix profile, everything else falls out. It's very easy to compute these primitives. And it turns out that it can be computed very efficiently and also makes very efficient use of modern hardware, including GPUs. So, we're working together with the university on extension, such as localized matrix profile, pan matrix profile, which is when you don't know the length of the subsequence, you want to compute it for all possible subsequences. Also, there's another development here is that the proposal of this tool, the matrix profile has enabled the creation of completely new time series primitives and one of them is time series chains, which has interesting history. The concept was proposed by a researcher from the Information Technology Center in Japan; we saw presentation from the center earlier during this keynote, Dr. Imamura, who is now a professor at Osaka University in Tokyo. So, the concept here is very similar to motifs. However, there is a direction of change in these motifs. So, an example is given on the left hand side. This is data from a freezer. Every half hour there is a pattern, but you can see that this pattern evolves; doesn't stay in one place. And in the middle of graph, we have shown here the difference between a time series chain and a motif. A motif in this abstract visualization space, we're showing that a motif are the red points and the magenta points which they change, they fluctuate but stay in the same locality. The time series chain is when this pattern evolves in a particular direction, signifying change. So, if you can model this movement, then we can detect gradual change. And if we can establish at what point during this evolution a failure occurs, we have a prognostic system. It's very easy to build a prognostic system. So, before the matrix profile was discovered, it was computationally impossible to find these time series chains efficiently. But after this discovery, turns out there is a very efficient algorithm to do it. So, here's how it works. At the right hand side graph, you can see a sequence of values. So, suppose the length of the sequence is just one, the time series chain is embedded there. This is the sequence 1,2,3,4, and 5, and there are some spurious values in between. That's what we want to discover. How can we do it? It turns out that if we compute the left matrix profile, so that is find the nearest neighbor on the left; in the right matrix profile, find the nearest profile nearest neighbor on the right, then an element of this time series belongs to a time series chain if it is the left nearest neighbor of its right nearest neighbor. It's as simple as that. So, once we have the matrix profile, we can discover it very quickly. So, we discovered this algorithm again with a student from this lab, and this got us the best student paper award at the International Conference on Data Mining in 2017.
[1:54:37]
So, with these examples, I wanted to make the point that time series analysis primitives are very powerful set of tools. They are domain independent; they can be used in various analytical problems in applications that came up during discussions here today for fault detection, diagnostics, and prognostics, also abrupt and gradual change detection. So, the performance of the algorithm, the algorithm for discovery of these primitives have been optimized and have fantastically fast performance: speed ups of 1000 times and millions of times are possible using advanced computer science techniques and also advanced the modern hardware. It's still an area of active research in academia and industry. And our labs have been working together both with academic partners, as well as with our collaborators in the domestic labs in Japan for the benefit of customers of ICONICS and other parts of Mitsubishi Electric. So, with this I will conclude. Thank you very much for your attention.
[1:55:59] Ted Hill
Daniel, thank you. I think it's got to be pretty easy for the ICONICS customers to see the value that we're going to be able to add to our applications by leveraging the type of research that's done by the R&D teams across Mitsubishi Electric. So, Daniel, thank you. We wanted to highlight one other piece of research that MERL was involved in a while back but has been taken over by our Power Products Division. I had the opportunity a couple of months ago to spend a day at MERL, and they showed me a variety of research projects they were doing and to some people from the ICONICS team. In one of the projects that MERL was working on as they were helping the power products business investigate how they could use new technology to help their customers in their business. The power product business in North America is based in Pittsburgh, and they've been an ICONICS customer. We've worked together for a number of years; they use our software for SCADA applications.
[1:56:57]
Michael Doak from the Power Business is going to be joining us next. He's based in Pittsburgh, and he's the Product Manager for something that's called Power I. Michael's brought new technology to the power industry for the last 20 years. Currently, he's leading an engineering team that's combining software engineering, computer vision, and mechanical and electrical engineering. And they're developing a state of the art computer vision and machine learning platform that moves. They call it Power I. Michael, thanks for joining us.
