The Ignition Community Conference (ICC) by Inductive Automation is a 3 day get together that was hosted in Folsom California this year. This conference attendees primarily consisting of their 2300 System Integrators globally, as well as their Strategic Partners, Third Party Module Developers, Onboard Manufacturers, Distributors and End Users. Inductive Automation relies deeply on their Community and has created this event to create unique opportunities for them to learn about Ignition from their experts.
This is the 6th year that Ignition has be conducting the ICC conference and it is growing drastically year over year, with between 650-700 attendees this year and an additional 150 employees. The event includes real world ignition projects, hands on experiences and networking events with industry professionals from all over the world.
HMS Networks attended this year’s event as both attendees and presenters with a 30-minute presentation slot in the “Solution Showcase” on Tues 9/17/19. HMS’ local Sales Manager Arjun Cardoza presented the new Ignition 8 Connector recently released by HMS for direct data connection into the Ewon Flexy Talk2M platform. The presentation was very well attended with almost full capacity. Watch the presentation On Demand Here:
The ICC event is geared towards the Ignition Eco system with 3 different tracks, advanced, intermediate, and beginner hands on workshops as well as tracks for Technology overview and Enterprise strategies. Since the largest part of the Ignition community is System Integrators, there is a large “Discovery Gallery” for these System Integrators to share real world success stories across many industries. This area was very well attended.
Inductive Automation originally released their Ignition software platform in 2009 as a SCADA/HMI solution. Now with a recent release of version 8 in April of this year, the focus for this conference is on version 8 new included features and modules.
With the core development and strategy of Ignition as a SCADA/HMI package, it inherently relies heavily on their software partners to function as Data Base Historian providers such as Canary and OSIsoft. As well as hardware providers that are capable of getting shop floor or process data to the Ignition platform.
The vendor area was predominantly hardware manufacturers that are utilizing the Ignition Edge application. Companies such as:
Advantech Esteem Hilsher Moxa | Opto22 Wago EZ Automation And many more! |
With these hardware manufacturers listed above as the exhibiting vendors, there is a big focus on Edge Computing and the Ignition Edge software application residing on these hardware products as a standard offering.
Data contextualization also seems to be a hot topic of this conference. Arlen Nipper presented on the advantages of Sparkplug version B as a standard for MQTT data transmission. Referring to one of the benefits is the usability of data that is contextualized in Sparkplug B. A start up company called HighByte also focused on their data hub for adding context to plant floor or sensor data to enable that data to be used across all software platforms.
Another new feature or module is a mobile representation of the data within Ignition called Perspective. Perspective has been transformed with the new Ignition 8 release. With Perspective you have the availability of visualization of virtually all data on your mobile device via an Ignition Perspective app or as a web page.
Inductive Automation has a very dedicated following of their Ignition software platform. The new version 8 seems to be very well received as it appears their improvements and enhancement suggestions come from within their community of System Integrators, End Users and Partners. I suspect that Inductive Automation will continue to see the growth figures in the many years to come as they have for the last 6 years. “Fun, Easy and Affordable” seems to be a good motto.