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

Hello, and thank you for joining today's webinar. Before we get started, we have a few housekeep items. The audio for this event will be streaming through your computer speakers. So make sure your volumes turned up and your speakers are turned on. Our webinar platform performs bad on Chrome and Firefox browsers. On the lower left-hand side of the presentation, you will see a Q&A box. We encourage you to answer any questions you have here, and we will answer them at the end of the presentation. If you're having any trouble connecting to the webinar, please take a moment to refresh your browser and disconnect from your VPN. If you're still having trouble, please clear cache. We have instructions in the Handout section of the webinar platform. All of the panels on the webinar platform are adjustable. To resize, simply click the corner to adjust or hit the maximize screen at the top right-hand corner of each panel. Today's event will be recorded and will be available right after it is completed. You can access the recording utilizing the same link you used to access the live event. After the webinar, we will also be sending you an e-mail with the resources from today's event, including the slides, handout and event recording. Additional information regarding today's topic can be found in the handout panel on the webinar platform. With that, I would like to introduce you our speaker for today, Tad Palus.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Good day, good afternoon, good morning. Today, we're going to talk about FactoryTalk AssetCenter, a Version 13. And before I start, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. I've just had 35 years at Rockwell Automation. I've worked on a variety of products. Today, I own AssetCenter and it's called the FactoryTalk Services platform, and I'm heading the modernization of those 2 products, and I live in Denver. As we get started, we're going to kind of set the stage for AssetCenter, why it's important, how it can help you solve some problems. And then I want to talk specifically about [ 2 ] centers that are coming in the Version 13 release. Okay? As you look at an industrial control system, today, there's hundreds or thousands of automation devices, there's automation controllers, like CompactLogix or ControlLogix. There's electronic operator interface devices or SCADA systems. There are drives, there are smart relays, there's switches. And all of these things have to be managed. And what we've seen is in the industrial control system, the need for device management is driven by the needs for regulatory trends, complying with laws or standards, looking at Internet of Things, cloud, these devices are becoming much, much more intelligent. And overall, customers are looking for a way to manage these devices not only at the site level, but even sometimes at the enterprise level. And at the same time, workforces are being pushed downwards and we're transitioning things from the OT side to the IT side and people are looking for different tools and different functionality. And on top of all of this, we also have an ever-changing cybersecurity environment. There is a myriad of different kinds of laws, rules, standards, all these things that is in industrial control system professionals we have to comply with or meet, things like executive orders or rules coming out of the European Union or just the practices. And some of these are recommendations. The EPA has rules for water systems or the TSA has a program called Shields Up that are really recommendations and best practices for a cybersecurity environment. There's also standards like IEC 62443 that manufacturers and customers, end users and people that are producing things that are being asked to meet that include third-party assessments and the attainment of stratifications. There's directive and compliance that are changing quickly. The right-most picture there is actually compliance for pipelines that has regularly been updated by the TSA. We also -- and there can be a barrier to keeping your business or maintaining business or gaining new business and then there's laws, regulations that have enough monetary applications or even criminal implications like some of the disclosures now required by [indiscernible]. So the cybersecurity practices for control systems kind of come down to a few things and many more probably, but they know what you have. So have an inventory of devices, being able to know when those devices change, managing the product lifecycle, so knowing when the device has been obsoleted or the firmware that's inside the device needs to be updated. We need to back up the configurations of those devices regularly so that, one, we can recover from failures or unauthorized change events. We can make reports against the baseline to tell you -- to know what has been changed. We need a security system that can prevent unauthorized access and monitor for unusual activity. And then just have the ability to have source control to track changes in these device configurations and to manage information that files on the platform. An AssetCenter can help with a lot of these. If you're not familiar with AssetCenter and you may not be, it comes in and has 5 basic capabilities. The first one is a change in [indiscernible] management system. We call it the [ archive ]. So AssetCenter lets you do check in and check out of files and folders, pretty much any kind of binary object that's up to a 2 gigabyte in size, which is a restriction at the back end of the product which uses Microsoft server. You can also hit the archive control who has access to those programs and files who can take what kind of