Rockwell Automation, Inc. (ROK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Please welcome Rockwell Automation's Vice President of Investor, Aijana Zellner.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Rockwell Automation's Annual Investor Day. We're happy to be back in Chicago for a second largest automation fair ever with over 18,000 participants. We started the day with a thought-provoking panel of industry leaders and how they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in personalized health care, and that is just the beginning. Rockwell is solve the world's greatest challenges. And we're excited to take you on that journey with us today. With that, let me turn the mic over to our Chairman and CEO, Blake Moret.

Well, thanks, Aijana. Well, thanks, again. Looking forward to spending a little bit with you now to talk about our strategy, the progress that we've made on our journey where we're going next, giving you a chance to understand more fully what differentiates us, opportunity to meet the team and of course, to answer your questions. Let's get started with strategy and execution. A lot of what we've been talking about over the last few years is creating new ways to win, new ways to provide value for our customers, new ways for us to grow faster, increase our performance, and we're doing it through the introduction of new technology. And you'll see that when you tour the show floor here in a little while. This is an unprecedented amount of new product introductions, new innovation, hardware, software as well as the high-value services to bring it all together and to create the outcomes. You'll see evidence of the expansion of the number of verticals that we're competitively serving. We'll talk specifically about the ways that we're strengthening our position in traditional verticals that we've addressed and ones that you would not have heard Rockwell talk about 10 years ago or even 5 years ago. And then it's about finding new ways to win with the business models as well. As recurring revenue becomes a bigger part of our story through Software as a Service, increased amount of subscription revenue becoming a tangible and meaningful part of the overall Rockwell value. We're transforming our company, and we are transforming the industry. Internally, we affectionately refer to this as the Swoosh slide and we introduced this in 2018. And think about the context when we came out with this, it was only 4 years ago. It seems like a lifetime ago, because we were in a very -- we were all in a very different place. When we introduced this, we talked about our core, which continues to make up the majority of our revenue and our profit. Information Solutions and Connected Services, serving as a proxy for the new value, and we'll talk about what a meaningful part of our business and our value that is today. The fact that we were going to be more deliberate about the acquisitions that we brought in, and I'm very happy to share our progress there and all within a responsible financial framework. The fundamentally conservative approach that you know and value Rockwell for. We have a strong track record. And when we introduced this framework, we were confident in what we had done, but if we're honest, there were questions about our ability to break out of a traditional growth CAGR. About our ability to bring software into the company, not to become a software company, but to add it as a greater part of our overall value. And our ability to compete in a pretty tough neighborhood. Well, I'm happy to say that 4 years on, we have moved solidly from vision to execution. We're well on our way, and I'm particularly proud of this, because there have been a few macro events that have happened since 2018. And everybody starts these sorts of discussions with the roll call of those. I don't think I need to do that here. But in addition to all of the defense that we had to play in terms of navigating COVID and supply chain and so on, inflation, we've been able to stay on offense and make progress to that original vision of where we were going to go. There's nothing magical about $9 billion. It's the way you get there. It's the pace. And I'm happy to say that as you look at what we have done, and we've gone back even further to 2016 with hit in all of these fundamental areas. And if you look at 2018 to present day, we've hit in all of these fundamental areas. So since 2016, we've grown our core at 2.3x industrial production. And when we introduced this, we said for decades, we had been sitting at less than 2 as a multiple of that IP, of that industrial production. And that's only a part of the company. But by adding new capabilities, new disruption and things like independent card, new verticals that we were serving, a more aggressive posture outside the U.S., we were able to increase that ratio of growth in our core. Information Solutions and Connected Services, we introduced that about the time we made the investment in PTC. And while PTC is a relatively small part of that, I am happy to say that we have continued that track record of double-digit growth since then. And in fiscal year '22, ISCS as we've kind of abbreviated it, there's over $800 million of profitable revenue. Inorganically, with a well-established framework of priorities, Information Solutions, Connected Services, originally process expertise, moving to advanced material handling and increased share in Europe and Asia, with that rubric, we've been able to add a whole host of very valuable acquisitions to the portfolio. And during this time, EPS growth has exceeded sales growth. So I mentioned before, this is in the backdrop of extreme macro disruption. And while each of these areas portrayed are challenges that affect Rockwell, because we are, in our own right, a manufacturer, they've given us opportunity to work in different ways with our customers to become an earlier broader participant in their company's overall digital transformation. It's not just the last mile of getting the automation done, but it's a part of the overall planning process with their digital transformation, addressing things like supply chain, cybersecurity and these other areas. I mentioned before about increasing the number of competitively served verticals. We've always talked about the automobile industry, and we have strengthened our ability to cover automotive, particularly as EV gives us new opportunities. And I've talked to you before about Rockwell being a net beneficiary of electric vehicles, because even though the overall component count in an EV vehicle is less than that of an ICE vehicle, a combustion -- internal combustion engine vehicle, Rockwell was never deeply penetrated on the powertrain side. And we do great work on the battery side and the new elements of drivetrain that are part of an EV. In addition to automotive, we've added penetration into the semiconductor industry. And with the amount of CapEx going on there, that's really important. We've always been a player in control systems, the building, the clean room, environment, primarily in Asia, where so much of that work was going on, but we'll globalize that. We found out a little bit of serendipity when we bought MAVERICK that they have very strong capabilities there. And Kalypso has capabilities there. And we've added new ways to win in semiconductor through independent cart technology for the wafer handling a really lucrative part of that business. Cybersecurity, as they're all concerned about that and our ability to get in to do assessments and remediation in their cyber environment and so on. Warehouse automation and even though e-commerce has slowed a little bit in terms of the new fulfillment centers, companies like Walmart are still intensely interested in taking efficiency gains between the make part of their supplier network and getting it into the warehouses and into the back of the store. In hybrid, food and beverage, of course, is our single biggest vertical and we are finding new ways to add value there. We've talked all about life sciences. We'll talk about it some more, because it's really important. People want to live longer, healthier lives. So we think we're on the right side there. Eco-industrial with renewables. We'll talk about some exciting work we're doing with companies like First Solar there and in water treatment, which has always been a traditional strength of ours. And then consumer packaged goods and the opportunities to weave in the circular economy concepts and to operationalize recyclability in consumer packaged goods. In process, the work that we've done within our Sensia joint venture as well as the products that we [indiscernible] customers, what we're doing to help them with their energy transition, strengthening our capabilities in chemical through acquisitions like MAVERICK, through Sensia and even Plex. Plex had a strong penetration into the chemical industry as well as automotive tier manufacturers. And then all the other elements of the process industry segment like mining and forest and metals. Metals, we don't talk as much about that, but metals is a big vertical for automation, and we've significantly increased our capability to grow in metals with some of the work that we've done in intelligent devices with our high-performance drives, some major investments there. So across a broad swath of verticals we've increased our capabilities to compete and win. We're going to focus in on the 3 segments or verticals or even parts of verticals that are seeing significant transformation. I want to do this to highlight to you how we're playing a deeper role in each of these industries and the companies within these industries as they transform themselves. The first 1 is life sciences and within life sciences, specifically personalized health care. We had a panel this morning where we talked a little bit about this. You're going to hear some of our business leaders go into more detail about our specific value there. But let me just say that the trends towards personalized health care, being able to look at the individual and to provide more tailored treatments and therapies, cell and gene therapy, getting down to using a person's individual stuff to be able to speed the treatment. And then in general, to be able to more rapidly apply the technology that Zikar and Vince and I, Barry talked about this morning. And to do that at speed and at lower cost as the industry modularizes itself. Those are the things that we see are a great fit. That flexibility, that modularity, the use of the MES for traceability. We're increasing our participation in the upstream process, and you'll hear more about that when we talk a little bit with Cytiva later on and continuing to provide differentiated value in the end part of the process, the packaging, which has always been a traditional strength. So without any further delay, I'd like to bring on stage Kevin Siever, who is the General Manager a bioprocess automation and digital for Cytiva. Kevin brings 20 years plus of experience in this area and Cytiva has long been a strong partner with Rockwell as we combine our technology with their domain expertise to bring these solutions to market. So Kevin? Kevin, just a couple of basic questions. I think maybe we start with the value of the combination, right? You've been around this industry a long time. You know what's available out there. But what's unique about the combination of Cytiva and Rockwell.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Blake, and thanks for having me today. So what our customers really demand from us is something that works out of the box. It comes to them, it's scalable. They -- as they grow, we can grow with them, it's flexible. So as they produce 1 product or another, they can be flexible and adjust, and we really need a product versus a project to go forward. So we developed that with Rockwell, I mean, the leading innovator in automation, obviously. And we were able to develop these products early on and spend really millions of dollars to provide to our customers. I'll give you an example. As these customers of ours are developing life-saving drugs, they're going through a journey, and they have to go through various clinical tests, as you know. And at some point, they got to invest a lot of money, a lot of capital to build a factory to buy process equipment. They want to do that as late as possible. So they want to have confidence that once they buy the product, it will work, and it will work in the time frame they need. So that's where we partnered Rockwell, because we're not software engineers. We're not expertise, you are, we have expertise in our process. So with the combination of us together and to be able to use predesign modules that you have and templates that we can configure as opposed to designing and testing and so forth, validating has really been a game changer for us and for the industry.

Yes. As we talk about these different concepts, sometimes the words can run together and it sounds pretty similar. Some of the things that we say sound similar to what others say. And you certainly have experience with all of the various platforms that you could choose to partner with. Why did you pick Rockwell?

So I've been working in this industry, as you said, for quite a long time. I think I've been working with Rockwell with almost 30 years in many different industries. And obviously, there's a track record there of proven capability and success. Rockwell is a leader in the industry. And 1 of our goals when I started with -- it was GE Life Science now Cytiva, was that we want to be a strategic advantage for our industry. We want to be that strategic advantage for Cytiva. So many companies knew about our hardware. They know about the cell culture media and our resin. But automation was what I would call kind of bringing life to cold hard steel in the background, right? So we want them to actually come to us because of automation. So that's what we did. We partnered with Rockwell, the leader in the industry. We feel we're the leader in the industry as well in the business that we're in. And we develop products that now customers have told us that they're coming to us. They went to our competitors, they're coming to us because of automation, because they know it's a proven technology that we have on our systems that, as I say, works out of the gate and really meets their needs.

