Intro


This blog is dedicated to open, interoperable manufacturing software and the coolest, latest and greatest things I see every day while conducting business under the banner of Inductive Automation.

Hello, my name is Steve Hechtman and I am president of Inductive Automation. During the span of one day there is more excitement, more discovery than I can possibly keep to myself. This blog is, therefore, my outlet. WARNING: This site is highly biased in favor of the most powerful, affordable manufacturing software in the world - Ignition by Inductive Automation!

The Three-Minute Misconception

I almost bust a gut the other day. I was talking with an industry analyst and asked him if he'd seen our website. He said “yes” so I asked him what he took away from it. He said it looked like a great solution for lightweight applications. Incredulously, I asked him what on our site led him to the belief the software was best suited for “lightweight” applications. His response? It only takes three minutes to install!”

Wow! If I knew that our three-minute install would be interpreted that way, I would have directed our developers install delay loops into our installation process so that it would take four hours or four days like everyone else's does!

All joking aside, I set the record straight by citing some of the massive deployments people are doing with Ignition. He soon saw, that in fact, a single Ignition server can deploy hundreds of clients, connect to dozens of SQL databases of practically any flavor, can launch one (or a dozen) concurrent developer stations, perform as a full historian and reporting engine, run on any OS platform – and a whole lot more for a single, affordable price. But he also saw it could perform as a lightweight system too.

The truth is, when you are used to dealing with 1990’s technology, DLL hell, and systems that have been over-patched by an endless string of programmers who have come and gone, you are bound to be shocked when you see what modern technology can do.