[1:57:31] Michael Doak, Power I Product Line Manager for Mitsubishi Power Electric
Thanks, Ted. I'm excited to be here with ICONICS today at Connect 2021. My name is Michael Doak, and I'm the Product Manager at Mitsubishi Electric Power products where I'm in charge of developing a state of the art software platform named Power I. Thank you for allowing me to crash the ICONICS Connect conference for a few minutes to introduce you to Meppi and the Power I product. Meppi is a sister company to ICONICS based in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, about 30 minutes north of Pittsburgh. We primarily serve the North American electrical utility market as a manufacturer of high voltage and medium voltage circuit breakers, power transformers, turnkey electrical substations, and power electronics, and electricity transmission technologies. We have been around since the late 1980s and have grown to offer products in almost all aspects of electric utility from generation to transmission to distribution and consumption. Our equipment enables the backbone are the power grid to operate and ensure that our electric utilities customers enable you as consumers to be able to turn the light every time you tell Alexa to turn the light because who manually flipped light switches anymore, right? Alexa, turn on the light. It allows you to watch Netflix every time you turn on the TV. It allows you to charge your electric vehicle regardless of where power is actually coming from, be it traditional generation or renewable energy sources. You can trust the Mitsubishi Electric equipment to be the highest quality products with the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry. Even though the products we sell are critical to everyone's daily lives, Meppi, as all companies are, is innovating and bringing new technologies to the market. Power I was conceived from revision two years ago to develop an advanced analytics platform based on computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for the utility industry to perform autonomous inspections and condition based maintenance of critical electrical facilities. Power I also provides real time visual intelligence, increased facility security, and provides enhanced employee safety by allowing robots to perform the work required in hazardous environments. Power I takes image data, thermal data, and acoustic data from a variety of sensor platforms and creates actionable alerts through the Power IQ AI engine. Power I enables autonomous patrol definitions and scheduling, including smart scheduling when an anomaly is discovered. Automatic asset baseline patrolling when a new asset is added to the system, and emergency patrols scheduling when the system identifies external emergencies, such as natural disasters.
[2:00:32]
In many of our customer facilities, communications can be a challenge due to the remote locations of each facility. We offer support for traditional network communications, cellular communications, and also new satellite communication technologies. We introduced Power I, utilizing fixed cameras, and incorporated Pan and Tilt cameras, and now we are excited to be partnering with Boston Dynamics to bring what may be the coolest commercial product currently on the market to our Power I platform. The Spot quadruped robot allows us to gather data from the ground in real time from any vantage point that we need. It allows us to form Power I’s computer vision models more completely and allows utilities to dispatch a robot remotely to any asset within a facility to gather more intelligence about the health of that asset, or the wellbeing of that facility, all without the need to roll a truck. Spot already has an amazing lineup of sensor platforms available from both Boston Dynamics and its partners. The ability for the robot to gather true ground based data that can be analyzed with artificial intelligence like included in the Power I and the ICONICS software platforms, make it like no other mobile platform. The robot lasts between 70 to 90 minutes on a single charge, and it can return back to his docking station to recharge before running another autonomous mission. Here's a quick video showing the robot undocking walking away and then returning to the dock, all being done autonomously.
[2:02:13] Video of Spot.
[2:04:44]
I don't know about you, but to me, that is pretty cool. Finally, as you can see, Spot is able to traverse rough terrain such as gravel, grass, and hills. It can traverse steps and scale obstacles up to 12 inches in height. It is truly a remarkable piece of technology that allows software developers to become more creative in providing solutions to customers by solving the hard problems that allow innovative solutions like Power I. Here's one last short video of Spot actually performing an inspection in an electrified substation.
[2:03:21] Video of Spot
[2:03:35]
So, in closing, when you flip that light switch on or tell Alexa to do it for you, it is really cool to know that somewhere in the power grid, a piece of Mitsubishi Electric equipment or an innovative software platform developed by Mitsubishi Electric is providing that critical function to your daily lives. We are excited to have ICONICS as part of the Mitsubishi Electric family, and hope that you have a better understanding of the depth of innovation and breadth of experience that ICONICS now has access to as part of the Mitsubishi Electric family. I hope everybody has a wonderful Connect 2021 conference. Thank you, stay safe and have a great day.