Kevin, I'll end it with that. Thank you so much for the partnership and joining us today. So the next vertical that we'll talk about is in automotive and specifically around the trends towards building out electric vehicle fleets with the required parallel development of battery capabilities. And along with that, the trend towards increased importance for the tier suppliers as people are disaggregating and then reaggregating their supply chains, looking at those tier suppliers to the automotive industry. And all of those are important trends for Rockwell, and they represent opportunities for us to capitalize on. Just to start with, an EV plant could have twice the Rockwell content of a traditional internal combustion engine facility with the software requirements, with the use of independent Cart Technology, particularly for battery assembly plus all the traditional areas, body in white and final and so on, then that's a great opportunity for us. When we look at the challenges that these brand owners have, it's about getting to market quick. It's 1 of the reasons that regardless of what inflation is doing, the established brand owners and the start-ups can't afford to wait it out for business conditions to change, because they know their competitors are working at breakneck speed to try to build out their fleets of capacity. The things that we're providing with digital twins, the ability to simulate production brings to the left, the commissioning time. And that's really important to these suppliers. And you'll hear our business leads talk more about this in just a minute. Looking at reducing cost in battery. People are having to form JVs to be able to get the battery technology quicker, but they're still very worried about the cost and technologies like independent Cart Technology help with that in terms of the total life cycle cost as well as the space, which remains at a premium. And then first pass quality is another challenge for this industry. And here's where our broad portfolio of MES, both on-prem as well as cloud native solutions really shines. And 1 of the things that's particularly helpful for us coming from the Plex acquisition is their existing footprint that we've helped them accelerate in tier suppliers to the automotive industry to be sure. Some of the EV brand owners themselves are using Plex, but they have a particularly strong value proposition for the tier suppliers for the EV. So to give an example of that, I'm especially proud of the work that we're doing with Ford Motor Company, and we'll hear from 1 of their executives. [Presentation]

I think this is -- Blue Oval is exciting for Ford. It is exciting for Rockwell. I think it's exciting for America to see this kind of greenfield, let's say, shoring activity going on right as we speak. But it's not just the U.S. brand owners. We've talked over the last couple of months about the pride with which we welcome Hyundai to the U.S. as they bring our greenfield EV factory out of the ground in Bryan County, Georgia. This 1 is particularly exciting for me because some of you know, I started my career with Rockwell in sales in Atlanta. And so this is the patch of dirt that I covered all those years ago. And I'd like to think we had pretty good support that differentiated ourselves then, it's only gotten better over that time. And besides the technology and the expertise in EV applications, that great on-the-ground support was an important part of how we won this project, and you can be sure all of our -- all of the usual suspects were competing for this project. Let's move on to energy. So for the traditional fossil fuel producers, as well as the providers of renewable sources of energy, energy transition is front and center in all of their dialogue. We saw Schlumberger changed their name to SLB to underscore the importance of their participation in energy transition. We're winning meaningful new business today in carbon capture and sequestration applications at some of the largest fossil fuel providers in the world. We're working shoulder to shoulder with them as they retool their businesses, their business models and they're finding that many of the same building blocks that we traditionally provided them are equally indispensable as they move to a greener future. And then, of course, the work that we're doing with renewables is a particular source of pride. For all of these, digital is the single most powerful lever that they can pull to transform their businesses, and we're right in the middle of that conversation. It's about being able to upgrade existing operations with efficiency and speed. It's about accelerating the vertical start-up of new operations such as we're seeing with renewables. And so I'll give you a couple of examples of this. And to help me describe it, Olivier Le Peuch, the CEO of SLB will join me virtually to talk about some of the value of Sensia. Well, Olivier, it's great to see you. We saw each other at the Schlumberger customer event in Lucerne, Switzerland, a few weeks ago, which was I thought a great success. And 1 of the questions that I wanted to ask you, as we've talked about on our joint venture, Sensia is, why is it so critical at this junction?

First I think the industry is at critical juncture. I think the industry is trying to address the energy dilemma of affordability, security and sustainability. And for it has transformed itself. Meanwhile, the industry has -- the oil and gas industry has stepped up its performance, its efficiency and at the same time, step up its path to decarbonization. And decarbonization has been made in the last 18 months, 2 years, digital is actually the best lever to step change performance, efficiency and at the same time, lower the carbon footprint. So that's the setting. That's the reason why this for SMB was so timely and so well received by customers and partners. Now if you put this in context of the priority of the customer, they want the 3Cs. They want perform better on cash, on costs and on carbon. And in producing assets, I believe Sensia, my opinion, as a unique value proposition because it has domain knowledge, it has been fit, it has been staffed with best people that have huge credibility in the industry that have been working and knows the detail of workflows, pollution workflow. It has digital technology at the core of it. And I think it has what Rockwell contributed, what SLB contributed, and it has best-in-class, world-class automation and control capability. There is a trend happening in the industry is electrification, electrification of platform, electrification asset. And this is the wheelhouse of Sensia, I will say. And then you have the 2 big contributors. I think the news we can make beyond reducing its own carbon footprint or in the context of reducing. One is methane that has to be detected, has to be addressed. And I think Sensia has a set of capability that can deploy control equipment, automation, digital monitoring that will make it a reality. And the second is carbon capture sequestration. This industry is certainly the industry that can make CCS a reality in the future. And CCS, carbon capture sequestration and finally CCS is the next leg of contribution of the industry to world to do decarbonize future.

I couldn't agree more. And this isn't just future-looking type of applications. I know that we're already engaged in some pretty ambitious CCS programs by some of the world's biggest energy producers. One of the common threats through the principles that you just talked about is data and the ability to utilize data that comes from multiple sources. Could you talk for just a minute about the partnership that was announced at your event a few weeks ago with Cognite?

I think industry has been suffering from our industry, is a silo of data, data hubs and data structure that has been plaguing our industry for decades. This has been unlocked for the last 3 years and is becoming adopted at scale by the industry. But what was missing is the data operation landscape. Data operation, operation data landscape that touch the assets, that touch the equipments, the Avatar of the equipment that is managing the sub-surface, fruits that are being pumped, produced and processed. Regarding this, we are giving access to this to Sensia and creating a world where we can't create Avatar subsurface. Avatar and digitalization of the surface equipment and process equipment and then allowing Sensia to plug its digital capability, is control and innovation capability that will then not only impact and play with the data set that is the data layer with Cognite, but also be able to connect to the subsurface, so that the full loop is optimized.

I think it's really unique in that the ability to close the loop, right, to take that data, contextualize it, to be able to aggregate multiple sources of it and then to produce real outcomes and changes in your control system to optimize production, avoid downtime. That's something that across industries, not just in energy is something that's been looked at and prized for years.

We always have a pipeline of customers leads that are willing to see the benefit of this aggregation of data, how to connect it to the real-time workflow, producing asset workflow and then how to bring intelligence at the edge, how to bring automation, how to bring a capability that then optimized and create the control loop that came out.

Well, Olivier, I really look forward to working together as this trend accelerates as people get the value in all the different ways that we've just talked about.

I feel very reassured that the journey we're on we are assured by the direction industries and the trends the industry is adopting. I think the potential of Sensia. And I think with your support and I think the leadership of Rockwell in control and automation and the experience we have across many of the industry, I think we have what we need to lead there. And I think we have now the ecosystem around it to make it a success.

Olivier is actually going to be here at the show a little bit later on today. And we are going to get a chance to show them some of the exhibits and then Frank and Scott and I are going to spend a little bit of time with him talking about the joint venture. So the next example is on the renewable side. Last year, we announced the work that we were doing with First Solar, which is the big U.S. provider of photovoltaic panels in the solar industry. And since then, a lot has happened. We worked daily with First Solar to ensure that they get the products that they need to keep their start-ups for the greenfields that were already announced on time, and we're very happy with the success there. Since then, with the IRA and the additional benefits to companies like First Solar for making new investments, they've announced a couple of additional greenfields and we're hard at work with them on that. It's a great example of our expanded value because in addition to the traditional automation that we're providing to First Solar and having some of their past undertakings, we're adding a lot of newer capabilities in terms of digital twin technology to be able to simulate the throughput in what is a pretty complex application. There's a lot of similarities to making a photovoltaic cell, to making a semiconductor. And if you can shave off a little bit of tag time in that process, you can save a lot of money and you can get a lot of additional throughput. And that's exactly what we're doing with our Kalypso organization to model their operation to be able to emulate the actual control code that's being used to make these panels and then to game it, to simulate it, to be able to look at more efficient ways to increase throughput. So this is 1 that I'm especially excited about. And so with that, let's talk a little bit about the underlying technologies that are emerging that are going to be so important to us in the coming years. to be able to accelerate this journey. And so to do that, Cyril Perducat, who is our Chief Technology Officer, is going to spend a few minutes with you on this journey.

Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here today. That's my second automation fair and the first 1 that -- at this scale. I think it's a great testimony of the number of innovation and products and solutions that we are bringing to the market for our customers. I'm going to speak today about how we leverage technology and how we think about our portfolio or architecture in order to scale all what Blake and the different people that were here before described. Because delivering all those capabilities in our targeted markets, in our targeted verticals needs an infrastructure needs the capability that can scale in the right way. It cannot be isolated solution. It cannot be isolated technical experiment. And I will add to this that the conversation over the years with our customers have changed a lot. I will say our customers don't just want technology. Of course, we are a technology company. We are not selling phones to our customers. We are real products, hardware, software services that have a business impact. But the nature of the conversation has changed. As the conversation has moved from what can you deliver to me to how do you solve this problem with me. And a lot of the conversations you have seen earlier, were illustrating this idea of co-innovation, collaboration, working with the ecosystem to deliver those specific business outcomes that our customers wants. And we have articulated our portfolio, we have articulated our strategy, so that in those historical strong verticals where we are present, but also in the new ones where we are developing strength and improving our position, we want to be sure and know the business outcomes precisely that we want our customer to look at us for what do we want to be known for, where do we want to differentiate. And through these business outcomes, then we are able to articulate our system architecture of products or portfolio and our business segment leaders that are going to speak after me are going to speak more about this. So, of course, at the core of what we do, and as I mentioned, we are a technologist company. We sell real stuff to our customers, of course. We have our product platforms. And we -- our portfolio is articulated around those 6 core platform that represents a space of the architecture and have unique technology, unique differentiation, unique IP, and they work on their own, each of those products work on their own, each of those software can work on their own. But when they work together, they work as a system, and this is what is important. And to highlight a couple of points when I look at what we have around factory floor, which is our set of software. You can see on the show floor, when you go this afternoon, how we are really covering from design to operation to maintenance where we are combining capabilities on-premise, at the edge in the cloud. So we have really a set of software capabilities and Blake mentioned this earlier through organic development, through acquisition, through the combination of both that allows to cover this more life cycle of needs for our customers. And we have hardware products. And I'm not going to mention all of them, because some of the speakers after me will detail this more. But I want to highlight 2 things, and I'm going to take the 2 of them. When I look at Logix, what has made Rockwell Automation strong in the market is this idea of a plant-wide multidiscipline and [indiscernible] integrated control, all the history that you have heard about the idea of the integrated architecture, the way things are put together. So it's not just a controller. It's a system of control builder on logix. And now this system of control and all the capabilities, we are bringing it to the modern edge of the cloud hybrid architecture. And you will see on the show floor, what we are doing, for example, with factory to design hub in order to be able to engineer in the cloud, favor collaboration, reduce libraries and work on different things. So those different products, and I use this example they are systems by themselves. They are platform by themselves. They scale, they expand, they are expanded by our ecosystem, which is a very important aspect of our strategy. They work on open inter technology, some of turned out we are involved in the definition of those to -- so we ensure that those products evolve with the needs of our customer, expand, add additional features. If I take on the other side, when I look at our drive offering like PowerFlex, small details that I'm going to come back here that you can see here. It's now we have high performance drives, but they include more things than the traditional drive. We are able to embed in the architecture predictive analytics, condition monitoring, so that we are able to have products that play a broader role in the system than just their initial function, which is to control and monitoring in that case. So all those different pieces, we have in our portfolio, as we have each platforms, they are built to scale, they are built to reuse core technology around different products within those platforms. But they are not working alone because if we want to realize this vision of value that is delivered to our customers so that we can deliver those outcomes using a system, we need to put all those different product platforms together. And the first step that we have taken is to expand and build on the history and the experience we had with the integrated architecture to go 1 step further and build the digital platform for workflow automation, which is a foundation of our digital acceleration for all different offerings. This is not a product. This is not something that we intend to sell to customers. But this is something that acts as a foundation to really bring common technology, common capabilities, common mechanism, so that when those products are put together in a system, we deliver better capabilities. So some of the Rockwell Automation products is gears. And above this, when we look at the way we deliver those outcomes, we look at industry solutions. But there are different ways to do industry solutions. Those industry solutions are not one-off projects executed exclusively by Rockwell Automation. Those industry solutions are demonstrated capabilities, demonstrated architectures where you can put together products of Rockwell Automation, products of partners sometimes different capabilities. And they package together the sum of Rockwell Automation product platforms or domain expertise, the knowledge we have in the application of our customers, the expertise of our people that are able to build application libraries, application capabilities. And IP is a differentiated value proposal that we have for solution. If I double-click a little bit on the idea of the digital platform to clarify what it is. So it's fundamentally a productized set of common services that the different product groups are able to use. The legacy and the history is networking, hardware services, on-premise and the edge. And now we are expanding this to having common services in terms of cloud management, cloud operations, user identity, maybe different capabilities that we create to become on across. And this is a combining wide effort that use the capabilities and the competencies of all the different teams of Rockwell Automation to create a collaborative model, those common pieces that are the building block of our digital foundation. A very important aspect I want to highlight here, we believe, and it's a very strong element of our strategy that simplifying the job of our customers, simplifying automation is a very strong priority and a huge differentiator on the market. Our customers are facing more and more complex scenario, putting all those things together could create experiences that are cumbersome, complex, slowdown the workflow of our customers. We do the opposite. We have a very strong focus on user experience and the ability of the platform to enable those common mechanism will help us even improve further this user experience and differentiate through user experience. There is another element related to this is accelerating our time to market for digital innovation. How do we facilitate the reuse of digital enablers and digital components across multiple offerings, so that we bring new and new digital offers or digitally augmented or enabled offer to the market faster. And I will say at the end, another extremely important point, business outcomes equals to data at the end. It's all about how do I capture data that I have in my process, in my system, in my enterprise, transform those data into insight and very importantly, not just describe insights and describe information, but as Blake said, close the loop, transform those insights into action so that we can deliver value. And 1 important point in this is to do this for the modern age of device edge and cloud, okay? We want to maximize architecture optionality for our customers. There are use cases that combine the edge, the cloud, on-premise. There are some use cases that are better with only the cloud. We want to have the capabilities to have this architecture optionality, so that we can serve better the needs of our customers. And as I was speaking about data, a very important element and a very important mechanism tool that we can use to transform those data into insight is AI. But I don't think that they are really AI products. We are not going to create a new product platform that is called AI by Rockwell Automation of something like this. We see AI as something that is more embedded everywhere in our product. When I was mentioning PowerFlex drives with condition monitoring embedded, this is AI. When fix is doing management system or competitors management system, this includes AI capabilities. So we see AI at every level, and we see AI as a very important element of this motion to transform raw data and the excess of raw data that exists in our customers' systems into real insight that translate into actions. The last part I want to mention when we speak about Industry Solution and on this idea of scalability, we have a very strong emphasis on the idea of creating reusable application libraries that describe well and encapsulate all these specific IP that we have in our own markets. And whether our libraries are used by Rockwell Automation teams or our ecosystem, both are possible and both are capabilities, because we also want to empower and help our ecosystem be more competitive on the market. But the horizontal scalability is also extremely important for us. And in that specific case, in that example as I take to illustrate what I'm saying is that we take, for example, an application and a solution for an food and beverage customer where there was a very strong need to package, transform, use data with kind of millisecond sampling rate, so that represents a huge amount of data to have a better view of the product quality in real time in the process. From this, we have developed a data management, feature engineering, core application for product quality management. And now we are able to extract this application library specific application [indiscernible] block and use it on new projects for EV batteries, because there are commonalities in the manufacturing of an EV battery, it's hybrid, you have a different set capabilities. So there are commonalities in terms of needs, and we can use this starting point and, of course, add what will be really very specific to EV batteries. And this really helps us scale horizontally. So develop solution in a vertical co-innovate with customers but extract the IP and enrich the rest of our portfolio with the right IP at the application level. But also inform how we evolve our product road map so that some of the capabilities that exist today at the library level can become native in the products, because this is now becoming a mainstream need, for example. At the end, the whole thing around solutions is not to create one-off, as I said, repetitive business, but it's really being able to answer to the question of our customers related to the outcomes. When a customer comes to see us and says, I am in this industry. My goal is to maximize my production and minimize my energy consumption. Yes, this is something that we have done. We have the application. We can demonstrate to use the architecture. It's proven, it's tested and it will deliver the outcome, and we create this trust and this conversation around a specific outcome that allows us to activate all our portfolio and deliver those writings. And at the end, what is very important for us is that how do we put this together so that this is scalable. There is a scalable business model to deliver those outcomes. And that is, again, not a succession of projects that do not necessarily relate to each other. And to give you a little bit more view on how these things work together in practice, I'm going to invite on stage our segment business leaders that are going to show to you this idea of integrated road maps and how we put all our different products together so that we have a clear view in each of the verticals that we target, all the different pieces of Rockwall Automation synchronize and work together to deliver those solutions and those outcomes that our customers exist. So let's welcome on stage, Tessa, Brian and Frank, Rockwell Automation business segment leaders.

Well, good morning, and we are happy to be here with you today. As Cyril said, Frank, Brian and I are going to talk with you about how we are collaborating together and with our to deliver integrated road maps for our customers to help them solve their challenges and enable their businesses. While we -- the work that we do really spans across all of the industries that Rockwell is in today. We're going to focus in on the 3 industries that you heard about earlier today and bring a little bit more to life, the things that we're doing together to enable our customers in those industries. So the first 1 we're going to talk about is in the life sciences industry. And you heard a little bit earlier today about the impact that personalized medicine is having in the way that, that is the manufacturing processes. So Frank, maybe talk a little bit more about that.

Yes. Thanks, Tessa. We heard a little bit about this, this morning, and it's really an exciting space, not just the technology that we spoke about, but the actual manufacturing processes itself. And what makes it really interesting is you're starting with the patient and ending with the patient. And so that has a lot of implications for the manufacturing space. Thinking about that smaller runs, right, because it's either patient-specific or patient group specific. Things like the need for flexibility that was mentioned this morning more SKUs, if you will, by the nature of the process and therefore, more data. And so things like custody tracking, you want to align that patient from the beginning with the patient at the end is really important. And so for us, that has implications on most things we do in the factory, the automation layer for sure. We talked about modularity earlier today. The information layer, our MES solutions and the things we do. And then it has implications for the types of analytics that will make a meaningful difference to help optimize those processes. And so we think, in general, our portfolio is aligned, but we also think there's opportunities to really drive improvement here.

Yes. Our Logix portfolio and product line is really ideally suited to the needs of these life sciences companies. We heard these customers talk about the need for scalability and modularity and that's exactly the hallmark, and always has been of the Logix automation platform. And we're adding on to that with new industry-specific functionality. As an example, here at automation fair this week, we're talking about sequence manager, which is a special set of capabilities in Logix to help with batch production processes. Again, the hallmark of life sciences and pharma companies. We're extending this automation platform with other new offerings. It's a big week for us here at Automation Fair with product launches. We have a new offering called FactoryTalk Optics, which is a cloud-based solution for building and deploying operator interfaces. The things that technicians on the factory floor interact with to control the production. FactoryTalk Optics is a brand-new SaaS offering that works not just with the Logix platform, but also in heterogeneous environments, and that's important because that's a hallmark of the life sciences industry as well.

We're talking a little bit about the evolution of health care. And you're talking about the evolution of our platforms along with it. The same thing is happening with our professional service organizations. Kalypso was mentioned earlier today. In this particular space, we've really developed some super deep domain expertise. So we have a very large global organization right now that helps customers design, deploy, install and then support these systems. We think our involvement and we think the customer base we have here as a testament to that really adds time and value. And then, of course, as we do that with these service offerings and software offerings, it's a great opportunity for Rockwell Automation from an annual recurring revenue standpoint. So we think that combination is really meaningful. I want to talk a little bit about our Information Solutions. Our MES platform, PharmaSuite, is kind of world-class in this space. And what that does is it helps the customer manage their production process. It helps them improve and maintain the quality. And while we do that in many industries, as Tessa [indiscernible] mentioned before, there's really some special capabilities in the PharmaSuite solution that help these customers. And so that same team of domain experts help customers deploy those solutions, and we're doing that with a lot of really important major manufacturers.