action that [ thumb ] has. So that's the first part. The next part is disaster recovery, what we call disaster recovery, it's back up. So AssetCenter can talk to and back up device configurations periodically for Rockwell Automation devices, psychologic architecture, controller, CompactLogix, ControlLogix, our drives, PowerFlex, E300 smart relays and a number of other devices as well as robots, devices that host that FTP servers like a robot. And we can detect when changes are made. And sometimes those differences are reported in great detail. And sometimes, it's just to track some. It depends on the kind of device and what's available. There is a life cycle management piece that comes with this and where we can do active discovery on industrial automation networks and discover devices for Ethernet controller and devices, what would be term of CIP network, and we can capture that inventory, put it into the source control file and then give you information about it. And we'll talk a lot more about that in this -- we're making big changes in the life cycle management Version 13. The next capability does track and trace. So this is auditing the user actions in our products. So this is part of the integrated architecture. It's part of a FactoryTalk-enabled product suite, so FactoryTalk do Logix Designer, FactoryTalk make things like those when customers make changes to the configurations, information is published and AssetCenter captures and puts into a log file. So you can see in great detail what the user has done on the platform, if they're online with the controller making changes to a file. If they're an operator using FactoryTalk USC through a USC client and they make a tag change, we know exactly what they did, what the previous value was and what the new value was. And then finally, there is a security system that uses FactoryTalk Security. So we can secure access to the AssetCenter client, to the archive to configuration of the system. And then that extends to other applications like Logix Designer and FactoryTalk. The AssetCenter system itself is comprised of a few things. There's a server and a client. But there's also something called an agent and the agent is just a computer that's taking care of a task for the server. So when we go out and scan a network or when we back up a PowerFlex drive, there is an agent computer that gets assigned that passed by the server, and it goes off and does that work, okay? There's also a SQL server on the back end, I mentioned that, and everything in AssetCenter is sorted at SQL server. So good hygiene and backup of that SQL server, it's very important to us, AssetCenter system. AssetCenter itself scales in 2 different ways, as I talked about some of these capabilities. So the first thing is there's license capabilities. For example, disaster recovery for Rockwell Automation, which gives you the ability to back up our controllers, control objects, even SLC and PLC as well as drive, Stratix switches and a few other devices. There's another capability for the Asset life cycle management. There's yet another that's called the fast recovery for FTP devices, and that is how we support things like panic robots or other robots that are hosts of FTP server and the robot controller, Cognex vision systems used the FTP disaster recovery element. And then we also scale on capacity. So how many physical devices is AssetCenter managing? So in the AssetCenter system, you build a plant model and you populate this with logical representations of physical prices. So you say, "I want this plant area and I have a ControlLogix device." So you make a logical instance of that device so when you associated to a physical device. So those are what we term an asset, and those are what we count in terms of capacity. It's important to know that 1,000 holders. So just like a word back in an ACD file, which is the programming file for ControlLogix, those don't count as assets. You can have a great number of files and folders in the AssetCenter server just by itself. So AssetCenter, through these capabilities, can really strengthen customers' cybersecurity initiatives. We support the asset inventory. So knowing what we have, we can find devices on CIP networks, Ethernet, Ethernet IP devices from it. These are all based on the OPA specifications for those networks and that means as a standard that we find not only Rockwell Automation devices in this -- in the asset inventory, but other vendors, products that are -- have to comply with the OPA specification for the CIP network. So they have to comply with how Ethernet IP is structured within OPA. We can do change management. This is an agnostic trial source control system, you can check in and you check in and check out for Rockwell Automation files, Siemens files and CPG files, WordPads, Excel Spreadsheets, almost anything you can think of. So this, through change management helps us do that. We can also do detection of changes in the life cycle status of devices that we find on the network. Now these are Rockwell Automation devices. We can look at firmware changes. So when firmware is different in the asset inventory file, we can tell you that a device changed its firmware from version 10.0017 to 11.002 and tell you what that happens. And then also do the change detection with ControlLogix controllers, which is a continuous monitoring of the controller, and it tells the AssetCenter system when certain things change, for example, key switch position that would let us detect that. We can do the disaster recovery function, which provides automatic backup and also information to have -- having to do changes in what was backed up, so when we compare it to a baseline, and then there is a