[2:04:13] Ted Hill
Michael, thank you. That was sort of an interesting mix of fascinating and sort of creepy at the same time. My daughter's bike got stolen from her house that she lives in at college, and I can't imagine if we didn't have one of those robots patrolling the street that her bike would still be there. Thank you again, Michael. I hope all of you are as excited as I am about our future, the new capabilities that we'll be adding to ICONICS, the opportunities that we have as part of Mitsubishi Electric, working with the R&D groups around the world, with Daniel's team here at MERL and the capabilities that we'll be able to add to our products. As an ICONICS customer, and an ICONICS partner, our commitment to supporting you remains the same. We have a lot more planned for the rest of the rest of today at 10:30 Eastern, Mark Hepburn will be coming back and hosting a session on Stay Agile and Resilient - Solutions to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Initiatives. And there's a lot of really interesting demonstrations of some new product capabilities and things that we're doing with customers that are part of that. And then for this afternoon, you have four different sessions that you can attend: pick one from each track, you are to attend two sessions. But as Mark shared earlier, they're all being recorded. So, if they're of interest, you'll be able to watch them after. And I would be remiss if I didn't thank the sponsors of Connect 2021. An event like this can't really happen without a tremendous amount of help and work. So, we are very appreciative of our sponsors, our customers, and our partners that are participating today and helping make this event happen. The last thing I've been asked to remind everybody is at the end of each session, you have an opportunity to fill out a survey. So, we'd appreciate it if you would take the time to do that.
[2:06:14]
So, with that, that's the end of our opening session for Connect 2021. Thank you very much for everybody that was able to join us here in person, and all of you that are watching remotely. I'm going to turn it over to Paul and Ryan who are going to introduce some of the topics that are coming up through the rest of the day. Thank you again and enjoy the day.
[2:06:35] Mr. Paul Carter ICONICS Business Development Manager
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everybody. Kind of a new session that we've got here with the break with the Connect 2021 is the Newsroom. My name is Paul Carter. I'm going to carry some content and remind some content during the course of the break. For those visiting remotely and those live now is a break, feel free to just step away and take care of whatever: get a drink and get ready for some exciting sessions coming up. With me is Ryan Legg. I'd like to let Ryan introduce himself.
[2:07:09] Ryan Legg, ICONICS Business Development Manager
Thanks, Paul. Yeah, it's great. Great to be here at Connect 2021. I’m excited to be here with Paul, actually in person. It's very, very exciting times here. True 3D. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We’ve certainly covered a lot of topics this morning. And we got a lot more to come. A few of the things that I wanted to recap on was the exciting time it is to be part of ICONICS. Here’s a company that's been around for 35 years now. Unbelievable, a software company for 35 years, going back to the to the MS DOS.
[2:07:52] Ryan Legg
And also to be part of the Mitsubishi Electric family now, part of over $40 billion company that's been around for over 100 years. It's quite amazing. For me personally, it's very special to me. As you may know, Paul, I'm actually a former Mitsubishi Electric employee myself and now to be part of ICONICS and being part of that Mitsubishi Electric family was very special to me; that was a big part of what got me to join ICONICS.
[2:08:34] Paul Carter
One of the things I'd like to share with everybody is that this is my fourth or fifth Customer Summit, even though I've only been with ICONICS for a year and a half. I came to ICONICS from a channel partner, and I've been involved with ICONICS since 2005. And what I always find when I come to these is so many new things. And even sometimes just a new buzzword. Like in the in the video that Mitsubishi showed there was a little term in there called Society 5.0. I have to admit, I hadn't seen that before. I heard Microsoft mentioned something called Planetary Computer and talked about Scope Three Emissions. These are all new terms. What I do when I come to these to these customer summits is I take copious notes, and I write all these terms down. And I know that over the next couple of weeks that I'm going to be spending some of my time researching all of these terms to learn more about what's happening. In addition to the information that's presented in the keynotes and the other presentations, I also find that there's so many other things that are almost embedded in hidden in there, Ted was talking about connectivity. And if some of you may not have noticed, there was a couple of new terms in there one was Sparkplug B, something new I've got to learn about. And there was also another term that I know that we've talked about called MT Connect, which is a communication standard for the machine tool industry and in some of the things that that could transpire and take place there. I found those types of things to be very interesting. And I know that I've taken a lot of notes, and I hope everybody who's watching today is taking a lot of notes that they can go back and continue to learn in addition to be able to replay the videos; pull out those little nuggets that are buried in some of these videos and some of the presenters slides and I think you'll find it's pretty amazing what is happening in the world and in this new normal that we talked about. So, I think that was rather interesting.