Yes, it's a great example, Frank, how our teams work together from a services standpoint that's delivering this domain expertise and from a software development standpoint, bringing this FactoryTalk Pharma suite to the next level. FactoryTalk PharmaSuite is used by dozens of life sciences companies around the world to control this highly regulated and highly complex set of manufacturing activities that are required to build, make and ship all of these drugs. We're privileged to do business with industry leaders like Pfizer and Lily and Roche and again, dozens more. And we are announcing, again, this week a new release of PharmaSuite that is featuring a brand new, much easier to use user experience. We talk a lot about simplifying the use of all of this advanced technology for our customers and is built on a brand-new cyber hardened platform underlying.

Brian, I want to build on the cyber thought for just a minute. Cyber security is front of mind for all manufacturers right now. I think we can say that pretty safely. A secure manufacturing environment means an available manufacturing environment. And that's kind of table stakes from an optimization standpoint. But for pharma customers, also based on the investments they're making in drug development, the protection of their intellectual properties is equally as from an enterprise risk perspective. So kind of as again, an evolution of these capabilities, our connected service team, our cyber team, Blake mentioned that earlier has really -- plays a big role with these manufacturers. What they do is they go in, they assess the plant, right? What are the factors, what are the risks. We all know that many of these plants have been there for a decade or more. And so they all have their unique characteristics. And then we use some special talent, our security architects to put together a design for them, deploy the solutions and even help manage them. At the expo, we'll have our secure operation center live out there. But that managed service can be anything from simple infrastructure and patching, right, updates to the platforms, as you mentioned, are all the way to that secure operation center capability. And so it gives a lot of flexibility for the user. We can even do hybrid versions of that to their IT SOC. And so that's a really nice part of the offering. And I have to mention it again, it's also a great way to drive some annual recurring revenue from a services endpoint. So we're excited about that. We're excited about the good things we're doing for customers with cyber, and we think we have a differentiated offering there.

Yes. I think our evolution and capabilities there has been trends over the last few years. And I think having the SOC on the floor, we'll give a good visibility to this group around what it really means to monitor your operations. Brian, you started us off with talking about production and quality management systems and how we're helping companies with our software. But I think the real power of the combination of our capabilities is when we take real-time data coming from the intelligent devices and the control system, and we integrate that in a secure way and in a secure infrastructure into those management and supervise systems to really help our customers understand in real time how their assets are operating and how they can improve them. And so we've been making investments across the intelligenct devices IP portfolio were looking at new applications and new capabilities, but a big area of focus is how do we continue to drive the smart devices and the data that's needed, so that we can leverage that with our software and our services to implement to really give visibility to our customers on how they can better operate their facilities and equipment.

I agree. I was really pleased to hear Olivier talk about closing the loop, right? I thought that was awesome. We've talked about that for a number of years, Blake. I saw you jump on that one. And he's absolutely spot on. And so in addition to the intelligent devices, the data management, the structure, the security that we've been building on, we've been investing also in capabilities for digital transformation. Our value chain consulting capability we have now with acquisition of Kalypso really can create that digital thread from product design to release into manufacture, to whole manufacturing production and then optimization phase. And so it's exciting. And the reason it's exciting for me is because we've proven and we know we can improve time to market. We know we can. Blake mentioned tech transfer in his talk, using artificial intelligence to aid the tech transfer process speeds time to market for those products, right? We also know we can improve quality in the production process using tools that we've had. George Young yesterday, 1 of the founders of Kalypso User Services, it's just math and math is free, but how you use it is important. And so using things like statistical process control for the continuous process validation is also something we know improves quality and optimizes the production process.

Yes. The underlying theme of the importance of data in production has been constant through the day, and we really put data at the center of our strategy and what we're doing. And this whole tech transfer process is at a data transfer or a data manipulation process. It's moving this amazing amount of data on new drugs from the lab into pilot production into volume production. And so we're enabling that with a new solution that we have on display here with the goal of releasing in the middle of next year, middle of 2023. That is a cloud-based solution for doing that streamline and automation using this artificial intelligence to kind of make that process of transferring new drug descriptions from the lab into production. It eliminates manual work and really helps the customers achieve that time-to-market advantage they're looking for time to cure advantage.

Yes, I agree. It's about as real as it gets. And what's exciting about that for me is it started with that value chain consulting process, right? Chris Nardecchia, our CIO, is sitting here, and Chris comes out of the farmers industry. He was that process as well. And so it's fun to see and to see the real value. Now something else that's happening with the transfer offering as it's being standard because we know when we standardize things and we simplify them, like we talked about simplification, right, that we can deploy things they're used more. So we just finished a project around continuous process validation with a customer it started with the goal of optimizing production. But in the end, what we've wound up doing is standardizing that capability. And so what that means is typically when you do that, you're customizing across the process. So this way, we've standardized it, and it's 1 of the things we want to talk to you about and your team. And what that means for us is it simplifies a customer's ability to deploy it. That means they can deploy at more places and because it's standard, it can handle more use cases. And so the other thing that happened there that was exciting is once we had this process working and all of a sudden, we have the data organized, now we're seeing insights. We're finding anomalies, right? And we're fixing other things we had never intended to fix. And so it's exciting to see how these analytics come to life in an industry where they really make a difference.

I think this is also a good example of our approach not only to integrated road maps, but thinking about the total life cycle that our customers have and how do we help them win they're designing and innovating and their processes and their products and their systems to helping them deploy them into their plants, operate and then maintain them. And I think an important area of value that we're bringing in the life sciences industry and across all of the industries that we service, how do we help them when they want to transfer and what the equipment design looks like and the process design looks like and how do we help them reduce the number of issues and speed the time to install and commission their equipment. Between Kalypso's consulting capabilities, our Emulate3D software capabilities to emulate automation and systems and equipment and the integration that we're making of our control systems and our intelligent devices to be represented in those tools for our customers to use, I think that's bringing together all of that capability for our customers to be able to validate and test before they ever go into physically building a piece of equipment and a process to really reduce the time and the risk for them. And when you're out on the tour today on the expo floor, you're going to see the visual of the virtual machine running and the physical machine running in parallel, which I think will give you a really good visibility to what that means.

That's super cool, so it's going to be a highlight for you, I'm sure. So I think you're starting to see a little bit of the value, the additive value we get with the integration of our hardware, software and services roadmap. Let's continue that discussion by moving on to our second target industry, the EV and battery production industry. As you all know, there's a lot of start-ups in this space. And even for the established manufacturers, they're trying to act like start-ups and part of that is really bringing new technology to play in ways that they never have before, to speed production. That's like a key KPI, a key value generator. And so they really want to move faster, to be more agile. And the adoption of cloud in their production processes is a great example of that, and their adoption of Plex and the smart manufacturing platform is another great example of adopting cloud. And as you know, Plex is the industry's only multi-tenant pure cloud offering for manufacturing execution operating at scale. And we've seen great growth of Plex in this automotive kind of value chain from OEMs and new ones like Shift, RE and 0 EV, all of which we announced in the last year and tier suppliers up and down the supply chain. Just recently announced that win with Futaba as an example, and Prometheon at the end of Q3. Those companies and many more are seeing those benefits of adopting the cloud and manufacturing, rapid implementation, the ability to implement without those scarce skills if you're trying to do a lot of custom application development and on-site support at individual factory. So we really think that these automotive companies are seeing great value by adopting the cloud. And 1 of the things they like faster, these frequent releases and new capabilities. They can start and stay at the leading edge of technology.

I think electric vehicles somewhat is behaving -- early adopting new technologies and new capabilities. And if you're a startup, you starting from a bit of a blank sheet of paper, right? So you get to select what's the latest and most valuable technology. And I think another area where electric vehicle is pushing ahead rapidly is in the area of advanced material handling. So how product, how materials move through a plant and move through equipment is really transforming. And I think electric vehicle has been open and early in terms of adopting new technologies. We've been seeing really rapid adoption of independent Cart Technology in electric vehicle for battery construction and assembly, and they're really seeing the benefits of the flexibility and agility, this highly versatile material handling solution can provide. I think the other area where we're seeing adoption, both in electric vehicle and in other industries is around unified robotics. And our teams, Brian's team and the Intelligent Devices team has been partnering close together to bring a unified robotic solution where can do machine and robotic control in our single Logix platform. And it has a huge benefit for customers at a single controller architecture, single software, 1 set of skills that your team needs to be able to deploy and maintain. And this week, we announced kind of our next version of unified robotic solution that came out of a partnership that we've had with Comau Robotics as well, where we're bringing really a next level of capability in terms of deploying robotic solutions into manufacturing operations.

Just listening to that part of the conversation, you're talking about the introduction of a lot of new technologies, manufacturing technologies. But quite honestly, a lot of these startups are more startups than software companies than they are manufacturing companies. And so 1 of the things that we're learning about this space is playing a different role for some of these organizations. The Ford video that was played earlier really talked about how we've been involved in the industry for a long time, and we're helping with our domain expertise. And so whether that's in battery assembly now press, Body and White, Blake mentioned and all those areas. We've been doing this for a long time. And we're now playing a different role helping the actual start-up of production, the optimization of production getting to those backlogs of EVs that all these companies have. And trying to help them optimize how much of production they can get out the door. And so it's a different role than we played in the past with some traditional automotive manufacturers. And it's exciting for us to be that bigger partner in this space.

Not just automation expertise, it's how do you build cars expertise.

Yes. Right.

Yes, 1 of the things the same in EV and battery production. We talk a lot about how it's different or you new and unique. But 1 of the things that's the same is it's still a very asset-intensive manufacturing process. It takes a lot of capital to make an EV or to build a new battery plant. And those companies really want to focus on those assets to really sweat those assets and maximize the OEE, the overall equipment effectiveness of those expensive assets. And so we're seeing a strong demand for our fix maintenance management system, fix an acquisition that Rockwell did a little less than 2 years ago, really helps companies be much more proactive in planning and executing the maintenance, a more predictive maintenance approach. And we've seen strong growth in our fixed business over the last couple of years.

I think this is also another area it comes together for us as a company and for our customers. If you think about maintaining assets, what companies want to move from is what is traditionally time-based maintenance scheduling, you do a fixed number of maintenance activities at certain periods of time and really moving to where you're performing maintenance when only it's necessary and as little maintenance to keep the machines up and running. And so really moving towards a predictive maintenance, where you're taking real-time diagnostics and asset operating conditions and driving maintenance activities coming out of that. And we've been investing quite a bit across the Intelligent Devices portfolio to ensure that the devices have the right operating diagnostics and health status, data in that we can enable that data to come with context into applications like fix. So that when a drive is experiencing a condition that could be a failure point in the future. We can deliver that information to fix trigger a work order and maintenance teams can perfform their maintenance work.

