Trends that are Reshaping Manufacturing Automation with Luis at Siemens & Ed at HARTING (Automate 2024)

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I mean, you know, it seems like with Del Cossi focusing on software-defined automation or software world, right, you saw in his keynote he said look beyond the buzzwords and try to see exactly.

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When somebody says digital threat, what does that mean?

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I think there's still a lot of you know not to take back from the hardware.

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There's still a lot of use cases and a lot of hardware is basically going to be here for a long time.

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It's here to stay.

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And really what the goal of that was to say that software is there to help augment some of the engineering tasks and operational tasks for the hardware and the design tasks right, but the hardware is not going anywhere.

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You're still going to need solutions for tasks right, but the hardware is not going anywhere.

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You're still going to need solutions for connectivity right, you're still going to need solutions for mechanical engineering, mechanical connectivity and things like that, especially when we're talking about connecting all assets, when we're talking about getting data from machinery, getting sensor data from our lines and from our production machines.

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How do we get all that back to a control system, control cabinets, how do we get that back to higher level systems and things like that.

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So I think there's still actually a lot of parallels between, like what's happening now in industry, from the automation side, from the control side, to even just simple things like bulkhead connectors go a long way for creating that kind of end-to-end solution for a lot of customers.

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Right and absolutely, and that's one of the things that we think about, I think, as we develop and refine and, you know, come up with new connectors is that these are going to be used in your applications in the field and these are going to be used for a long time.

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And one of the things I would imagine, like what's a typical product lifecycle for you it's got to be 30 years, right, it's got to be a long time, right, and so you know, the connector needs to be able to support that, of course.

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Or, if there is a problem with the, the connector, you know, heaven forbid, uh, you need to be able to quickly uh, swap it out or change it, identify it, change it and swap it out.

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Yeah, so those are kind of some of the areas that we focus on in terms of designing our product to support what you're doing yeah, absolutely, um, and that that goes to point out.

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you brought up the lifecycle thing and I said 30 years, but I think the equipment that a lot of these components get installed on, I mean you'll find them like workingmens s5 controllers, and if you don't know anything about siemens s5, they were obsoleted 30 years ago and they're still running today, 30 years later yeah and it was a new product 60 years ago.

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So, uh, that's that's pretty crazy that you know they've got machines that have are 40, 50, 60 years old still out there producing, you know, 2,500 parts a day, or or whatever you know their production goals are.

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So, to that point, there's a lot of mechanical failures that happen throughout that life cycle.

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Right, forget the automation side.

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There's a lot of mechanical things that need to be replaced and retrofitted so that way those machines can stay up and running.

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That's exactly what you were just talking about just now yeah, absolutely.

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And, um, you know, and let's talk about a product that's been in the field for 30 years or 60 years like, maybe you want to replace a module on that to bring it a little bit more into this era, or maybe it needs new functionality and that's something that the connector can support too.

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Uh, like, we talked about the modular connectors and we can literally have a dummy spot that's available for in the future.

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Now you need to use this newfangled technology, whether it's single pair, ethernet or whatever you want to talk about and we're helping to future-proof your product so that it can be in the field for another 30 years beyond.

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Yep exactly.

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Yeah, that's a good example actually.

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I mean, look at PLCs from 30 years ago.

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Almost all of them, even some PLCs today that are modern, have serial connections as a primary method of collecting data.

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And then now what I would consider at least minimum requirements for modern is an Ethernet port for connection.

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Right, how do you go from like a shielded serial cable to like an Ethernet jack or something like that, being able to kind of adapt your?

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Something you wouldn't think about when you're just modernizing a PLC is those other things.

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That's right.

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And again, this is the other things.

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That's right.

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And again, this is the way that we think as well.

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And when you think about, you know, Ethernet and RJ45, a product that was designed for office space and, you know, really was designed to be used in some of the environments that they were using.

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You know we have a product like our IX Industrial, which is basically a ruggedized industrial version of the RJ45 that's much smaller, and so you know, I've seen application use cases where you take maybe four channels of Ethernet, four channels of RJ45, and you replace them with eight channels or more of this new connector, yep, and they're designed for the shock and vibration you know, for more rugged environments.

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Because one of the things I wanted to ask you, one of the trends that we hear, is about more and more decentralization.

