After two years of virtual events, Inductive Automation staged its 10th annual Ignition Community Conference in-the-flesh on Sept, 19-21 in Folsom, Calif. The event drew 862 visitors, which was almost 20% more than the 720 who attended the previous in-person ICC in 2019.
In her kickoff address, new COO Kat Robinette, reported that Inductive’s sales of its Ignition web-based SCADA software and related products increased 27% in the previous year, growing 62% in manufacturing, 113% in electronics, 239% in dairy and 276% in biotechnology. Because it’s on track for similar increases in the coming year, she added that Inductive has added 97 new employees, including 36 to its training and support department, doubled its IT team, and strengthened its cybersecurity and human resources staffs.
“We feel like everything has changed and nothing has changed. More than half of our present staff didn’t work here when we had our last in-person ICC,” says Colby Clegg, Inductive’s new CEO. “We were fiercely proud of working in our Folsom office, but now we have 40 staff that work remotely full-time.”
Driven by digitalization
Clegg traced the company’s recent growth to the fact that users in many applications and industries are facing challenges that Inductive has been dealing with for years, such as digital transformation and knowledge transfer and increasing automation. “We’ve been talking about operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT) convergence for 10 years, along with the open data, agility and innovation it needs,” adds Clegg. “This is why Ignition is the ultimate hub for connecting plant floors to the latest technology for solving problems. We’re at the crossroad of digitalization, and Ignition is at the center.”
Carl Gould, CTO at Inductive, explained that Ignition enables digitalization because it’s an industrial application platform that was originally designed to be a pragmatic toolkit with unlimited licensing. This allow its users to quickly extend its functions; connect to any application; run across platform and anywhere else; make devices and systems more compatible; and deploy orchestration techniques that used to rely on hardware.
In fact, the company will launch its Ignition Cloud Edition in the U.S. in early 2023 through Microsoft Azure’s container registry. This model will enable more scalable, elastic, pay-as-you-go applications. It also works with Inductive’s Ignition Edge and other platforms, and will also let users deploy a collection of cloud-connected modules.
Innovators announced
As usual, another highlight of ICC were the Firebrand award winners and other end-user projects in its Discovery Gallery that featured innovative applications of Ignition and supporting technologies in a range of operations:
- U.K.-based system integrator BIJC Ltd. used Ignition to help Scottish Leather Group access cameras and display video for monitoring its hide processing operations.
- Flexware Innovation in Valparaiso, Ind., developed a hub-and-spoke architecture for Automated Control Concepts (ACC) and Indiana American Water, which integrated dozens of systems into an ISA100 network to get data to hundreds of users.
- Salmon and fish processor Nordlaks Produkter in Stokmarknes, Norway, updated the SCADA system for several hundred valves, motors and pumps serving clean water operations and ice production at its processing facility by adopting Ignition for data reporting, alarming and information storage and management.
- Réseau31 in Toulouse, France, employed Ignition to add maps, weather services and video to its HMIs, and coordinate databases for 1,400 local, municipal water/wastewater systems serving 500,000 residents.
- Streamline Control in Calgary, Alberta, replaced a legacy SCADA system for 300,000 tags on agricultural pipelines operated by Jayhawk Pipelines with MQTT networking and Ignition to fine tune dashboards, detect leaks, and provide metering and alarm summaries.
- Vertech in Phoenix, Ariz., needed to report key performance indicators (KPI) and analytics for Soft Bank Energy’s fleet of solar facilities in Redwood, Calif., and deployed Ignition to coordinate and display data from 386,000 tags at multiple sites, and deliver that data to the enterprise level.
For more coverage, as well as online videos of the session at ICC 2022, visit icc.inductiveautomation.com.