So in the services group, we have an asset management business already. Fix being a strong asset performance management platform kind of bringing into our mix, we saw as an opportunity to expand what we could offer the market. And so working with all the product teams, we've kind of pre-populated the system with Rockwell Automation data as well as a bunch of other typical data we find in plants. And now we're using that to provide a managed service capability to expand our asset management business. From a customer, there really speeds time to deployment, it speeds time to value, because they're able to take advantage of that quickly. And that managed service capability obviously simplifies how we get it into the plant. And so -- and again, I would be remiss to say it does provide that annual recurring revenue opportunity for us. And Brian and I are in a little bit of competition to grow that faster on either side. So we're always looking for ways to do that.

You need me to help you.

all right. The third technology trend or trend in EV and battery that we feel is important and we're taking advantage of here is we're designing and implementing these new offerings that we're bringing to market is around the kind of merger of IT and OT in manufacturing in these companies. Rockwell has talked a lot about this trend for a long time. And we're really seeing it come to life in this industry segment. These companies want to bring modern IT practices to the factory floor. And a good example of where we're taking advantage of that is with our brand new release also launching here this week of FactoryTalk Design Studio, right? This is a project of pure cloud, software offering for the programming of our Logix automation systems. It's a next-generation approach that really reflects the needs of these customers and the market overall to act more agilely to bring these modern software development practices into the hands of the production engineering organization. So on your tour, you'll see examples of how it's modern from a programming approach. How it's multiuser, really bringing that collaborative design approach to life for sophisticated production automation systems and it's system-base. So it's a great user experience, all of it delivered through a web browser anytime and anywhere.

And Brian, to really preserving the value of 1 integrated system. And so taking what has been really successful and valuable for customers, which is, 1 architecture and 1 system to configure and deploy and really bringing that forward into the cloud.

I mean I think it's exciting for all of us and all of us anticipated getting this release out. And our team using it in prerelease to kind of put it through its paces as well as some of our partners. So I think it's exciting. Congratulations, Brian, on the general release. So I wanted to kind of go back to Brian's comments about IT/OT and in the context of these large automotive programs. These programs are significant. They're complex. They have complex supply chains, peer suppliers and OEMs. But when we think of IT/OT, I think of digital transformation, right? And I think of the opportunities that, that presents itself to create that digital thread that I talked about and bringing those complex products through the manufacturing environment all the way through supply chain and then into the opportunity to optimize it. So product life cycle management, digital twins, all these things ensure time to market and quality. I mentioned that before, but it's the same context in this particular industry. And so I think that's important. From a coordination standpoint, we often play a global coordination role for customers on making sure the tier suppliers are trained and capable and ready with the technology, making sure the use of standards. So when everything gets to the plant, it all ties together, and then coordinating those activities with the user to make sure the commissioning and bringing the plant up is successful. And so that's more similar to what we've done in the automotive industry in general, but now we're applying those skills and capabilities here.

So that was a good discussion around electric vehicle and electric vehicle really is a part of the energy transition that's taking place across our industries in the marketplace. And so I'm going to shift the topics and about energy transition. And what are the -- we're going to focus on a few things. And the first is that the energy transition that's happening across all of the industries that we're working with is, one, creating new opportunities for us as new energy sources, investments in new energy sources start to scale. Whether it's in wind, it's in solar, it's in green hydrogen, it's in geothermal or hydroelectric, there's a requirement to scale up operations and locations, energy storage, and this is an area where we're playing already today.

Yes, we are. It's kind of funny. We use the term new energy. So everybody thinks that we're waiting for something to happen, right? But it's in full flight. We've got many programs going on in all parts of the world around new energy. Geothermal in Nevada, hydrogen plant in France, right, and many, many more. And we're doing these with our partners, folks like SLB to help us get these done. Olivier also mentioned that in addition to new energy, the demand for energy continues to increase around the world. And so helping the current energy customers, oil and gas, in particular, is also a role we talked about CCS earlier. And so I'll mention again that this is kind of an optimal spot for Sensia to target and play and provide that value to customers digital oilfield, if you will, in carbon capture. So it's not just about the capabilities we have, it's about the intellectual property and the domain expertise that organizations like Sensia puts together, that I think is a really good fit for this space.

Our acquisition of Cubic also is an opportunity in this space as well, a large part of their business is in new energy, in particular, in wind. And they're largely in EMEA and in Asia Pacific. And so not only market access and new technology into our portfolio, but a footprint in an emerging and growing area of new energy as well. Frank, you mentioned Sensia and the work that we're doing around carbon capture. And if you think about it, across every industry driving towards energy optimization or decarbonization is at the forefront of what companies are thinking of. Oil and gas, in particular, as Blake and Olivier were talking about, it's at the top of the list. And oil and gas companies are under a lot of pressure. Today -- even today, there are a lot of assets that are in oil and gas operations that are still diesel or gas fired. And so there's an effort to go through electrification and bringing assets to lower carbon-intensive electrification in terms of control and power. And this is really about modernizing that infrastructure, an area that we play really well. And our combination of intelligent motor control and process control has a really direct and strong fit in the work that companies are doing to really drive decarbonization and move to electrification of the assets that they have.

That's definitely an area we don't have to wait for.

Yes, right. And so many of these companies are in what we would call process-based manufacturing, right, flow-based manufacturing. And so their requirements are for these highly available fault-tolerant systems that keep production running all the time and where human safety is of critical importance, obviously. So we've had a great portfolio for years around this highly availability in fault tolerant architecture. We're building on that with a new release, again, here at Automation Fair, and you'll see you on the tour, of a product we call Flex HAE5000, HAE for highly available. And it's a new configurable I/O system, helping companies manage a tremendous amount of interconnectivity that's present in these industries. It complements what we already have today and helps us serve a bigger part of this process market.

The last area that we would have to talk about when you talk about energy transition is energy optimization, the reduction. The use of energy in plants and in processes. And we've spoken a lot about data as we is the different industry transitions. And I think from an energy optimization standpoint, data is going to be critical. So getting the energy usage out of intelligent devices and the control system to be able to monitor, to report and then to reduce energy usage is going to be really important.

Yes. We hear this from customers all the time. We've just created a reusable template built on the PTC ThingWorx platform. Frankly that your organization can use over and over with customers, getting them to this ability to monitor and measure and track the usage of all of this energy or other natural resources used in production. So it's going to be faster and easier for them to get kind of data-based information and even compliance with their objectives.

