ICC 2024 Recap: Breaking Down The Breakthroughs

On September 17-19, the worldwide Ignition community gathered in Folsom, California for the 2024 Ignition Community Conference. ICC was sold out for the eighth year in a row, although those who couldn’t get in-person tickets could purchase a Livestream Pass to see all of the sessions. With this year’s theme, “Breakthrough,” ICC attendees were expecting big news and, as you’ll read in this recap, they were not disappointed.

Technical Keynote Focuses On Ignition 8.3’s Breakthrough Features

This year for the first time, the Technical Keynote was presented on the first day of the conference. With the release of Ignition 8.3 scheduled for next January, we knew attendees would be eager to hear juicy details about the next version right away.

Chief Executive Officer Colby Clegg and Chief Technology Officer Carl Gould took to the stage to describe why, in Colby’s words, “Ignition 8.3 is our most substantial and ambitious release we’ve ever done.” They presented the new improvements of 8.3 by dividing them into three broad categories: Applications, Historian, and Infrastructure.

The Applications category included the completely redesigned Gateway UI, Perspective Drawing Tools, Perspective Forms, Perspective Offline Mode, and Event Streams, which Carl summed up as “essentially a pipeline that maps event data from a source to a handler.”

The Historian category included a new, public Historian API that enables quick implementation of new historians around any technology. It also included the new Ignition Power Historian, which is an embedded, in-process time series historian that stores data simply and efficiently with minimal configuration.

The Infrastructure category included complete compatibility with source control systems, an all-new REST API that allows configuration management via an external agent, and Deployment Modes, which make the Gateway aware of whether it’s running in a dev, staging, or production environment.

Then Carl and Colby turned the rest of the technical keynote over to Chief Technology Evangelist Travis Cox and Chief Technology Architect Kevin McClusky. Travis and Kevin introduced additional new features such as secrets management, compatibility with Git for improved version control, and integration for WhatsApp and Twilio. They also described potential use cases for 8.3 features, each of which was aimed at organizations at different sophistication levels in their digital transformation journey.

Main Keynote Celebrates The Dreamers Who Get Things Done

Simply put, the Ignition community is making the world a better place, and this year’s Main Keynote focused on the different ways people are using the power of Ignition for good.

In the Main Keynote, Chief Technology Evangelist Travis Cox highlighted the fact that it’s now Inductive University’s (IU) 10-year anniversary. Since IU’s inception, nearly 8 million challenges have been taken, more than 100,000 user accounts have been created, 30,000 Ignition credentials have been earned, and it’s had a whopping 10 million+ video views! IU has empowered so many people to “Dream It, Do It,” and it’s truly the doers that discover a better way forward.

Sales Engineering Director Kent Melville and Chief Technology Architect Kevin McClusky explored how 2024’s Firebrand Award winners are discovering this better way forward, whether achieving greater sustainability, improving people’s health, or helping advance quantum physics research in pursuit of understanding the fabric of our universe.

Following that, Industry and Education Engagement Manager David Grussenmeyer shared notable projects from the Community Impact Program, including an emergency courier services organization that transports vital medical supplies for hospitals, a community fridge that provides 24/7 access to fresh food, and a project that helps keep the lights on in a community hall. We also awarded BIJC’s Chris Taylor with a special Firebrand Award for Community Involvement, for his passion for helping people with Ignition.

In the Main Keynote’s closing, Chief Operating Officer Kat Jeschke shared a big surprise: next year’s ICC is moving to the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in downtown Sacramento! This larger venue will help accommodate ICC’s growth, turning a page to start the Ignition Community Conference’s exciting next chapter.

Closing Keynote Asks: ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’

The Closing Keynote on Day Three focused on what IA’s future looks like beyond the release of Ignition 8.3. After some opening remarks by Colby, Carl spoke about the future of the software (with a disclaimer that he was not promising that the things he discussed would all be included in the next major release after 8.3). Specifically, Carl talked about incremental improvements that will be made to 8.3 after its initial release, and gave a brief overview of post-8.3 core platform improvements. He also talked about a concept he is tentatively calling “Zero Development Applications,” which will be pre-made application experiences that could be used out-of-the-box without any work in the designer.

To talk about the future of support, Co-Directors of Support Services James Hunt and Marcus Bellamy took the stage and shared their exciting plans for 2025. James and Marcus said that the support team will add 70+ new videos as well as skill-level-specific learning paths to Inductive University (IU) next year. They also announced that IA will extend support hours by nearly 50 percent in Q1 of 2025 by adding more support engineers in the US and Australia. Also, they are planning to grow the training course catalog with 4 new classes on CSS in Perspective, Advanced Scripting, Containerized Deployments, and Git, which they plan to make available towards the end of 2025.