centralized audit diagnostics for capturing what users do. So that's kind of a basic overview of AssetCenter and what it can do, how it can help and how it really strengthens response to a cybersecurity initiative by a customer and how AssetCenter applies. And now I'd like to transition to talking about what's coming in our next release of AssetCenter. And to do that, the first thing I want to talk about is some exciting changes in FactoryTalk services platform, which AssetCenter uses and any FactoryTalk-enabled product pieces. So Logix Designer, FactoryTalk USC, things like that. And the reason I'm breaking into the AssetCenter presentation to talk about services platform because these are some pretty wide ranging and exciting things that we've done. The first is that we're going to support Socket.IO, has a communication channel and an alternative to DCOM, which has been the basis of communications and FactoryTalk services for the last almost 25 years that the product has been around. And Socket.IO is going to give us some strong benefits in increasing throughput and the scaling of the system. So we'll be able to have more clients and have more stability. It will -- for those of you familiar with FactoryTalk it will default to a setting that supports both a Socket.IO connection and a DCOM connection at the same time. And what this really means is as you were updating the system to services platform 6.40, you could update the directory server and then all the older clients can still talk to us using DCOM and then as you update the clients to 6.40, they will all start to use Socket.IO. So the system is designed for backward compatibility with older systems. There are options to set the system to only use Socket.IO, which would be a benefit, particularly in terms of firewall management. DCOM as designed by Microsoft uses an area, a number of parts that are dynamically allocated and we can't control which ports they use. Once we move to Socket.IO, we can very well control the port that's used by the Socket.IO connection. We are adding in 2 different multifactor authentication alternatives to FactoryTalk Security in 6.40. The first is when to use Azure Active Directory and yes, Microsoft last month, we named Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra-IT. We're still assessing how that works and how it might teach these people and what it means. So right now, we're going to call it Azure Active Directory still within Rockwell products. And with Azure Active Directory, we can authenticate from the plant to Azure Active Directory and then get an MSA in exchange for the user using what's available with Azure Active Directory. So that might be the Microsoft Authenticator application. It could be a onetime phone codes or via SMS, or any of those options. FactoryTalk Services does support the Azure Active Directory users or Azure Active Directory services users, which are a slightly different technology. We are also supporting on-premise multifactor authentication and the way we've attained this is by adopting the OpenID Connect identity provider standards. So you can configure the FactoryTalk directory with information from the OpenID Connect IDP. It's generally some URLs and some other information that comes from that third-party product. Now the OpenID Connect IDP is installed on the domain controller and adds multifactor authentication to on-premises active directories. And that might have also the same attributes as the Azure ID authentication, but those are in control of that vendor. So for instance, one of those vendors is HID Global. They have a product called Digital Persona. And it supports a wide variety of MFA options like fingerprint, facial recognition, iris scans, there's something called a mini band, so it's a biometric physical device there and a bunch of other options. So pretty exciting stuff. And it's so exciting that I wanted to give you a short video demonstration here of how the Azure Active Directory authentication works and to do that, when you use the FactoryTalk administration consult, but this would be the same workflow. You would see the Logix Designer, Studio 5000, FactoryTalk AssetCenter, anything that is logging into the FactoryTalk directory. So that the login dialogue has been changed, you'll notice that there's 3 different kinds of authentication buttons. There's a password button, and that's using the native FactoryTalk user or what a Windows-like user in today's services platform. There's also Azure AD and then an OpenID Connect but -- so for this demo, we're going to use that Azure AD button, and the user picks from a site, there could be multiple Azure AD sites or just one that's configured in the system. And then you start the MFA process, the lock-in process for Azure. Now as a Rockwell employee, I'm using the Rockwell Automation, Azure AD tenant, and we're going to log in as a user and then our password just like normal. And the tenant that's in use is not in your controls -- in the control of your IT department. And now here, you'll see a multifactor authentication. This is set up to use the Microsoft Authenticator app, so my authentication of entering 43 is occurring off camera, so you can't see that right now. And as soon as I perform that authentication step, you can see that I was logged into the FactoryTalk Administration Council. So these -- once you are in to the system, you can add Azure Active Directory user groups into the user group's collection of the administration console. Once they're there, you can create access control lists using the Azure AD group, as Azure did with any other group. Those are supported within FactoryTalk administration console. When you go to add a Azure AD group, when you