Highlights:
- There were no major announcements during the keynote–on the development side, Colby and Carl punted the roadmap discussion to Day 3 and the developer’s panel session. I’m hoping to hear more details about 8.0 (Blaze?) — Ignition’s HTML5 efforts.
- Travis Cox did announce a new program called Ignition Onboard. Ignition Onboard is a program where hardware companies will be packaging Ignition (likely Edge) on their hardware solution. Opto22 and Hilscher are the first two members. You will know by the Ignition Onboard sticker on the box.
- Carl Gould announced the future security developments coming down the road during the Security session. For security… this really was a great session and I highly recommend anyone who missed it to watch the video once it is posted by IA. The highlights are below and should be taken into account for all future development in Ignition. I did ask Carl what effect the pen-testing would have on the release of both the Ignition builds and the module builds… and he said that is still to be determined. For those that aren’t familiar with 3rd party pen-testing… it is when software developers pay a 3rd party to try to hack their software and then report on vulnerabilities. This will be an added step in the development process and will likely slow down the release schedule a bit.
- Security Enhancements coming in future releases of Ignition:
- Better unidirectional gateway support
- Secure by default
- Multi-factor authentication and federated identity support
- 3rd party pen-testing of Ignition builds
- Auditing and 21CFR11 Tools
- I had an opportunity to set up a Skype Session with Perfect Abstractions and one of our clients to demo the 3-D Charts module. Nick has done a great job with the development and our client is excited to get the module installed for some 3D representations of O.D. measurements and time series representations of AQP and OEE.
- Brown Engineering has a really slick solution on display. Using Ignition and an external sensor–over serial–they have developed an application that builds sequential pick lists and then tracks the operators selections. It is a very cool implementation and has many applications in manual assembly, QC and inventory management.
Day 2 was an impressive showing all around. From Sepasoft’s presentation of OEE 2.0 (phenomenal improvements) to the IIOT discussions to Security Improvements… and capping the day off at the Palladio with a spectacular farm to fork dinner. Inductive Automation has not disappointed.
Intellic comes to the show every year… I am, personally, here every year… and ICC 2017 is shaping up to be the best yet.
Blessings,
Walker