[2:10:29] Ryan Legg
To expand on that a little Paul, a couple of points you hit on there and what I really think of is you're talking about the new innovations with Sparkplug B, MT Connect, it's about universal connectivity. That's a key message from ICONICS. Connect and the messaging from Mitsubishi about connect everything. That really hit me in that video. They're monitoring how far we're going and with the investments coming; here we are a company investing nearly $2 billion annually in research and development. It's very exciting. It's significant.
[2:11:09] Paul Carter
I also found that one of Ted's early slides really hit home to me. And that was “If you can imagine it, you can build it with ICONICS”. And I think that all the engineering people and all the engineering talent, I'm sure that's watching today, certainly watching live, sometimes engineering teams seems to be kind of dull and routine and task oriented. And I think it with an application like ICONICS, that allows us to open up and to think about what's happening in the world, and what could our organizations possibly do, if we can really make that invisible information visible. And so, I found that slides spoke a lot to me, it really triggered me. And then he followed it up with some of the applications that customers had used with our product. I remember coming to this workshop, or this Customer Summit multiple years ago when the term big data was starting to be talked about and everybody was like, “Well, what does big data really mean?” And here we are, this year listening to a company like Continental Tire that's collecting 27 trillion samples a year. I mean, that's almost beyond almost beyond imagination. It's incredible. Or Microsoft collecting 500 million samples a day to operate its buildings, again, things that we probably could not conceive of five or 10 years ago are realities. Right. So, it's really incredible.
[2:12:37 ] Ryan Legg
Yeah, well what always hit me is just hearing about the real world examples. And what our customers and partners are doing? You hit on one the Continental Tires; that was one great example. We heard about what Scholle IPN is doing with their OEE. Hearing about Microsoft too. We talked about Mitsubishi. We'd be remiss not to talk about our key relationship with Microsoft. Right. We're absolutely very proud partner of Microsoft for a very long time; a 10 time Partner of the Year; that means a lot. And we were talking about being the runner up for the Sustainability Award. And that was out of what over 4000 submittals for that award?
[2:13:32] Paul Carter
You heard that right, at least, that's what I heard.
[2:13:34] Ryan Legg
I mean, that speaks volumes to me. To be obviously business is a company's goal is to run a business and make a profit, but when we see we're doing things like that are helping society too, that's something I'm very passionate about. We talk about the sustainability topic a lot, right? That's something we heard a lot a lot about today. How about that, SUSTIE building?
[2:14:04] Paul Carter
I found the SUSTIE building very interesting because if we normally think about energy savings, almost all the time, we're thinking about the envelope, the building itself, the equipment in the building, and in the SUSTIE building, it was talking about the usage of the space inside the building as well. Right. It's a much more holistic approach that not only did was in an experiment or R&D center, but they've actually proven that it works, right. And so, use your imagination; how could these things be deployed? Or how can our partners take these types of ideas? Take them to their customers? Or for those customers that are watching today? How can how can they reimagine what they think their facilities and their buildings could be? And in what type of journey could they get on to do that? Right. And, and so you got to start somewhere. And we've got a lot of tools to start in. And who knows where it can go.
[2:15:00] Ryan Legg
Picking up on the connectivity topic. A new relatively new solution that ICONICS has come up with it I caught was mentioned early two is this new CFSWorX solution which is exciting, and which is our Connected Field Worker solution to be able to really not just connecting data but connecting people. This is about connecting your field service network to be able to more quickly react to your customers’ needs to do things like to set up a geo fence, for example. When your field service engineer is driving an area and hits a trigger, it says, “Hey, we have a customer in this area, maybe it's not an emergency situation, but it has to be taken care of.” He's in the area, and maybe there's some maintenance that needs to be done. That's a great example. So again, not just about connecting the data, but connecting the people as well.
[2:16:04] Paul Carter
One of the application examples we've shown, we didn't name the company, but it was a large global automotive company. I'm very, very fortunate to have that as a customer. I actually worked with that company. And it's been an amazing journey to have watched them come from their imagination to their result and what they're doing with it now and to helped them along that journey. It was rewarding to watch them obtain their goals. Not always easy, but it was a very, very rewarding journey. And I really appreciated the opportunity to have worked with that customer. They've been fantastic to work with.