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So instead of having centralized, control.

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Yeah, so I imagine that's something that informs your products too.

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Yeah, yeah, for sure.

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I mean decentralized automation is a big trend as well.

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No-transcript to the sensor, right, and bringing the IO closer to the sensor, and now you've got machine mount IO, things like that.

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So the technology is changing so much where it's like the intelligence is getting closer and closer to the sensor and closer and closer to the machine and kind of makes you wonder, like what's happening with the PLC?

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What's the PLC good for anymore if all the intelligence is right there next to the?

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You know simple prop switch or simple temperature sensor.

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But that's where you know the PLCs can take over those more advanced functions, edge computing, things like that.

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It'll be a gateway.

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The PLC will just be a gateway Just a gateway?

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Yeah, exactly.

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Yeah, and I'm going to jump in here and say some of our friends that deal more with the networking and stuff are saying that you know, some of their startup-y customers are more so looking at like connecting each individual device just to the network, right, and they want to get, they want to do more virtual PLCs.

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They want to do more virtual PLCs.

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They want to be less hardware-specific dependent, sure, also to kind of match their talent, which is often more from the software world rather than the old school.

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The reason we program in ladder logic is because it doesn't come from a software background, it comes from really logic right.

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So we have to bridge that gap with existing facilities because they have these 30-year-old PLCs.

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We have to bridge that gap with existing facilities because they have these 30-year-old PLCs and they're also trying to maybe bring up a digital twin, which is where bringing those old assets on getting the data out from existing assets in a streamlined way is super important.

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So we've been talking about digital twin for the last.

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I don't know how long and we're finally, I think, getting close to a point where it's more feasible to adopt.

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I think the keynote this morning really spoke to that?

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What was it?

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the speed of uh relevancy technology at the speed of faster than the speed of relevance, exactly, and you need to be able to get things in production and see them actually work, and you know that.

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Oh my gosh, the renderings from that, and I saw them at uh gp gtc gtc earlier this year and I was blown away.

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Um, I had to take a video of that.

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But, like the fact that that is a whole digital twin that you set up on the factory, the fact that it looked so real, um, a, that was just a really cool way to see how your partner ecosystem is really.

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Like you've realized, okay, siemens isn't going to need to invent the rendering.

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It's actually an open source project from Pixar that NVIDIA has picked up, that everybody's collaborating on.

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It's called OpenUSD.

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But that is part of what's enabling this amazing digital twin technology that you guys have Plenty of other tech partnerships that we saw up there.

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So I really see and feel that Siemens is kind of opening up and realizing hey, partner ecosystem is a way to grow.

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And the soft PLC or not the soft PLC, because that's a different thing from the virtual PLC right?

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The virtual PLC is a way to move into that kind of hardware agnostic option, at least having the redundancy, like you were saying about the connector having a dummy spot open.

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It's like you can have a whole other PLC sitting and waiting on a virtual PLC to be spun up in an instance if your PLC is down, instead of now having to order a piece of hardware that you have to wait six weeks for.

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These types of developments are really exciting to me on a conceptual level.

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Are you seeing a lot of that adopted already, or are we still talking?

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You know that this sounds like a great thing for the future.

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Yeah, exactly, I mean you hit the nail on the head.

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I mean that's one of the use cases you could think about for virtual PLC, but even soft PLCs running on IPCs as well, industrial PCs, everything is kind of moving towards more PC-based automation is what I'm seeing for a number of reasons performance, but also that decentralization piece is a lot of people aren't necessarily requiring the IO to be close to the controller anymore.

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So when we talk about the use case of virtual PLC, we're putting that into our industrial edge computing ecosystem.

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So now you're moving it closer to the IT cabinets, so out of the control cabinets into the IT cabinets.

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But you still need sensor data, right, you still need IO.

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And that's where that decentralized part that we're just talking about comes into play, where you still might move your controller away from the factory floor but you still got your IO that you got to bring back to your controller to be able to make those decisions, right.

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So those long Ethernet runs, maybe wireless could be a way to change things.

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But you know, obviously you know a lot of existing brownfields.

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You heard Dell mentioned that greenfields are great.

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You get a clean sheet of paper, but brownfields are what keep America running, right?

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This?