hit this list button, there is a requirement by Microsoft, and this is through the Microsoft APIs, you have to reauthenticate if Azure -- to gain access to enumerate the groups that are in the application. And once you can enumerate the groups you add that group just like any -- just like we would have [indiscernible] Group except now you're adding an Azure Active Directory group to the FactoryTalk system. So to support this, there is a new container called authentication services within the system. It has 2 different kinds of sites, the OAD site and the Azure Active Directory site. And at this point, I am going to move on. Talking about now FactoryTalk AssetCenter, Version 13. These are the key areas of focus that we've made. So we're continuing to modernize our web-based client. So this does not mean that you have to have Internet access to use AssetCenter. This web-based plant or a browser-based client simply is using the IIS server within the operating -- the Microsoft operating system where the AssetCenter server is installed to host a client. And there's a lot of benefits to this. This would mean there's no installation process for clients. So if you were, say, a large automotive customer with several hundred clients when it becomes time to update AssetCenter from merchant X conversion X plus 1, once we have the more fully functional by the client, there is no installation necessary to get the new functionality, okay? So there's a big benefit to customers for us migrating to a web client for the AssetCenter system. We have done a tremendous amount of work in the device management area with the asset inventory, and we are indeed adding intrinsic built-in disaster recovery for Siemens and the [ STIG ] in this release with more vendors to come in future releases. And I'll talk about that in a lot more detail in a second. So the focus on Version 13 in the web client has been on the asset life cycle system. And we have added in a new dashboard that aggregates all of the inventory files that it finds in the AssetCenter system based on their selection in the asset tree. So if you select the route of the asset tree, the system will find and aggregate information from all of the inventory files, the RAI files that are in the archive and presented in a dashboard. As you change your focus on the asset tree, the aggregation changes with your focus, okay? This aggregation also applies to the grid view. So behind a dashboard, there's a table and this table view also does the same aggregation. So this case is much, much easier to, let's say, find all of the devices that are on the platform plus all of the inventory files that are in the end-of-life state from Rockwell Automation and then do an export and only get those end-of-life devices exported, so you can find them more readily and replace some or make an action plan. And right now, we're going to break into another video that will show you how this new asset inventory function works. So we're going to start from the web client. And this is the Version 13 web client, and there is a new widget in the tray over there called Asset Life Cycle. And we bring -- come into here and we will get the aggregated information. And there's a number of very useful widgets that we've had. There's one that just shows you how many files that the system found and how many are being aggregated. We cannot and do not aggregate an inventory file that contains software information to date. This is only looking at devices. There is a device summary tab that shows you how many total devices are there, how many duplicates and how many are missing their serial number. Another widget to show you the installed base, both Rockwell and non-Rockwell devices. Now we get to some more useful information. There's the major life cycle items, which tells you really important things, like how many devices are discontinued or how many devices had safety notices from Rockwell Automation. Then there are minor life cycle items, things that you should pay attention to, like devices running limited firmware or retired firmware. Another very useful widget is the out of date widget that tells you if there's products that are not running their most current major or minor version. The product price cycle widget for Rockwell Automation products, but you see how many prices are in each category of our life cycle states as well as the replacement category. So when a devices is in end of life, we also categorize its replacement category, whether it's just a stress swap or if you have to do some work. We can also show you the firmware life cycle of the devices and then we show you a distribution of products. So what's the top 5 products we found in all of these inventory files and then finally there's a communication protocol widget that right now so you whether it's coming from a SIP network or SNMP. As you change the focus in the asset tree, you can see that the aggregation will tell you different things. So as I changed my focus, now we're only looking at the same information for 3 inventory files instead of 14 inventory files. As you would expect with the dashboard, if you click on a pipe or you click on a category, we go to a grid that shows you more detailed information about that widget. And you can very quickly switch back and forth using these buttons at the top. Once you get to this, you can very easily export this information. So if I was looking for end-of-life devices, and I wanted to manage it, hit the export button and then we can very easily and quickly see in Excel that we have the catalog number, the inventory and the serial number as well as the address. We are, also in this version, making significant changes in our ability to support