Recently we were asked what Inductive Automation's market share is. Good question. Clearly what was being asked was, "what percent of the SCADA market does Ignition have?" But asking that question misses the bigger picture. The diverse applications to which Ignition is deployed defy any simple categorization as "SCADA". Nonetheless, I will address the SCADA market share question later in this post. But as knowledgeable users already know, there is no established category that adequately defines Ignition. A good analogy of this is the history of the cell phone. In the beginning the cellphone was just a telephone. Everyone understood you could make calls with it and nearly everyone had one. Then the smartphone came which handled emails, web browsing, scheduling, photography, video, games and a thousand other things. It became a viable second office. It's no longer a cell phone, it's a handheld computer. It's in a whole new category that happens to make phone calls also.
It's exactly the same with Ignition. Ignition is clearly in a category of its own, and yes, it can do SCADA too. But it is an IT friendly, all-in-one, rapid development and deployment platform that can create custom database applications, or anything else at an unbelievably low price. So what is this category called? I'm looking for suggestions.
Old SCADA is like using a horse buggy. Ignition is like driving a Mercedes AMG ML63.
That gets us back to "what is our market share?" Simple. 100% of our category. Because no one, I really do mean no one, even comes close to our functionality. Some companies are trying to copy us, but they clearly don't understand much about Ignition. A bunch of programmers and marketers in an ivory tower will never understand Ignition, nor do they understand actual needs of the market.
Now as I promised, let's look narrowly at the traditional SCADA market. What's our market share? There are different market share metrics used like new sales and install base, but how would you ever measure either now that there's Ignition? Ignition antiquates these metrics. Consider this... install one Ignition server, deploy 25 runtime clients, use 100k tags, create 5 simultaneous projects with 250 screens each and you spend about 13K. Now rip it all out and replace it with your traditional SCADA software and what will you spend? Maybe $65K? More?
Let's extend the example a bit. Let's say you want to add 25 more runtime clients and go up to unlimited tags. What do you pay? Another $65K? More? With Ignition it costs you nothing more.
So tell me now, what is the size of the SCADA market really? And since Ignition is sold at a fixed price by the server with unlimited runtime clients, unlimited tags, unlimited concurrent development seats, unlimited database connections, and unlimited historian points, how do you measure the cost to fulfill a given system's requirements? I'm sorry to say folks.. we just broke all traditional market share metrics.
From our perspective though, it's not all about SCADA. We do SCADA also. But how about fulfilling all the needs of Production, QA, Scheduling, Maintenance or any other department and making it all work seamlessly at the speed of light as a paperless system. The market for that is huge. How huge? I doubt anyone knows because the category has never been adequately defined. But whatever it is, we've got 100% of it because no one else is even trying.
