User-driven solutions just kept rolling in at Inductive Automation’s Ignition Community Conference 2016 on Sept. 19-21 in Folsom, Calif. As usual, several hundred of the SCADA software firm’s many system integrators, partners and other fans showed up to exchange experiences, success stories and advice, and quiz Inductive’s experts on best practices and the new and upcoming capabilities of their Ignition SCADA software.

“We need accuracy, especially in times of drought, so we’ve been converting 55 nodes to Ignition,” says Charles Cowan, head of technical services at Yuma County Water Users’ Association. “It’s saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars by showing uncompleted tasks, and letting us know about others that can’t wait 15 minutes. This  SCADA software is easy to learn and teach to others, so in the future, we’re going to add it to the generation and distribution systems on our power generation side, too.”

Steve Hechtmann, president, CEO and founder of Inductive, adds that, “Inductive is all about removing friction for our users, and that’s why we’ve revised our four pillars to include new technical, licensing, business and ethical models. This is what enables the same Ignition source code to reside on everything from a Raspberry Pi computer up to a large enterprise server. Meanwhile, our unlimited licensing gives users $1 million worth of software value for less than $10,000, and our new Ignition Version 7.9 has enough features that it can become whatever users need, whether it’s an HMI, historian, dashboard, alarm package, reporter or vision module.”

Aided by links to new software messaging tools like MQTT and communication strategies like OPC-UA, Inductive reports that Ignition’s capabilities are converging IT and operations technology (OT) functions in some applications, and enabling it to participate more effectively in the IIoT. “There’s an amazing demand for data and a desire to connect people and processes, but OT needs to drive this effort because they know the operations, equipment and environment best, and that’s where 90% of this data is presently stranded,” adds Don Pearson, chief strategy officer at Inductive.