20-Year Anniversary of the Genesis of MQTT

It’s been 20 years since Arlen Nipper and Andy Stanford-Clark sat down in the IBM labs at Hursley, England, and started to devise a solution to a recurring problem in the oil & gas industry: how to send data over a bandwidth-constrained communication channel and share the data with an ever-increasing number of data consumers within the enterprise. They invented MQTT, but little did they know it would become the de facto standard for IoT 20 years later. This presentation will step you through the challenge they were trying to solve and the process they went through in the creation of the MQTT specification as we know it today.

Using SQL Databases to Grow Your Enterprise System

Using Ignition with SQL databases creates a powerful combination for handling enterprise data. In this session, you'll hear from the team at Sherwin-Williams about how they seamlessly use both technologies to meet the company’s growing data demands. Get great first-hand tips for using SQL in large enterprises, including how to annotate and model SQL data, using databases to drive user-customized context in Vision clients, handling database downtime smoothly without impacting SCADA and operations, and more.

Firebrand Awards Panel (2018)

At the end of each conference, the Ignition Firebrand Awards are given to the most outstanding real-world Ignition projects featured in our yearly Discovery Gallery project showcase. Join us to celebrate the creative spirit of the Ignition community as we honor this year’s Firebrand Award winners and hear their stories of struggle, innovation, and triumph in a fun and informative panel discussion led by Inductive Automation’s chief strategy officer, Don Pearson.

Connecting at the Edge: Real Hardware Solutions for the Real IIoT

For years, the Industrial Internet of Things was more of an idea than a reality; now that's all changing because there are many solutions you can start using today to quickly and easily connect to all the "things" at the edge of the network. In this session, you'll get to see the many IIoT-ready products you can start using with Ignition to connect all kinds of devices like PLCs, panels, edge gateways, and more. You'll also learn some great tips and strategies for how to put them into action in brownfield situations so you can start leveraging legacy infrastructure to build a modern IIoT architecture.

Building Enterprise MES Solutions with the Sepasoft 2.0 Modules

In this session, learn how Ignition and the new Sepasoft MES 2.0 modules can be used to fulfill the MES needs of an entire enterprise. We'll show you how the newest OEE 2.0 and MES Enterprise 2.0 modules take advantage of the scale-out architecture and Gateway Area Network (GAN) features in Ignition v7.9, to provide a powerful and flexible way of distributing MES functionality across your enterprise.

Blending OT and IT: Meeting Plant-Floor and Enterprise Challenges with Ignition

For Tyson Foods, the challenges of running a global food processing company are both big and small: How do you keep production on-target and improve efficiencies on an individual line or multiple lines across a facility? How do you manage resources and maintain servers across the enterprise? Tyson Foods is solving these challenges, along with many others, by using Ignition. In this session, you’ll hear how Tyson uses Ignition all the way from the plant-floor level, where it helps improve their processes, to the enterprise level, where they use it along with the Enterprise Administration Module to manage their system centrally.

Big Access: Unleashing the Real Value of Your IIoT Data

In the transition from accessing purely operational information to accessing IIoT information, Ignition IIoT becomes the perfect platform for Big Access. The next disruption in the IIoT market sector will be providing IIoT information to Big Data platforms where customers can discover greater knowledge about their process: trends, correlations, equipment optimization, and predictive analytics. Integrators and end users can use this knowledge to improve processes and performance, and realize greater cost savings. In this session, Arlen will present some new features built into the IIoT MQTT tooling, and some new Ignition modules providing direct connectivity to Big Data platforms. Without Big Access, you can’t implement Big Data!

BlueTech: MQTT and Ignition Use Cases

MQTT and Ignition have made it possible for Magnetrol to implement Sparkplug and gain 24/7 access to the HART data from Magnetrol level transmitters. This information has been instrumental at deciphering and solving customer issues to make their smart transmitters work better and benefit the end users.

Beyond Compliance: Improving Food Safety and Traceability with Ignition and the Sepasoft MES Modules

In this session you’ll learn how the Food Safety Modernization Act has changed the way food producers and suppliers do business. You’ll also see several examples of how and where using Ignition and integrated MES technologies can make a big impact. Learn how modern MES software from Sepasoft and Inductive Automation can be used to enhance food safety plans and processes by ensuring truth in labeling, product quality, and traceability — automatically on the plant floor.

The Enterprise Transformation Journey: How Reynolds American Created a World-Class Operation

Projects are hard – transformation takes courage! Few industries face the challenges that the tobacco industry faces. The success Reynolds American achieved over the past 10 years is truly a remarkable story. Join Reynolds American and their integrator Brock Solutions as they tell the story of leading the transformation of the industry and their organization — leveraging leading-edge technology, driving measurable business value, and overcoming barriers that few thought possible to conquer. And the journey is far from over as Ignition is blazing new trails to creating a digitally connected enterprise.