Ignition Proves What It Can Do At The ProveIt! Conference

As Inductive Automation’s Chief Technology Evangelist, I participate at many industry events around the world, but I recently went to an event with our team that was unlike any that I’d been to before: the ProveIt! Conference, which took place in February in Dallas, Texas. As I’ll explain, this conference was intentionally quite different from the typical industrial trade show, and it turned out to be an excellent showcase for Ignition.

A Unique New Industry Event

The name ProveIt! hints at what made this conference unique. Rather than relying on traditional sales and marketing tactics, each vendor at the event had to present their solutions as if they were pitching it to a customer that needed to solve a specific problem. Before the conference, the organizers set up a common digital infrastructure that used a Unified Namespace (UNS) architecture, which the vendors had to be able to plug their solutions into.

The vendors were told what the fictional customer’s goals and strategy were, and what their infrastructure looked like. The fictional customer had an MQTT broker which they wanted to use as a UNS, so the data coming in and out of the broker had to be organized in a certain hierarchy and namespace. In order to show how their product met the given requirements, the vendors created a functional design specification (FDS), which laid out how their product would solve the problem, what the architecture would look like, what the cost and implementation times would be, and other important details.

As someone who loves to give demos of Ignition, this got me excited to take part in ProveIt! Because Ignition has speedy performance, powerful visualization, unlimited licensing, and transparent pricing, the concept of the conference really played to our strengths.

The ProveIt! Conference was presented by 4.0 Solutions along with several sponsors. This was the first ProveIt! ever held and it was sold out. The main host at the event was 4.0 Solutions’ IIoT & Industry 4.0 Solutions Architect & Online Educator Walker Reynolds, who has become well-known as an industry influencer and content creator.

Everybody that I interacted with at ProveIt! was very excited about it. Several people there said that it was the best industry event they had ever been to. One of my colleagues from another company even told me that now there are two events that he must attend every year no matter what, which are the Ignition Community Conference (ICC) and Prove It! I must say that I agree with him!

A Strong Showing For Ignition

While Ignition was mentioned in many sessions at ProveIt!, our main event there was a session that I presented with Arlen Nipper from Cirrus Link Solutions. Live onstage, Arlen and I gave a demo of how Ignition and Cirrus Link’s MQTT modules take data on a complete edge-to-cloud journey. During this roughly half-hour demo, we connected to the entirety of the digital infrastructure that was provided by ProveIt!

Starting at the edge with Ignition Edge, we provided local HMI for the press machine in the digital infrastructure. We brought in data from the fictional customer’s OPC UA server, PLCs and other sources. We got data from the press and built a model off of that data and put it into our UNS, showing how our solution collects, democratizes and contextualizes data. We defined the data one time at the edge and carried it through the rest of the journey to the cloud.

At the edge, we also provided store-and-forward, so if communication to the broker is lost, Ignition Edge would store data locally and forward it up when communication is restored. We could also provide local HMI if the network was down.

Then we showed standard Ignition at the plant level, which was consuming all the data from the broker. This is where we built the SCADA system, and built dashboards so that people throughout the organization could see actionable data on their phones, tablets, or smart TVs. We then connected and stored that data to a SQL database, which enables trends, alarms, and history. This gave the customer one unified application at the plant where they could see all of the data from all of their equipment in one place.

We also showed the great power of UDTs. In the demo, we had a UDT for a press machine, and we showed that when a new press machine was installed and got published to the broker, it was auto-discovered and dynamically appeared on the screen. We could then click into that press machine and see all of its details because everything was already configured in the UDT. Then, we showed how to import CESMII smart manufacturing profiles (SM profiles) into Ignition as UDTs that we can map to PLCs. We used the CNC Base Profile that the CESMII team has built out, mapped it to a simulator, and published it to the MQTT server. That allows organizations to build their library of information models using the standard OPC UA Part 5 specification and import that into Ignition automatically. This saves time when building out a new system.

Then we wrapped up our demo by showing how we can take the data and publish it up to a cloud infrastructure, and how to use tools like the IoT Bridge For Snowflake to get that data to Snowflake. We pointed out that the contextual data that had been defined once at the edge as a single source of truth was now available in the cloud.

The crowd was wowed to see Ignition do all of this in real time and without writing any code. Afterwards, Walker Reynolds commented on LinkedIn, “And to say Inductive Automation - Travis Cox and Arlen Nipper proved it… would be the understatement of the year. 🙏” (That’s just the kind of thing you want to hear after doing a live demo!)

After the demo, a lot of folks asked if we could share the Perspective Gateway for the ProveIt! infrastructure. I’ve made all of the projects that we used for our session available to everyone on the Ignition Exchange; to download them, click here.

Ignition was also mentioned and shown in a session by Dell Technologies, which used a Perspective OEE dashboard that was built for them by our Application Engineering team. The OEE dashboard is also available on the Exchange here.

While at the conference, I also recorded two podcasts: a podcast with Zack Scriven of 4.0 Solutions, and an episode of the Manufacturing Hub Podcast with Dave Griffith and Vladimir Romanov. I also recorded a few other interviews there.

All of this activity generated a huge amount of engagement for us at ProveIt! Because this conference was so technically focused, we got a lot of attendees asking about technical details and really wanting to know how things work behind the scenes in Ignition. This led to different, deeper conversations than you would usually have at a trade show, and I loved that.

Taking A Stand For Open Standards

In addition to the positive reception that Ignition got at ProveIt!, I was also very pleased to see how some of the principles that Inductive Automation strongly believes in — open standards, interoperability, and collaboration — were represented there.

I was glad to see open standards like MQTT, OPC UA and SQL playing a big role at ProveIt!, because it’s more proof that open standards are being widely adopted in the industrial space. Inductive Automation has always been dedicated to using open standards, even when that went against the grain of what the rest of the industry was doing. Just as IA has played a key role in the development and adoption of Sparkplug, we’re dedicated to supporting any open standard that we believe will help the industry to keep evolving at a rapid pace.

At ProveIt!, I also recognized a strong focus on interoperability, which made me think about the ecosystem that we’re building around the Ignition platform. The purpose of our ecosystem is to make it easy for Ignition users to connect Ignition to complementary third-party technologies. That effort includes forging relationships with many other technology companies, and also encompasses Inductive Automation Australia and our network of international distributors, our integrator certification program, our online and in-person training, and other programs that empower people through our software.

Just as technologies should work well together, so should people. Since our first Ignition Community Conference, we’ve worked to create a community where industrial thought leaders, influencers, and problem-solvers can come together to share ideas and move the industry forward, and ProveIt! was the first time I’ve witnessed that level of interaction and collaboration happening outside of our own conferences. We love to see that spirit catching on in the industry because it will ultimately benefit everyone.

We’ll Be Back

We’re grateful to Walker and his team for putting on a great event and inviting us to play a part in it. Our team will be back next year for the next ProveIt! and we’re already looking forward to it. I also look forward to seeing many of you who attended ProveIt! at our 2025 Ignition Community Conference in September, which will literally be our biggest ICC yet, taking place in an amazing new venue in Sacramento for the first time. I encourage everyone to attend the next ICC and ProveIt! if you can, because we need your knowledge, ideas, and energy to help move the industry forward.