It's a good point, Brian, we've talked about this ability to simplify and reuse and deploy. We're delivering these solutions today. Tessa mentioned that a lot of these things are really good fits for the portfolio. And we're also applying some of the new things that we do, not just around energy storage, but applying AI into optimization uses, things that we've had in the portfolio for a while, like model predictive control, take on new meanings in some of these spaces, production and asset optimization. All of these things are current opportunities that we're working on with customers today. So new energy is here, right? It's not something that we need to wait for. And of course, Sensia is playing a big role in this as we help those current producers of energy optimize. You heard Olivier say digitalization is the fastest way to optimization, and it's true the reduction of methane and things like that. And then, of course, the carbon capture work they're doing. So we've gone through most of the content that we wanted to, hopefully, kind of bringing to life some of the comments that Blake made about these kind of outcomes and challenges. So I'm going to wrap this up first, I think my counterparts here, Tessa and Brian. We had a lot of fun getting ready for this, and hopefully, the discussion was valuable to you. And then we're also hoping that you've got a little insights in how we and our teams work together to really deliver these outcomes, because that's an important part of this equation. While we all have kind of unique responsibilities, it kind of takes a family here to make it work and come to life. So thank you again. And with that, we're going to transition again now to our next set of speakers. So Becky, Scott and Nick are going to come up and talk about a different topic, the infrastructure of our company and it's ecosystem and what that means to all of you as investors. So let's welcome them to the stage. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Frank, and I'm going to take a few minutes this morning and talk about talent. More specifically, what are we doing to make sure that we have the talent now and into the future to deliver on our strategy, right? We know it's a dynamic marketplace out there. Coming out of the pandemic, everything from the great resignation, the great retirement, the great reshuffle. We know people have different expectations about what they want from their employers. It's a competitive, and we see increasingly volatile and dynamic talent marketplace. And we know we still have a skills gap in many key areas in the manufacturing and technology industries. So we're taking a holistic approach to our talent strategy that really looks across the entire talent life cycle. From our talent branding to when you're attracting people and getting them to join the company, all the way through to when they depart the company and making sure that we've got a coherent and cohesive way of making sure that we have the people coming in and we're training and developing them for our needs into the future. On the attraction side of the house, we've been specifically focused on making sure that we can attract talent that has new skill sets. You've heard from Blake and our other leaders today about the evolution of our strategy. where is technology going. We know that we need different skill sets in the organization to deliver value into the future for our customers. You see it reflected in the leadership team. New folks coming in with different backgrounds and skills than we've traditionally had. Our acquisitions are also a critically important part of our talent strategy. Blake talked earlier about the important contribution it makes to our inorganic growth, top line and bringing new technologies and expanding markets for us. But acquisitions are also a great source of new talent with skill sets. You think about our Kalypso acquisition back in 2020 with the consulting expertise. And over the last year with our acquisitions, we brought more than 800 new employees to the company with software skills. Think about people with deep cloud native software development skills. People who know SaaS business models and go-to-market transactions, how do we make our customers successful. And so we're focused on as we go through our integration process evaluating, understanding that talent, making sure we're retaining the key people and bringing them in so they can have a broader impact across the entire Rockwell Automation ecosystem. We're also developing our existing talent now and into the future. We've been engaging with all of our business units and functional team leads and strategic workforce planning, to help define what are some of the new skill sets, what are the training opportunities. Cyril talked earlier about AI that's going to become increasingly important. And what are the right strategies for either building those skills within our existing workforce, do we need to go out and look for new talent. One of the great examples of the power of a good development and training program is our Academy of Advanced Manufacturing. Many of you may recall when we launched it back in 2017, it's a training program for military veterans. Since we launched it, we've graduated more than 350 veterans from this program. And we place them and position them in technical jobs and advanced manufacturing across our customer base. And they're starting in jobs with salaries of at least $60,000 to $70,000 and in a great stat when we went back and looked at things, especially in this talent marketplace, after 1 year, more than 85% of them are with that original employer. So defining what those skills are that they need for success now and positioning them for long careers in the automation industry. We're also really accelerating our investments and our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Now this isn't a new space for us. We've got a great foundation that we're building on, but we also know that we need to do more. We need to accelerate our efforts. So our Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and his team have partnered with all of our leaders to use data to really look at the workforce and understand where are our best opportunities. Where do we have some gaps that we need to move faster? Is it training and development programs and developing leadership competencies with existing diverse talent? Is it looking externally at new sources of talent to open up that aperture to make sure we're bringing in folks with different skills and backgrounds and adding them to the organization? And we're making great progress. Over the last year, we've increased both the number as well as representation of both female and people of color within our global workforce. And we've been really focused on leadership levels, people managers, visible demonstration of diverse leadership across our organization. And I'm proud to say that the representation of our women and people of color in our senior leadership roles, is above the manufacturing and technology industry medians. And we know we need to continue focusing on making sure that all those folks who are in our organization or joining our organization with diverse backgrounds can be successful. So the focus on building an inclusive culture, and we measure our culture. And what does the data tell us? It tells us that actions like having all of our managers, more than 3,000 people over the last year, go through inclusive leadership training, managing across difference, how do you really engage and empower people who are different than you are, has led us to having our global inclusion index that measures the inclusiveness of our culture above the norm for companies globally. And we're also focusing on employee well-being and total well-being not just physical, but also mental and financial well-being, right? We've always had best-in-class safety performance for years, and that was critically important during the pandemic, and we'll never stop focusing on that. But increasingly now, we see the importance of mental health. People show up to work and they're engaged dealing with the stresses of their day-to-day life, whether it's health care issues, challenges that the virtual world has presented to us, or global events. So providing them with the benefits and resources, talking to our managers about checking in with their employees, making sure you're talking about those challenges and really ensuring that it's not a barrier to their success in the workplace. From a financial perspective, it starts with ensuring that we're offering a compelling and a competitive and attractive total rewards package to our employees. And looking holistically, adding to our benefits program, including extending our parental leave, paid parental leave and time off, adding to that a caregiver relief program. Our flexible work options that allow people to balance the demands of their personal and professional lives. And ultimately, looking at our pay-for-performance philosophy and how do we bring it to life? What do I mean by that? It's about differentiation. We're focused on making sure that our key talent, our top performers, the people who are so important for delivering value now, delivering for our customers now as well as developing for the future, know how important they are. So differentiated rewards, whether it's in the form of equity or increased merit for your top performers to let those folks know how important they are. And what we've seen is it really matters. Over the last year, the people who received those differentiated rewards, had conversations and were told how important they are, increased their retention by more than 50%. So when we look at voluntary attrition numbers, they were 50% to 60% less likely to leave the organization. And a lot of that is the compensation, but it's also the conversations and how they know how critical they are to our future. Ultimately, all of these talent actions that we're taking on is really has to be consistent with and founded on our culture. We want to make sure we're creating an environment where people can and want to do their very best work. And culture isn't something that just kind of happens, right? You need to be really intentional about it. We've talked about our 4 cultural principles, and we bring it to life in our workforce through everything from onboarding that every single new employee goes through and understanding what's important to us and how we're driving our strategy through culture workshops where we have every single 1 of our employees talk about and identify ways that they can bring our culture to life and our 4 culture principles to life in the decisions they make and the activities that they engage in every single day. Another critical piece of the talent puzzle is creating that sense of purpose and belongingness. We more -- we know more now than ever, how important that is. People want to work for a company where they feel like they're impacting the world in really, really positive ways that what they do is making a difference in that we care about what's important to them. And our sustainability strategy is a way that we bring that to life for our people, right? Our strategy around sustainability is really driven -- aimed at driving 3 different outcomes. First, sustainable customers. And you've heard about that all day today, right. Whether it's how we're engaged in supporting electric vehicle manufacturing or the energy transition, and you'll see even more examples out on the show floor with water and wastewater solutions. That's really powerful for folks to know that they are changing the world through the work that they are doing every single day. It is the way that you -- our employees at Rockwell can have an exponential impact on the world around them, through making our customers successful in achieving their own sustainability goals. We also want to make sure we have a sustainable company, and I talked about that in terms of our intentional focus on our talents and on our culture. And we've set our own environmental goals to decrease the impact we're having on the world around us. And finally, our sustainable communities through programs like Rock & Action, which we launched last January, to almost 16,000 of our employees globally. And what it does is it empowers them to get involved in their communities and throws the company's support behind them. So we provide paid time off for our people to volunteer in their communities. And for every hour that they volunteer, we'll make a financial contribution to that organization or will match what they donate to organizations that are important to them. This tells our employees how important it is to us that they're involved in the world around them, that they're making a difference and that we are behind them and what's important to them is important to us. So it's through this ecosystem approach that we take to our talent strategy that's setting us up for success and really making us an employer of choice out in the marketplace as we're filling our talent needs now and into the future. The talent that makes us successful isn't just within our 4 walls, though, it's also with our external partners. And so I'm happy to turn it over to Scott, who's going to spend a few minutes talking about our partners.

Thank you. So good morning. I guess it's still morning technically. As you've heard from my peers this morning, we have the portfolio strength, strategy and positioning to continue to win in the marketplace. I don't think that's a question. And there are some very key advantages in our ability to drive success through our teams, partners and acquisitions, and we're really doubling down on how we do that this year. So today, 1 of the things that I want to spend a little time on is maybe talking also a little about talent, but talent in the sense of how are we making sure that the sales, marketing and partner organizations are prepared to be able to do what we need to do as we evolve and introduce new solutions. So as you heard from Becky, we are investing in our talent as a key differentiator, both in the terms of attracting, retaining and developing, but also in how we create the right mix of skills and capabilities and organizational alignment throughout our organization. And we've spent a lot of time over the past year ensuring that our organization, alignment, talent mix and skill sets are in place just to do that. One of the things we're very focused on as an organization is of elevating the conversation through marketing and sales with our customer executives. Around these industry business issues and conversations that Cyril talked about and how do we help solve those issues. It's a big focus area for us. We're also focusing on aligning our teams to sell as what we call outcome-based sellers, across our hardware, software and services portfolio. I am a big believer that if our teams are out having conversations about real business issues that customers are struggling with and that we can solve those, we will sell a lot of hardware, software and services. And we're also expanding, and we've made a lot of focus here around our global and strategic industry account focus. In every region, putting more resources, sales and domain expertise and marketing and industry expertise to help drive those solutions. And we are also supplementing our sales with specialty sales organizations and resources in key growth areas, including cyber, which we've talked about, digital transformation, sustainability, as Becky mentioned, and software to accelerate deal closure and success. These types of resources are extremely important as we go in and have more business strategic conversations with our customers. Key amongst the strengthening of our talent is the value we're achieving not only through the business -- through our acquisitions and integration of it, but also the talent integration. And I think this is something that's really important that we don't talk a lot about. Over the past few years, our acceleration of acquisitions have clearly added strength to our portfolio. And obviously, we've delivered strong revenue growth from it. But what we don't talk a lot about often is how these acquisitions are also strengthening and supplementing the deep domain expertise, selling capacity and experience for our teams. So through Kalypso, as an example, we have extended our consultative selling capabilities and resources, specifically in large-scale digital transformation within our strategic and global accounts. It's been an extremely important acquisition and success for us to be able to go have that skill set to do that. Through our Plex and Fix acquisitions, we've expanded our software selling capability, high velocity sales motions and marketing. And through Avnet, we brought in deep domain expertise in critical cybersecurity, operations and solutions. So I'm really confident when I look at the integration beyond the portfolio, of the teams associated with these acquisitions and the benefits they bring to our company and that through my leadership. So I have also now, in the last year, have taken 3 senior leaders from Fix and Plex, and we've elevated them up inside the GSM organization or the sales and marketing organization. So Tim, who was CRO at Fix now reports directly to me, running our new high velocity team. Fred, who was CRO at Plex, reports directly to me now running an enterprise -- global enterprise software sales organization. And Robin, who also was at Plex, their Chief Marketing Officer, now has been promoted and also is our Chief Marketing Officer for Rockwell overarm. So as a company, when I think about 1 of our core tenants, it's comparing ourselves to the best and continuously seeking a steady stream of fresh ideas. And I think we're doing that with these integrations. I think it's extremely important that we figure out how to bring in new ideas as we expand, but also make sure that we preserve the value of what the Rockwell employees of what got us here. So let's pivot real quickly to our partner ecosystem. The strength of our partner ecosystem is unmatched in the industry, and it's key to our growth over the past several decades. We have been actively expanding our partner base, especially in software and services. And we're including the creation over the last year, 2 new partner types, a software specialty distributor and a software value-added reseller. Both partner types are intended to extend our reoccurring revenue growth. The software specialty distributor are the new partners that have existing experience in software space, not surprising. The software VAR is an added partnership that we have that allows our traditional distributor partners to sell software and deliver services, both new and renew. And we're growing the influence of these programs very quickly. Over the last year, we've appointed 11 new specialty distributors in EMEA, and we put 7 in Asia Pacific to drive information solutions grow. In addition to this, we've also recruited and enabled close to almost 100 IS system integrators. And that breakout is, it's about 25 in Europe, 20% in Asia Pacific and about 40% in North America to really accelerate our Information Solution growth. And our traditional distributors are looking to add these capabilities as a way to further differentiate themselves in the marketplace. OEMs are another aspect of our unique partner ecosystem that is very key to our success. Building smart machines and ensuring our end customers have that capability to access data and analyze performance. Over the past year, we have added almost 200 OEMs to our partner network and launched a whole another new tier of OEM partnership model like we did with the system integrator program to engage and measure our combined success. Strategic partnerships are also a very important part of our partner ecosystem. And when I talk about strategic partnerships, I'm talking about companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Cisco and we have many others. We -- these types of partnerships continue to elevate our consultative selling and they also strengthen our strategic account relationships. We're seeing great results in the sense of pipeline and activity from these partnerships. And these partnerships allow us to call in different areas of customers that maybe we don't typically call on, and they also bring us into new accounts. So we are very focused on strengthening our market access model with a focus not only in North America but beyond, and we want to continue to grow share outside of the North America market in Europe and Asia Pacific. The strength of our distribution model is key to our success, and we are working to drive focus, enablement and success across all market access partners that I've talked about today. I think a true sign of success in this area is we also see co-innovation when we work with our partners and our customers. And we heard a little about that today in the health care panel about how important that is and the stuff that we're doing together. So in closing, I want to say 1 thing. The talent of our teams, the integration of our talent through acquisitions and the expansion of talent through the reach of our partner ecosystems, are critical for our success in fiscal year '23 and beyond, and I'm very confident that we're building that out to be very successful in the years to come. At this time, I am going to turn it over to Nick.

Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone. It's really good to be here with the investor community. It's really good to spend time with you. And I hope what you're getting out of this morning is some of the reasons why we're so excited about our future. We've been executing a strategy since fiscal year 2016, where we've been working to how to accelerate growth in our core as well as what we then called ISCS and still call it that, and then complementing that with organic growth. And you saw Blake talk about the success we're having there. Part of the success we have comes from the way we allocate our resources to what we're spending money on to support that growth. So I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about where we have been investing and where we are investing in fiscal year '23. First, if I look backwards at the year that just ended, our growth investments, what's illustrated here in yellow grew 12% year-over-year. And this is supporting, what you're going to see on the automation floor this afternoon, a record year of key launches that this enabled. In addition, we're also investing in redesigning a number of our products to enhance our resiliency to volatility in the supply chain. And at the same time, we're balancing that level of investment with productivity amongst our support functions, where we saw spending go up 3%, far less than our growth rate. If I fast forward to our current year fiscal year '23, our plan is for total spend -- investment spend to go up mid-single digits. The growth component of that, again, illustrated in yellow, we estimate it's going to go up approximately 6%. And then our support functions up a couple of percentage points. If I start with digital and infrastructure, digital, infrastructure and supply chain, we are investing in the infrastructure to enable growth in our recurring revenue as well as activities to simplify the process for our customers. We also continue our investment that we were doing in fiscal year '22 around redesign for our resiliency, and we expect the benefit that we're getting from that, which started in '22 to expand and be more beneficial to us in fiscal year '23. We also worked on expanding our manufacturing capacity in fiscal year '22, and that will continue in '23. From an R&D perspective, we continue to invest and focus on what -- on development around on-prem and software offerings. By doing that, they also differentiate our hardware and service offerings that we provide. Blake talked a little earlier this morning about many of the innovations that we're coming forward with. A couple I'll just highlight, announcing now our cloud-native programming for Logix as well as a new line of IO technology specifically designed for the process industries that we serve. We're also investing in industry-specific solutions. You heard Cyril talk about that. You've actually heard several of us talk about that this morning. But industry-specific solutions, taking our technologies, our hardware, our software, our services to bundle out solutions that create outcomes for mere doing them in a number of industries like life sciences, which you've seen this morning, electric vehicles, food and beverage. And then finally, 1 of the things we're investing in, in fiscal year '23 is that digital platform that Cyril talked about, to enable the technologies that are coming in the future for Rockwell. In addition, we're also investing in cybersecurity as our customers are looking for ways to better secure their work environment. We're working on adding technologies to help enhance the offerings that we provide there. In addition to the organic investments we do, we also see accelerated profitable growth coming through our acquisitions and partnerships. Here's a list of what we have done in the last 6 years. And I hope as you look at this list, you'll say, we think it reflects that we've been very intentional and disciplined of acquiring things that we see aligned with our strategic objectives. Once we bring these acquisitions into our company, they are growing at twice the pace of growth that the rest of Rockwell is growing. And in fiscal year '23, the collective group here of acquisitions, we expect to be contributing approximately $150 million of EBITDA. And we expect that number to keep growing as some of our more recent ones are still in the early stages of growing at scale and reaping the synergy that we expect. The most recent acquisition, Cubic, we closed in October. It's a profitable growing business and it strengthens and expands our global reach. It gives us access to new customers, new partners and new markets for us. It's differentiated modular design, we think, is a winner. And in fiscal year '23, we think it will add approximately 1% in organic growth to the company. You've seen this slide before, many of you, our long-term financial framework remains the same. We continue to expand our margins with our focus on core conversion in the 30% to 35% range, and we continue to focus on generating 100% or greater free cash flow conversion. Much like our long-term financial framework, our capital deployment framework is really no change. In addition to balancing the long-term capital deployment priorities listed here, a focus in '22 and in '23 has been on delevering our balance sheet post our acquisition of Plex. If I take -- then turn over to our capital structure, we expect a meaningful portion of our cash flow generation to be going in reducing our debt. We expect our adjusted debt to EBITDA ratio to be approximately 2x by the end of fiscal year '23. Of course, we do maintain the optionality of temporarily increasing our leverage for the right strategic acquisition. And as we've mentioned in the past and have been executing throughout '22, we do plan to continue -- we do continue to plan to monetize a portion of our investment in PTC. And we're doing that for additional flexibility to strategically deploy capital. Backlog. This is a slide we introduced at our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. But I wanted to take a moment to just to tell you how this informs our fiscal year '23 guidance. What we mentioned 2 weeks ago is that pre-pandemic in our intelligent devices and software and control businesses. We had backlogs that were less than 1 month of normal sales. Right now, that backlog is greater than 50% of our full year revenue guidance for each of those businesses. This unprecedented backlog coverage adds to our confidence in a broad range of macroeconomic conditions in fiscal year '23. Our outlook in fiscal '23 continues to be more driven by supply chain and our access to components than by the normal cadence of orders. In addition, we've been working with our channel to implement order cancellation fees on new orders that occur after starting January of '23 to ensure the continued high quality of our backlog. I'm going to wrap up just by sharing again our '23 guidance that we put together, I shared with you a couple of weeks ago. At the midpoint of our guidance range, we expect revenue of approximately $8.5 billion. We expect approximately 50 basis points of margin expansion, which leads to an earnings per share between $10.20 and $11. And with that, let me bring back Blake back on the stage.

Well, thank you. We hope that you've found the comments that I've made and the members of the team have made, interesting, informative. And I also hope that you're as excited as I am about what lies before us. We're delivering on our commitments to accelerate profitable growth. Despite enormous challenges in the macro that all of us have had to deal with over the last 4 years, we're taking those in stride, and we've continued on a path of delivering more value and finding more ways to win. We've become a scale provider in many areas of new value that are well on their way to becoming a part of our core offering and our core money-making capacity in the organization, and we'll become a more resilient company, increasing the amount of recurring revenue, operationalizing as-a-service business models, becoming more resilient with respect to our supply chain and offering new disruptive products and services that, again, contribute to that theme of finding new ways to win. So with that, I'm going to bring the rest of my team to the stage, and we're going to answer your questions.

First question, Julian?

Maybe 1 first question, perhaps just for you, Blake and Nick around the orders comment that Nick made around ensuring quality of future backlog. Maybe just give us some more context around that kind of implementation of charges. Is that something that your industry peers you think are doing as well. And when you use the phrase kind of normalization of orders, is there any geography or end market vertical that you think that might be more or less pronounced as you look ahead?

So as far as the order cancellation, we are seeing that being done in selected areas by some of our competitors. We don't think it's out of the norm. As we look at our backlog today, we have high confidence in it, basically we've seen very, very low cancellations and in engagement with our end customers, there is truly a heightened appetite for the products and solutions that we have. However, we are instituting this just to make sure in the coming months and years that we continue to ensure that we have a high-quality backlog. That orders that are coming in that there are implications if it gets canceled, that -- because we are planning our supply chain around it and we want our customers to be aware that if they do choose to cancel it, that there is a financial implication of that.

Yes. I really look at this as hygiene. I don't expect this to have a step change in any of our current dynamics or trends. It's hygiene. And it's recognizing that certain things that had not been addressed in our order cycle, we need to address as we have with the more immediate realization of price increases, for instance, something we've talked about over the last year. So this is another step in that process, working together with our partners to implement.

And then just 1 quick follow-up, maybe around the PTC relationship. Nick, you talked about maybe monetizing some of the stake. So any sort of color on that and also from Blake or Brian around just the overall health and status of the partnership, the PLM cross-selling and so forth?

Yes. Let me start in general, by saying that the commercial relationship remains strong. Some of you saw Jim with us last night and PTC has a strong presence at the show. So the benefit that our customers are getting from being able to combine certain aspects of the PTC offering within Rockwell's overall offering has been helpful. Now IoT and augmented reality have been kind of the primary focuses. Kalypso has strong capabilities in terms of implementing PLM solutions, that hasn't really been the focus of the relationship and nor is it a real strong desire from customers to say, I got to have those pieces together, the product design together with the production control, it's just not required to have those 2 things together. And after these years of working together with PTC, we've seen continued evidence of that. It's nice to have. We have that capability, but we also value that open approach where we have expertise and other suppliers in those design tools as well. And so maybe Nick answer a little bit on the monetization of our investment, then I'll ask Scott and Brian to talk a little bit more about the relationship commercially.

And I would just start by it's the strength of that commercial relationship that is influencing and has been influencing our decision that we can go ahead and reduce some of our stake. That -- because it's such a strong commercial arrangement and relationship that we have there, that when we look at our capital needs and where our capital structure is, we just wanted a little more flexibility there. And while we still want to maintain a certain stake that we have in PTC. We saw an opportunity that we could bring it down some to enable other capital deployment opportunities for us.

Yes. and we're happy that it is in the money, and we're monetizing again. So that's good, too. Scott, maybe a comment about how that helps us in the market.

Yes. I think PTC adds value for us to be able to compete in spaces if we didn't have that relationship, we might not be able to win. Our relationship with PTC is extremely strong. We work together. We worked together on deals together. We partner very well together. And I think it's an area that we need to continue to drive together. I think it allows us to be able to expand. As I talked about earlier about consultative selling outcome-based selling, this solves a problem for us when we're in talking to customers about problems that without it, we just wouldn't maybe be able to have the same conversations. Brian, do you want to add anything?

I'll just echo Blake's comment about the portfolio is really a pretty perfect fit for us to bring capabilities we don't otherwise have around an IoT platform, around augmented reality. And I mentioned during our 3 segment discussion there, we're using some of the PTC technology like ThingWorx to build on top of for industry-specific solutions. So we have good, strong collaboration at a product level or commercial level of the relationship.

Blake, you kind of talked a little bit about pricing just in the last question. And so all this transformation, integration and inorganic growth, maybe update us given the inflation over the last 5 years, Rockwell's progress on pricing, given maybe you got a little bit of a late start?

