Ignition (Inductive Automation)

About Inductive Automation

Inductive Automation was founded in 2003 by Steve Hechtman, an experienced controls systems integrator, with an idea to make industrial automation software more affordable and easy to implement. The company is based in Folsom, California, the U.S. 

The Ignition SCADA platform is Inductive Automation’s main product line. This SCADA platform is widely used in a variety of industries, including oil and gas, wastewater, food and beverage, utilities, energy, research, transportation, chemical processing, mining, aerospace, transportation and other. According to Inductive Automation, they have customers in over 90 countries and 1,200 independent automation integration companies support their solutions. 

Inductive Automation first introduced the server-centric architecture for SCADA systems and is considered to be a pioneer of supporting interoperability standards among SCADA vendors. It is also a supporter of Open Source software and the OPC Foundation.

Ignition SCADA History 

The Ignition SCADA was preceded by two other original products by Inductive Automation: FactorySQL and FactoryPMI. 

FactorySQL was an OPC based Middleware product by Inductive Automation. Initially created as a drag and drop OPC to SQL data logger, it later was extended to be a transaction manager and industrial historian. FactoryPMI was a Java based SCADA solution with three main components: the runtime, gateway, and designer.

Inductive Automation consolidated FactorySQL and FactoryPMI with newly developed functions on one platform to release Ignition in 2010. FactorySQL and FactoryPMI became the modules of Ignition, SQL Bridge Module and Vision Module accordingly. Two other modules included into the initial release were Ignition Reporting Module and Ignition OPC-UA Module. 

Ignition SCADA features 

Ignition is an Integrated Software Platform for SCADA systems used to achieve cross-platform web-based deployment. It includes a number of modules, both free and paid, that are developed using the Ignition SDK.

The Ignition modules can be divided into three layers:

• Platform Layer
  Platform Layer provides a number of core functions to all modules, including OPC-UA Client, Database, Web Server, System Logging, Licensing, Unified Development Environment, Auditing, Authentication, Module API, Alerting Core Functionality, Database Connectivity, Scripting Engine, Realtime Tag Database, Store & Forward and Redundancy.
  

• HMI/SCADA Module Layer
  HMI/SCADA Module Layer contains most of the main components of the platform, such as Vision as the main visualization module, SQL Bridge as bidirectional OPC-to-SQL database historian and transaction manager, Mobile for access to HTML 5 compatible devices, Reporting for automated reports, and others.
  

• MES Module Layer
  MES Modules, added to the platform through a partnership with Sepasoft company, are designed to provide specific functionality and can be industry specific. Their main goal is to save integrators and end-users time with out-of-the-box functions and unlimited flexibility via custom scripting. Some of the core MES Modules available on the platform are OEE Downtime, Statistical Process Control (SPC), Track and Trace and Recipe/Changeover.
  

Why integrate with Clarify?

• Search - let people on your team easily find data across siloed systems - always available on their phone or in the browser
• Visualize - See trends and combine data to visually explore
• Explore - See statistics and seamlessly move from millisecond detail to years worth of data
• Export - Combine data sources and easily export to Excel for further data work
• Annotate/label - Add meaning and context to your data by labeling both points and periods in time, to build training sets for your AI/ML efforts
• Contextualize - Ensure naming, labeling, and metadata is of high quality
• Cloud Storage - one safe space for your raw time series data built for cost-efficient speed and performance at scale
• Integrate - break down your data silos and build one source of truth
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android - make data easily available for your team, whenever and wherever they are. Fuel a remote work culture with live data.
• Collaboration - share visualizations and discuss data with comments, threads and the activity feed. Add files for even more context.