Even after all of that, the Closing Keynote had one more big announcement up its sleeve. Product Manager Nick Barfuss went onstage and spoke about the benefits provided by a free Inductive Automation account, which led up to his announcement of Inductive Automation Workspaces, which is a new solution to provide self-service tools for organizations and the people in it. As Nick explained, if the IA Account is designed for you as an individual, then IA Workspaces is designed for your organization. IA Workspaces will empower organizations to access and manage their licenses, support plans, roles, and organizational structure through a browser-based interface, and will launch in 2025.

Quick Wits and Quips Bolster Bold, Boisterous Build-a-Thon Finish

Day Three of ICC 2024 opened with a Build-a-Thon battle bubbling over with buckets of brilliance, competitive SCADA, and … maybe a little soapy water.

Teamwork was tested as representatives from DMC Engineering and BIJC Ltd. both designed and integrated an Ignition project to manage and monitor a fleet of 3D-printed convenience stores — complete with colorful car washes, fueling stations, and mini-station wagons.

Each team faced the challenge of using their imagination to create a fun storyline and set the stage for their expanding enterprises. But they also put their development skills and quick wits into practice by configuring and controlling UDTs using PLCs provided by partners Opto 22, Ignition Edge with MQTT Sparkplug, and a host of other technical terms and practices that industries use to innovate.

This was all in an effort to make it smooth and, ahem, convenient to run their empire of convenience stores and track things like a slew of snack inventories and energy consumption.

The 2024 Build-a-Thon truly had something for everyone — even some magical music from the Inductive Automation Dept of Funk band that’s sure to climb the Billboard charts as an international hit.

The Build-a-Thon rocks (really, the IA band told us so in a music video that left everyone humming along), and so do DMC and BIJC! Congrats to Team DMC on their victory in winning the most votes and taking home the crown, err, orange jacket in their second Build-a-Thon appearance at ICC!

The Discover Gallery Showcases Brilliance Across The Globe

This year’s Discover Gallery took in a record-breaking 80+ submissions, which were narrowed down to 6 Firebrand Award winners and 12 finalists. The projects that made it into the video showcase illustrated innovative and powerful ways to use Ignition, and were truly inspirational to conference-goers, who got to meet with the brilliant minds behind the projects in a meet-and-greet on ICC’s first day.

Winning projects ranged from improving efficiency in large bakeries, real-time orchestration for a pharmaceutical company, a cutting-edge MES for a building product manufacturer, a system to help cultivate barren desert into a green paradise, and even helping a particle physics and accelerator laboratory monitor and control its latest experiment!

In addition to the wide range of project types, there was also a broad geographical range of integrators and end users represented, including those from the US, Canada, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, France, United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Barbados, and Australia, which exhibited how professionals in all corners of the world are doing incredible things with Ignition.

The Exchange Challenge Highlights Community Innovation

Earlier this year, we asked the community to create and submit exceptional new resources into the Ignition Exchange, offering them a chance to shine in the annual Exchange Challenge and, of course, get a snazzy pair of Ignition socks. The Exchange Challenge winners and honorable mentions were announced at ICC during the Build-a-Thon.

Hats off to Artek Integrated Solutions for winning first place with the simple, highly functional, and very polished Task Toggler resource. Eric Gruber’s Historical Tag Analysis resource won second place, and Andrew Geiger’s Jupyter Kernel resource won third place.

The five honorable mentions included Simeon Wislang’s Cognex Vision Web Socket Demo, Steve Laubach’s 1734 and Compact Logix 5069 Animated IOs, Alex Marcy’s groov RIO EMU Faceplates, and Arnaud De Clerck’s Mettler Toledo Library.

Trifecta of 8.3 Presentations Set The Tone For The IA Sessions

The IA-led sessions this year used the Technical Keynote’s Ignition 8.3 announcement as a springboard, with not one, but two, follow-up deep dives into what users can expect from this upcoming major release.

Like a cannonball into the deep end, these two sessions made a big splash. The first previewed platform updates to Ignition’s Gateway UI (now with multiple selection and bulk editing), API access, no-scripting alarm aggregation, What’s App integration for the Twilio Module, secret management, and much more. The second session examined novel features coming to 8.3 like centralized data management in the form of Event Streams, the easy-to-use Form Component, Offline Mode, and the hotly anticipated Drawing Tools, a native SVG editor in Perspective that integrates directly with tag bindings.

Also looking toward the future and new possibilities, Travis Cox took the main stage to discuss how, with Python and the Module SDK, Ignition gives integrators the confidence to say “yes” to new technology. The session covered integrating Ignition with everyday peripherals like cameras, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth, while taking some time for a live demo of a less-common use case: creating a 3D virtual control room using an Apple Vision Pro. But that was just a warm-up for special guest Gray Solutions’ in-depth demonstration of how they leveraged Ignition to control a pair of autonomous robots courtesy of Boston Dynamics.

Community Sessions Demonstrate The Breadth Of Ignition Usage

This year featured more sessions hosted by members of the Ignition community than any previous ICC, and the extra space on the schedule gave the presenters room to cover an extensive spectrum of topics.