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is what is the heart of America's existing manufacturing and how do we modernize those and bring those to a level where we can move our automation to the next level?

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So we have to think about solutions for existing installations, right, and a lot of those factories maybe have existing infrastructure in place, and that's how we need to think about those decentralized solutions.

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And the good thing is, you know, when it comes to virtualization virtual PLCs or soft PLCs or virtualized edge computing, all those things, those are scalable, regardless of greenfield, brownfield, but it's the hardware that comes.

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A little bit more complicated conversations where you need to talk with the customer a little bit about find out you know what's existing, what kind of downtime can we expect, if any?

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yeah, right, and those conversations take a while to kind of mitigate sometimes so if you're listening to this and you are either interested in learning about siemens or you have some thoughts swirling and you have questions, um, luis is great person.

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He's easy to get a hold of on linkedin.

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He can point you in the right direction, connect you to the right person to talk to.

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We have a lot of people that we know that you know they work on certain things because it's been what's in the plants that they work or it's, you know, more readily available um.

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We really want to encourage people to at least be aware and, if not, be a little bit proficient in other platforms.

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So we're huge, you know, advocates of open learning, availability of stuff.

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So we you know siemens is pretty easy to get a hold of for trying and training things, testing stuff out, uh.

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So come to any of us if you have, you know, thoughts, ideas, questions.

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Siemens is very approachable, but they're very big so it can be hard to know who to talk to, depending on what it is that you need or what um, and so for us it's like if you know me, I can make a personal recommendation introduction.

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That goes a long way.

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Sometimes we all get thousands of emails, cold pitches, who is who, and being able to say like hey, I know luis, you should know ed, right?

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That goes a long way in deciding whether or not you want to spend time talking to somebody, and we're not here to sell any platform or product or brand, but we know good people that we can recommend that you talk to, and luis is one of them, and I really wanted to make sure that luis knew ed is the other guy when you want to talk about connect to anyone.

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Now, you know ed, I feel an instant connection just talking to him before we sat down.

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It was really good yep, and I think that's the power of those.

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So you've kind of self-selected by being in our orbit a little bit.

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Um, we all like to collaborate and we like to learn from each other and yeah, so thank you very much for coming by to have this conversation, ali Ed.

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Do you guys have any closing remarks or questions?

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For Luis, I know everybody's like headed off to the next happy hour here.

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It's almost the end of day two, it's been a long day and it's been a whirlwind and a long day right.

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No, I just wanted to say thank you, luis, it's great to meet you.

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And thank you guys again.

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I just can't say it enough you bring I'm not going to call myself a good person, but you bring good people together.

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You're definitely a good person.

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I can tell Okay, you can say it.

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We may not know all the solutions or all the technologies, but I think we are pretty good at spotting people that I don't know are kind and collaborative.

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Those are some of the top things I look for in people that I want to spend time with in business or in personal life.

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I used to be in field sales, which I learned a lot and I highly recommend anybody in the industry take some time to work out in the field.

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But I was in a sales position and I only sold one brand and I had to spend a lot of time with people that I didn't necessarily want to.

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If I had a choice otherwise.

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Now I'm a little older, a little wiser, a little bit better connected.

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I have options in my career due to the fact that I've learned a lot and I know a lot of people, and then you get the luxury of choosing a little bit who you spend your time with.

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And is a vast industry and there are technologies for everything, there are options for everything, um, and so being able to choose to work with great technologies and good people, that's, I think, the best you can hope for.

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So thank you everyone, uh, if we hope to see you later at the manufacturing happy hour party we'll see and at the very least we'll be coming by.

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Uh, siemens, and I know you guys are doing some content with dave and vlad, our friends over at the manufacturing hub great yeah, they're probably there for another 10 minutes.

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Yeah very cool.

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This will be like put out after the show as well, so I just want to give a shout out to them.

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They're going to have a lot more coverage of, specifically, siemens technology in the booth coming from this show than we are, so check them out and their channels if you want to see what was actually going on in the Siemens booth.

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Yeah, check out Industrial Copilot.

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I'm so excited about that.

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Yeah, we'll be sharing.

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I actually have some content from the keynote this morning.

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The Wi-Fi here is terrible.

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So I can't upload it real time.

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It's pretty rough but I definitely appreciate you guys having me on and very great to meet you and good to hang out.