Introducing Ignition by Inductive Automation - Web-based, cross-platform SCADA Webinar

From an official Inductive Automation email....


Say goodbye to rationing clients, patchwork control systems and project development constraints caused by oppressive licensing systems.

Ignition by Inductive Automation is being released January 27th. Ignition is a major next step in the evolution of FactorySQL and FactoryPMI.

Join us for this new release webinar to see how the Ignition platform opens up possibilities in the industrial automation industry. The webinar will give an overview and demonstration of Ignition's features and its capabilities, such as:

• Web-based clients that enable scalability
• Unlimited clients and tags, licensed by the server
• A flexible database-centered architecture
• OPC-UA support
• 100% cross platform: Windows and Linux
• Simplified software setup and ...

Also accompanying the product launch is Inductive Automation's new website design at http://www.inductiveautomation.com/, which will launch January 27th with details about Ignition.

Register here to attend the new release webinar.

Title: Introducing Ignition by Inductive Automation - Web-based, cross-platform SCADA
Date: Thursday, January 28, 2010
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendeesRequired: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/273245266

Ignition preview and a visit to Inductive Automation

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to visit my good friends, Colby and Carl, who are lead developers at Inductive Automation. They gave me an in depth technical "sneak peak" of what is becoming their next product line, "Ignition".

The plan is a single product platform that replaces the separate functionality of FactorySQL and FactoryPMI. They really went all out with levering technologies! The product is platform independent (Windows 32 or 64 bit, Linux, Mac, etc), fully web based (no client installation), and supports separate "modules" that all have access to the same powerful core technologies. Everything runs from a cluster aware web server similar to the current FactoryPMI Gateway but they had new behind the scene tricks (Non-Blocking IO for multithreading, advanced serialization schemes for saving/storing projects, and a whole slew of security upgrades consistent with the OPC-UA specification).

They showed me an OPC-UA application that securely connected to different PLCs (many AB, Siemens, and AD) via different PCs without an OPC tunneller. All this worked equally well on Windows and Linux systems. Once the data is accessible from the PLC, you get the full visualization spectrum that FactoryPMI already offers (graphics, multimedia, historical trends, reporting, etc).

The coolest part is that development time should be cut down substantially, for both Inductive Automation proper and 3rd parties/end users as the API is released, since the platform performs so much native functionality (network, database, project launching/hosting/editing, clustering, storage, alerting, auditing, authentication, etc, etc.). The Ignition platform should become to controls software what Metasploit is to ethical hackers/penetration testers.