The lineup broke down any notion that there is only one way to approach an ICC presentation. Some sessions narrowed their focus to a single goal or project like DMC’s presentation on optimizing load times in Perspective or 2024 Community Firebrand winner Chris Taylor’s walkthrough of his work with SERV Kent, a charity in the UK that ferries live-saving medical supplies between hospitals. Conversevely, presenters like those from TIGA, Cirrus Link, and RoviSys used their time to get expansive, tackling organization-wide concepts like enterprise standardization, Unified Namespace, and DxOps Transformation respectively.

Some presenters took an industry-specific approach, discussing how Ignition is affecting — and shaping the future of — manufacturing, biotech, and oil & gas. Others, meanwhile, defined their sessions by how Ignition integrates with other technologies, such as Flexware’s presentation on combining Ignition and ERP or Shamrock Foods Company’s session about using Ignition with Canary DB for predictive maintenance.

Capping off the community sessions, Sepasoft took the breakthrough theme to heart, using their session to announce the AI-powered MES solution SepaIQ. A tool to effectively organize manufacturing data for higher-level AI/ML/BI systems, SepaIQ aims to provide real-time KPI, dashboards, predictions, sentiment analysis making plant floor production more efficient.

Integrator Panel Explores Breakthrough Tech And Trends

This year’s ICC Integrator Panel offered a view into the current state of the automation industry and how it’s changing. The integrators touched on many important topics, such as the importance of cybersecurity, how customer pain points have changed, bringing OT and IT together, and more. However, the main topic was what technology and trends are breaking through and reshaping the future of automation and how integrators are adapting to these advancements.

Industrial Networking Solutions’ (INS) Morris Moore, Concept Reply’s Remus Pop, and Tamaki Control’s Leah Warren all agreed that with greatly increased data availability from the adoption of Industry 4.0 practices and technologies like MQTT, the Unified Namespace, and edge and IIoT solutions, companies are now focused on finding the best ways to implement this data. “Now the challenge points have escalated and grown and morphed to more of the cloud solutions and how you model data,” said Morris Moore. The integrators also discussed the importance of AI and ML for both everyday tasks like answering emails or writing code and integrating into automation systems for predictive maintenance and more.

Industry Panel Charts A Path To Innovation

Industrial automation professionals from a wide range of verticals gathered on stage for the Industry Panel, where the conversation focused on innovation and Digital Transformation. Panelists offered practical advice on issues such as getting buy-in to start using Ignition, shared their current cybersecurity measures, and commented on the process of building an integration team.

There were also numerous illuminating insights shared on the subject of innovative technologies, like using Augmented Reality in product manufacturing, and the future integration of AI in the industry. Regarding the latter, SugarCreek’s Dan Stauft highlighted difficulties of integrating with AI, saying that “[with] AI models [it’s] garbage in, garbage out. It takes a PhD almost to define what goes into the model.” Energy Systems Network’s Becca Gillespie went on to emphasize the importance of adding context to data with AI. “It’s so difficult to add,” she explained, “and yet it’s the only way AI can really learn.”

Table Talks, Golf, Arcade Games, and More

The Ignition Community Conference is an event that truly breaks through barriers — pun intended. And this year was no exception to its history of putting ‘fun’ in function!

In addition to the sizable sum of sessions and formal presentations of industrial insights, there was also an enormous amount of extracurricular activities offering equal amounts of informal interactions.

ICC 2024 ‘twas a magical place where wizards (we’re looking at you, Inductus) cast spells of technology from the Stage One balcony, and robot dogs roamed the campus performing tricks. And, there were no ‘mishaps’ to clean up.

The community-driven Table Talks had no speakers, no presentations, and no incidents! And exhibitor showcases lined the Harris Center hallways offering opportunities of one-on-one demonstrations and product presentations.

Gamers got to test their reflexes at the SCADA Arcade of games built using Ignition, while the social butterflies among us fluttered to the IA Social Media Team’s Selfie Station for some pics. Say “cheese!”

Think the festivities came to a close with the Closing Keynote? Nope! A golf scramble put professional networking and enjoying fantastic Folsom, CA, weather in the bag one day after the conference. A little birdie told us it was a hole-in-one. Sorry, not sorry.

See You In Downtown Sacramento For ICC 2025!

With so many new features and big announcements, ICC 2024 truly lived up to its “Breakthrough” theme. If you missed the conference, you can still buy an ICC Livestream Pass, which is now 50% off!

While we’ll miss the Harris Center and all of the ICC memories we’ve made there over the years, the new, larger venue of ICC 2025 will take the ICC experience to a whole new level. Next year’s ICC takes place on September 16-18, 2025, so mark the dates on your calendar, and sign up here to get exclusive early access to the lowest prices on tickets and other conference announcements. We can’t wait to see you again next year — until then, keep building amazing things with Ignition!