third-party devices. And we're working to develop disaster recovery that's built in for major vendors, for major devices, and this will grow over time. In Version 13, we're adding Siemens' TIA portal support and Mitsubishi support. This is built into the agent architecture. It does require though that the end user provide a licensed version of the appropriate editor on each agent that's going to perform scheduled tasks with those controllers? So when we go off to do disaster recovery for Rockwell, you have to install, let's say, if you're doing control logics and you have on your plan for Version 32 and Version 34 controllers. On the each agent, you have to install Version 32 and Version 34. Now for Rockwell Automation products, AssetCenter can use our services without you providing an activation on the agent. For Siemens and Mitsubishi and other vendors that are coming in the future, you have to provide an activated version of the editor for us to talk to, okay. And That's just licensing requirements by those third parties. For these 2 product families, Disaster Recovery for Siemens and Mitsubishi, we are supporting for Siemens' TIA portal, Version 15.1, 16, 17 and 18 on Ethernet essentially PN/IE is Ethernet, PROFIBUS and then MPI is a direct connection. The Step 7, 300s and 400s are still supported through Step 7 software that is available if you -- as we had -- we had that product about 4 years ago. Siemens had discontinued 300s and 400s a long time before that as well as the Step 7 software. But we have -- we discontinued our catalog number. Customers that have it can continue to use it. And as long as the operating systems that Siemens support for Step 7 and the operating systems that Rockwell Automation supports are the same or overlap, we will continue to have 300s and 400s score. For Mitsubishi, there's a lot -- there's 2 different editors. There's GX Works2 and GX Works3, and these 2 pieces of software support different hardware platforms. So if you want to work with IT wire Series controllers, you have to have GX Works3 installed on your agents. If you want to work with an F-Series controller, you have to have GX Works2 installed on your agent controllers, okay? The compare reports that we get are provided by those vendors. So we are using the Siemens compare report or the Mitsubishi compare report. They are slightly different than what we get for Rockwell Automation products and that they're summarized of function blocks or summary of changes, not individual changes, but that is in the control of Siemens or Mitsubishi not Rockwell, if they migrate and change their content, we will get updated compare both reports from those products as we use them. You may have a couple of questions about Disaster Recovery ones we thought of quickly. These will be licensed at the server level. So if you want to take advantage of Disaster Recovery for Siemens TIA portal, you would buy that capability and install the license on your AssetCenter server and [ SDN ] AssetCenter Version 13 or later server. And what the question might come up, well, what about Schneider, when is that coming? We will continue to add third-party vendors to our supported list of vendors over time with each new release of AssetCenter in the future. Next viable question might be, are we going to discontinue the custom device plug-in? No, we will not. We will continue to have the custom device plug-in, which supports scripting that is developed by the service provider for the end customer or by the end customer themselves. It may be needed for very small -- smaller vendors or smaller controllers or smaller devices that we don't see a market need to support its built-in. And the only other question is, do you really need to purchase a license version of a third-party editor for each agent? Yes, you do. So every agent that's going to support an S7, for instance, 100 controller requires that you have TIA portal purchase for each and every agent. Now within AssetCenter, you can use agent groups to segment agents. So that segmentation could be based on network usage, geographic location. And you can also use agent group's segment by vendor type. So if you only had 1 agent to support all of your Siemens controllers. You could use agent grouping with an AssetCenter to only have to provide 1 license. I do want to make a quick note. We've noticed when the PowerPoint was uploaded, some of the images got corrupted when we repost the PowerPoint for your uploading things will all be taken care of because as an example, this image has nothing to do with the topic of the slide, so I apologize for that. We are adding into the web client the ability to create and manage schedules with Version 13. So you'll be able to create a new SaaS recovery schedule, a new change management schedule, a new search control validation schedule, you'll be able to modify existing schedules and their tasks from the AssetCenter web client. We are -- I'm happy to say working and adding in the scheduled database maintenance into the AssetCenter web client. This has been requested for a very long time. In my long career, this is actually the second time I've managed AssetCenter, and it is a recognition that has been asked for since very early on even when I had AssetCenter the first time. I hate to say it's 18 years ago. But with the web client now, you'll be able to schedule the maintenance of the logs in AssetCenter. So you can schedule the cleanup of the event, audit and diagnostic log in this version. Version 13 will not support scheduling the cleanup of the archive. That will actually come in our next release, which will be September of 2024, okay? But this does eliminate the need for some what can manually remember to