[2:16:42] Ryan Legg
You made me think of something else there, Paul. We go back to the Spirax Sarco customer example. Fascinating usage of technology there, first of all. Now, he talked about being able to remotely see what's going on how and IoT was very key to that, but besides the technology what really hit home to me during that presentation was to hear him say “ICONICS is like part of the family”. We’re obviously a technology company driving technology solutions, but that can only get you so far. What really takes you to the next level is the people and to hear a customer say that you're like part of their family, that means a lot to me. I'll say personally since I've joined ICONICS, that's what it felt like to me. It's a very great collaborative company. I love the way everybody works together; it's just an exciting place to work. And that's great synergy. I do think as well, it’s with Mitsubishi Electric. I can say that from my own experience as well, when I worked for them, and now having the great opportunity to collaborate.
[2:18:01] Paul Carter
Just a little different business.
[2:18:03] Ryan Legg
It's the same culture there. And I think, again beyond the technology, the collaboration and the people really, really make a difference.
[2:18:15] Paul Carter
Before we get too far into this little newsroom, I think it's appropriate to re-recognize Russell Agrusa and everything Russ did to start the company, and he set the cultural tone of the business in the way he ran the business and the way he brought people into the business. And he unleashed the imagination of all the people from ICONICS and who joined the company. Many of them still here; some that have moved on to other opportunities to pursue. And ICONICS was the foundation for which they could do that. A lot of us knew Russ; I didn't know him well, but a lot of us knew him, and he was really visionary. He had a wild and vivid imagination. I can remember Russ used to do all these keynote speaker announcements. So, this is kind of a transition in our world too with Ted coming on board. And I'm sure that we will find tremendous things coming out of Ted as he imparts his cultural ways onto ICONICS. And I know we're all looking forward to working closely with Ted.
[2:19:21] Ryan Legg
There’s been great leadership in this company, from the past, and now to the present with Ted as President, and I'm absolutely confident into the future as well.
[2:19:32] Paul Carter
Absolutely. So, what other the things that you saw this morning that got your attention? I know there were a couple of things that got my attention.
[2:19:41] Ryan Legg
How about that robot?
[2:19:44] Paul Carter
Well Ted did say it was kind of spooky when you watch that robot move around. I've watched the Boston Dynamics for a number of years, and their videos, and it's like, “What are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with that robot?” It's really cool. It's a really neat, real amazing piece of technology. What are you going do with it? One of the Mitsubishi groups said, “I know what we can do with that; we can put advanced sensors, put intelligence on it.” And if you saw the video, that robot was going into substations, and that's not the most safe environment for humans to be in. And think about the creativity: if they can imagine that you can do it and, and they went out and did it with a really interesting piece of technology with that with that robots.
[2:20:26] Ryan Legg
It’s a great application because unfortunately, some people may think of robots like, “Oh, is that taking a job away from a person?”, but we're talking about an application where you don't want a person.
[2:20:39] Paul Carter
This is about safety and possibly it may even be more about monitoring those types of equipment more often. Because you don't have to worry about safety and I don’t know about what the safety protocols are in that type of industry, but it may be that they have to shut all the equipment down inside the substation. Now, they don't have to do that. So, it's amazing. The other kind of very interesting presentation that certainly spoke to me was Daniel with MERL and the evaluation of time series data. And if we think about it: a Hyper Historian collects massive amounts of time series data for many of our customers, and I know that I've been involved in a discussion with one of my channel partners about monitoring servo motor currents and torques. And trying to figure out whether or not there were mechanical anomalies starting to occur in things like linear actuators and in other types of motion devices in discrete manufacturing operations. But one of the challenges we had is we didn't have the knowledge, the brains, to understand that time series data information. And so, I'm really excited about maybe something like what Daniel talked about is the catalyst to allow us to monitor those mechanically driven devices in manufacturing machinery and to help prevent unexpected downtime events.
[2:22:10] Ryan Legg
I think the key words there are driving towards predictive maintenance. How many times do you hear this from manufacturers to optimize their operations? This is the holy grail to be able to use big data. But what does it mean to have a lot of data if you don't know what you're doing with it? And we build models to drive towards predictive maintenance. That's what we want to do with this big data. So, to really optimize operations, the ultimate goal is to avoid downtime entirely, or at least reduce it but to avoid completely is the ultimate goal.