Well, traditionally, Rockwell would typically talk about somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 point of price a year, right, point of price realization in a year. We obviously seen a much more volatile environment in terms of inputs and our need to respond to that in terms of pricing to the market. And we talk a lot about what we're doing with respect to our products, but I want to make sure that you know that we're also incorporating that in our dynamic pricing for engineered-to-order offerings as well as solutions. So we talk a lot about how we're changing to a fixed discount process with products and this and that and that's important. It's remains the largest portion of our business, but I don't want you to think that what Frank is doing with life cycle services, what we're doing in the ETO part of Tessa's business is not being impacted as well. We were negative price cost in the first half of fiscal year '22, rapidly escalating costs, particularly around semiconductors, but including freight and things like that was also a piece of it. We shifted, as we said we were going to, to positive price/cost in the second half of fiscal year '22. And price is an important part of our financial growth in fiscal year '23, where it's accounting for about 4 points of the total 11% in organic growth. And obviously, it's helping us offset some of the continued cost. Cost hasn't gone away, and cost is still rising in some areas on a year-over-year basis, but we're very confident that the pricing amounts that we've implemented over fiscal '22 and continue to implement in fiscal '23 are being accepted at a high degree in the market, and are appropriate to make sure that we're keeping ahead of that -- those cost increases. The other point is the process improvement. We had talked before about implementing price increases, but taking a long time to work through the system. And by moving to a fixed discount model, which is progressing well, we are seeing the ability to more immediately recognize the impact financially of those price increases.

Yes. And then in the last couple of months, we -- in addition to what you've heard us talk about in the past, we have had a couple of other price increases, 1 specific to Europe and then a general price increase that's going into place next month. Those price increases, given our backlog, they will have some impact on our pricing later in '23, they're probably more about a fiscal year '24 impact for us, what we've set up there. And I think I said it on the earnings call, weeks ago, we're expecting over $250 million of price growth, and that's roughly double the amount of input cost inflation that we're expecting in fiscal year '23. That is partly offset some of the negative we had in the first half of '22.

And then maybe just a quick follow-up. You don't want to change the swish like I think we get that. But time, you did 2.3x IP over 5 years. And the and the markets have changed, Rockwell's changed. So the capability to do more than 2x accelerate from that 2.3, maybe just address that.

Yes. Let me make a general comment. Look, we want to look it into the globe, so to speak, right? We want to make sure that we deliver on what we said we were going to do as we introduced this framework in 2018. And 1 point to make is up until that point, we had talked about a multiple of IP for the whole company. And so we not only increase the gearing, if you will, the amplification on for our core, but we introduced the concept of information solutions and connected services as the new area growing double digits outside of that, regardless of what IP was doing. And so with $800 million plus of business there, that's on top of the better growth in the core and acquisitions fueling the different parts of that. What I'm going to ask Vin to make just a comment about leading our strategy effort is kind of the process as we start looking at how we seamlessly move from the Swoosh to what comes next. Some of the elements of that program, how we're getting more people, more external views involved as we develop an ongoing refresh of our strategy.

Right, thank you, Blake. So as Blake laid out, we're still performing against the elements of the long-term growth framework. And so as we think about how we're delivering at pace and delivering against commitments, we are looking at not just perform, but also how are we going to transform against what you mentioned and it was just all of the different ships that are happening in the landscape. And so that is the work that we're going -- we're doing as a team in terms of what is our next horizon aspiration and taking a broad view what's happening, all of the different megatrends, all of the places that we can uniquely differentiate and create value for our customers. Because 1 thing that will never change is creating value by delivering business for customers. But how we can do that, we'll build on the strengths that we have, and we'll make adjustments and enter new spaces that will help us continue to deliver profitable growth going forward. So we're engaging in that process, and we're taking broad view. We're also looking at getting input from a broad series of stakeholders. So 1 of the cultural tenets of steady stream of fresh ideas, being able to compare yourself to the alternative options, all of that is input into how we're going to think about the next phase. So more to come.

Just a question to build on Andy's question about the growth growing at 2x IP. That number may prove to be quite a bit higher than it's been for a long, long time, right? So you may be facing with a problem of having to grow for many, many years. I mean that's my view. I think you share that view. So if you take a look 2, 3 years out, a, as you look around, what are the best practices you can adopt to strengthen your processes, strengthen your supply chain, to be able to keep up with the growth? And specifically, maybe as you look out 2, 3 years, what would you like to achieve to improve the resiliency of your internal supply chain?

Yes. I'm going to make a few comments, and then I'm going to ask Brad, who's been our interim Chief Supply Chain Officer for some really challenging months over the last 6 or so months. But broadly, it is making more visible our internal processes to the whole company. I will tell you that traditionally, because we were working on a model that was buffered by a distributor stock and because semiconductors were something that could generally be reliably expected to come when we expected from the network that they were using, we sometimes took that for granted. And we certainly will never do that again. Over the last couple of years, we have gone far deeper in understanding our own processes, understanding the important linkages between supply chain and production. And we, as a company, that sells some of those capabilities, making sure that we're even more fully implementing that and ensuring an awareness throughout the overall organization of those processes and how we can work more efficiently together. There's things that we can do on the inside. There are things that we are doing in that ecosystem. And some of you heard us talking this morning with Vince at Analog Devices. And I can tell you that those direct relationships with counterparts, my counterparts at the world's biggest semiconductor companies, is something that we wouldn't have chosen this crucible to have developed those relationships under, but I'm proud to say that we have, in fact, developed those relationships with, put the long-term agreements in place. We have devoted the significant amounts of our internal resource for the continuous redesign of our products to make sure that we increase the resiliency scores of the individual products. And I think that those are, in fact, best practices. Brad, a few comments?

Yes, Blake, just to maybe expand upon -- you touched on a lot of the elements. It's both as we think about it in the short term, we've done a lot of activities to expand our internal capacity to expand the capacity of our suppliers. And those activities will continue as we continue to grow. But then what's also extremely important as we rethink about how we run our supply chain and the interactions that we have, both within Rockwell and across the entire enterprise, including total supply chain ecosystem. So for example, as Blake mentioned, looking at our products and the resiliency of those products, looking to put in place scorecards that score those products, so we know the level of within those products, working with our business units and engineering teams to change out components, have dual source on components to do those types of things, to have closer partnership with our suppliers to understand their processes, and where their capacity is at to ensure that we can ensure a steady flow to ourselves. And then it's about end-to-end visibility. We talk a lot about it with our customers about data and the ability to harness data and use that to make better insights. We need to continue to do that within our own supply chain so that we can see where we potentially have bottlenecks, where potential problems are and so that we can react quickly to that and ensure that we have that seamless flow across that supply chain. And so implementing some of our own technologies, which we've done a lot of, we'll continue to do and also look to other partners to figure out how we can continue to increase that visibility of the end-to-end supply chain.

We'll take 1 more question.

Like, just before we walked before today, I think a lot of these automation trade shows that a lot of folks in the room have been at over time, you kind of have this like digital utopia 1 pane of glass shows the whole plan, everything is nicely ticked and tied and optimized. But maybe for like the nonengineers in the room, I guess how much of the market is sort of ready in adopting these solutions today versus folks who are just either aren't there in the journey based on either the hardware or the cost or something like that, and would you say the backlog is consistent with how you guys see that mix?

Yes. So let me answer the first, and I'm going to try to figure out how to tie that into the backlog. But when I think about the market that's ready to go to these new forms of value in their own operations, advanced analytics and AI, more converged systems for the visibility and the processing of the data that's coming up from the individual machinery, there's still a lot of room to run. I think when we first answered a similar question, Frank and I were up here talking about, less than 20% of machines even being connected, even having the connectivity between the conveyor and the palletizer and the mixer and so on, to be able to bring the data together and send it up. All these manufacturers have some basic forms of operator interface. So let's start with that pane of glass. Just about everybody has operator interface there, but a much smaller number and probably closer to that, say, 20% figure actually has an MES system or MOM system to be doing production scheduling. Now the lines are going to blur between all these different acronyms. And so you are going to get to more performance software and the cloud is going to help with that blurring the lines between EMI and operator interface and MOM and MES and all the others. So the good news is you're not going to have to try to remember the nuances somebody told you existed between these various pieces. They are going to come together. And cloud is going to help quite a bit with that. And our approach to the digital platform that Cyril talked about with creating the micro services that make it much easier to tie these different pieces together, I think we're going to lead the industry and being able to provide that. And in fact, our more rapid movement here in cloud and on-premise applications may give us an advantage to leapfrog some of our competitors, because a lot of the software that we're building see on the floor and that we're acquiring is coming from a roughly similar time, so the tech stacks are going to be more similar. Now I'll take a stab at the -- your question about backlog, and then I'm going to ask Brian -- actually, I'm going to ask Chris to make about the internal plumbing, so to speak, with being able to deliver these various pieces. But if you look at the backlog, the vast majority in the intelligent devices and the control are for smart products that are designed not only for their last mile function, controlling the speed of the motor, controlling torque on a web, things like that. But also think of those motion controllers and drives and even overload relays and things like that as bundles of sensors that are feeding the data that's so important to getting to that single pane of glass that's going to allow you to analyze data. So the vast majority of that backlog are products with semiconductors in them that create a data path from the factory floor up to those software systems. Chris, a couple of comments about the internal transformation we're taking?

You want to talk about the digital transformation?

Yes.

Okay. So our digital transformation internally is focused really on 3 primary areas. One -- and you heard a lot of this from Cyril and Scott on focusing on business outcomes. So this is about reinventing our product from something that was just a physical piece of hardware to outcomes and experiences. So that's kind of tenet 1 of the transformation. Tenet 2 is reimagining how we interface with our customers, through distributors, our end customers and how we engage more in sensing what's happening in their business, their market, how are they using our products and using that as opportunities for cross-sell, upsell and furthering the value. And then the third component is the reimagining or the reinventing of business model. You heard talk about annual recurring revenue and subscription-based services that interface with our distribution channel and our customers becomes very different around that, and we have to redesign our operating and our internal systems and our processes and how our people engage, including the sales force and everyone in between there on how we go to market and execute those transactions.

Yes. It's really at the very beginning of the morning, I talked about new ways to win through new products. And you heard a lot about the new products that's fueling a lot of that backlog quite frankly, that are absolutely needed. But it's also about new ways to combine these to produce the outcomes and getting the plumbing right within our organization. A company that's traditionally been focused on moving products to our distributor shelves and then off to an integrator or a machine builder or an end user. That still remains fundamentally important to us in the future, but being able to combine that together with the software that's also needed, the services, it's complex internal business systems that we're simplifying to be able to simplify the whole process of acquiring and implementing and maintaining and refreshing automation at our customers. And again, that's what's going to sort out the winners and the losers over the coming decade.

Perfect. Thank you. Well, that concludes our prepared remarks and Q&A session. We will actually take a quick break for lunch, which is being set up in the back of the ballroom and we will resume at 12:10 for our show floor tours. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.