go do the cleanup activities, which were previously available in the desktop client of AssetCenter. There's some other small changes we've made. We can control who can use the web client through security. We can control who can access tools and options. So this is where you make some changes across the whole system. So we made some effort to secure that. We have support for the new FactoryTalk Echo Release 3, which will be coming out in November of 2023 that supports additional controllers, the CompactLogix 5300 and the Compact [indiscernible] Logix 5300. The FactoryTalk Linx has made some changes so that FactoryTalk view any applications running specifically on an ASEM 6300 platform, which can now do disaster recovery for those. And to do that, you actually use the MOBILEVIEW asset type in Version 13 to perform that back up. Okay. By the way, this does not mean that you can back up a view any application running on any application. It's just the ASEM 6300 platform. FactoryTalk Linx has also made some additional support for larger systems and complex networks that affects AssetCenters. So this makes it things better for AssetCenter. You can increase the number of total devices that a computer -- the whole computer can see within FactoryTalk 6.40 in terms of those shortcuts and those links. This previously was limited to about 400 devices, so we've got double that. And we've also made a change in Ethernet driver list so that it can have 255 devices enumerated in it, not 64. So you basically, you needed 4 drivers before to do 255 devices. Now we can do that with 1, okay? More clients. So there is a server. There's still 50 agents in Agent Groups as a limitation. Remember, a single agent can service roughly 100 assets in a 12-hour period. This does depend, your mileage will vary greatly based on how big your, in particular, controller programs are. So if you have 100 [indiscernible] have giant programs in them, you will not be able to do 100 uploads in 12 hours with the single agent. But that's a good rule of thumb for 100 per 12. We will be increasing the total number of concurrent clients for AssetCenter to about 350 as a mixture of desktop clients than our web client. And for operating systems, we are looking at supporting current Microsoft OS server 2022, Windows 11. The browser support for AssetCenter for the web client is based on Edge, Chrome and Firefox. It is intended on a windows platform. We do not support Apple mobile -- iPhones, mobile browsers very well. It's intended for a desktop environment running the browser. Moving on a little bit talking about road map and where we think AssetCenter or where we want to take AssetCenter [indiscernible] we want to take it. We're working on 4 major themes for our future developments of AssetCenter. One is remote management, so you can see that through the web client. So that idea is if you were a customer that had 1, 3, 4 or 5, 10, 100, 200 sites all with AssetCenter through the web client, you can actually remotely connect to any of those systems now when you log into the web client, you have to authenticate to that multiple directory. But that lets us -- let's you or the customer manage the AssetCenter system remotely. We're working on information aggregation of multiple AssetCenter systems into a cloud. So this would be based on Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Hub. We will be working to have information aggregated into a hub tile or a hub tenant or application that you can use. And then ultimately, being able to centrally manage and coordinate multiple on-prem AssetCenters from FactoryTalk Hub system. So the way that AssetCenter works doing backups, doing inventory scans, there will be having a need to be something in each plant possibly at each [ VLAN ] to do work to take the new activities that are essentially coordinated from the cloud in a SaaS offering . There won't -- we won't be doing backups from the cloud to the OT networks. You need a proxy at the plant. Well, we're going to continue to work on the life cycle management on the inventory and making improvements and changes on incorporating other device management tools into the system, for example, importing a Rockwell Automation installed base evaluation database into the asset inventory file of AssetCenter or being able to manage to do [indiscernible] or to have manually added items in the inventory, okay? The next focus is on expanding our coverage. So that is additional third-party disaster recovery as well as additional dashboards and insights in the web client is where we're going to be adding this. And then enabling additional OT cybersecurity initiatives through partnerships and through additional functionality, okay? One of the capabilities we have planned is a security posture check. So the idea here is we would go out and look at a ControlLogix controller and assess security attributes of that controller and tell you if they match a template that you've configured for that device class. So you might say, "are all of my 1756 LA controllers, I want to know that the control switch is in the hard run position, and tell me if there's any exceptions." So we will do that. There's other security attributes we'll look at. And over time, we'll share more information about that new capability. And with that, we want to summarize real quick. So AssetCenter can help implement good cybersecurity practices. We have the ability to know what you have. We have the ability to back up device configurations regularly. There is a security system, and we have an archive to manage source control. So come back, okay. That slide is being popped over. Okay. Thank you. And let's see if there's question and answers we need to handle.