[2:23:00] Paul Carter
I'm going to divert a little bit. I had the pleasure to work with a customer in Florida in the United States that made hurricane proof windows doors. And in the middle of the last recession, they knew they had to get their operations running more efficiently. And they decided to implement a set of ICONICS tools. And almost immediately, one of the things that they saw in the data coming in was that one of the tech time, the cycle time, in one of their heat treating furnaces started to go up. And they didn't know what that meant; they just noticed it. So, they saw something they never knew happened before. And about two weeks later, the heating elements in that furnace failed. And so, what they were able to determine immediately, by being able to make the invisible visible, was they're able to find and predict that fault so they were able to move that from being an unscheduled downtime event to a to a preventative maintenance event, by being able to monitor that data. It totally changed the operation of that company because over time, they were able to increase efficiency. They were able to close the plant and consolidated into one plant, and then they went even further, and they're able to eliminate building an another plant because they were able to gain such tremendous efficiency out of that one plant. So, this whole concept that we talked about being able to pull all that data and make the invisible visible, there are real world examples of this. And for all those customers watching, or all those channel partners, speak to your ICONICS representatives and talk about these things. These are real realities of things that are happening in the world. So, I apologize for diverting. This wasn't one of the sessions today, but it was just something that that came to mind that really made sense to me.
[2:24:52] Ryan Legg
Another topic that really caught my attention this morning, Paul, and I think we all hear this from our customers and everywhere is a topic of security. This is a critical factor obviously, and without it, what good is a solution like ICONICS to drive your analytics and everything, if you don't have the confidence that the system is secure. One of the exciting things to me when I came on board with ICONICS was to learn that we're working with the Department of Defense, Department of Energy. Obviously, organizations like these demand the absolute highest level of standards when it comes to security and to know that ICONICS is working with the Pentagon, National Laboratories. Very, very exciting stuff. And for those of you that are interested in that topic security, I believe that is one of our presentations coming up.
[2:25:58] Paul Carter
It will be one of our presentations just after lunch and I didn't mention when you were talking about CFSWorX earlier, there'll also be a presentation that features that. So, again, a couple of topics that we'll have as the Connect 2021 goes on to be some great things.
[2:26:11] Ryan Legg
So, another thing that Ted talked about this morning is about this new normal. We're all excited that we are here live and that we actually got to see one another. Ryan and I have been working together for almost a year, and we met last night. That was the first time we met. So, it's very enjoyable to be able to meet Ryan because I hear him every week on our conference calls. And it's really interesting, but Ted talked about some new things in the new normal and one is this edge to cloud concept, digitalization, digital transformation and how we're all going to work differently, and how we all need to be able to have our data available, anytime, any type of data anywhere. These are really important things that are confronting us as we move forward in our business careers and as the time continues to move on.
[2:27:07] Ryan Legg
Absolutely. It’s great to talk about how this affects people, not just the data but if we go back to the SUSTIE building, for example. A lot of that was not just about the energy savings, driving towards a goal, but also towards the comfort level.
[2:27:27] Paul Carter
Not only the comfort level, but to a certain extent, the safety level. They had an occupancy threshold that they wanted to make sure they maintained in their buildings because of the unfortunate tragedy of COVID that we're dealing with. And so, you want to make sure that you don't violate those things. They let us take our masks off while we're here talking. But we're all wearing masks here today. And it's part of the new normal; it's just part of where we're going.
[2:27:52] Ryan Legg
Again, it’s exciting to be here. And maybe we'll have an even bigger event next year.
[2:27:59] Paul Carter
You never know what the future holds.
[2:28:03] Ryan Legg
Well, I'm happy to introduce Mark Hepburn who is going to be joining us again on the stage. He's been with ICONICS for over 18 years now. He’s our Global VP of Sales. So, without further ado, Mark.
[2:28:24] Paul Carter
Thank you, everybody who's watching today. Hopefully, you'll find the next session to be as interesting as the first. I watched the practice session yesterday, and I took a lot of notes yesterday. So, there's a lot of good stuff coming up.