We do have a lot of questions actually. Tad, let's see what I have the time to go first. So first one for you is, if I use AssetCenter to secure a ControlLogix controller. Can I use it to still get online if they have a computer with Studio 5000?

Sure. So using FactoryTalk security and using that controller. So in the ACD file, you can bind the controller to a FactoryTalk directory, a specific directory by name, only computers that are members of that directory then, the Logix 5000 software will evaluate the directory that your computer is in. And if it doesn't match the controllers directory, Logix 5000 will let you go online. So FactoryTalk security is application-level security. The -- It's not like SIP security where the controller is evaluating certificate and accepting or declining communication connections. For our user authorization, it is done at the application level. So we can make it stronger, but it's not infallible. Next question?

All right. So next one, some devices use as FTP, is this supported?

So today, as the center FTP does only support OpenFTP. What we will be adding in September of 2024 is FTP using SSL. So FTTS. Currently, we are not planning on supporting SFTP, which is slightly different. So -- I'm sorry, SFTP and FTTS are different, and we will be supporting FTPS, which is FTP using SSL and certificates.

Okay. Great. This one was from the beginning of the presentation. So if you cover that already and just to highlight again, we appreciate. But he was wondering if this will handle older PLCs in any way, PLC-5s that are in CIP compliance for example?

So for PLCs and SLCs, we will -- inventory will discover SLC500 and PLC-5s. Yes. And Data Highway, Data Highway Plus, Data Highway 45. So what Rockwell term PCC PCQ networks. So yes, and we can do disaster recovery for PLCs and SLCs also.

Okay. In order to all the users actions, where all does the AssetCenter clients need to be installed, the HMI server data service, et cetera?

Sure. So for the audit log to function, there's 2 ways to get that. One is you install the AssetCenter desktop client. The other is [indiscernible] installed media for -- since Version 8, maybe Version 9, slightly before I took AssetCenter over again a few years ago. There is a diagnostic connector installation option. And that's intended for FactoryTalk View SE clients. It's also now intended for the web client. So you install the -- oh, I'm sorry, I'm taking that back, it's not for the web client. The web client knows how to do audit by itself. Primarily for [indiscernible]. So you installed the FactoryTalk diagnostics option of the FactoryTalk AssetCenter install media to enable audit -- [indiscernible] the auditing.

Okay. And can you track operators actions via HMI, BV+7?

No. The PanelView Plus 7s don't participate in the FactoryTalk directory. So the auditing is based on the network scope directory and the PanelView Plus 7 don't participate in the network scope directory.

Okay. Any chance Version 13 allows the asset inventory to automatically send 1 email with the inventory? Currently, I have to export the Excel and copy that file to our GPN manually.

No, Craig, I see the question. No, the asset inventory cannot be e-mailed directly today.