Ignition SCADA integration, on the PLCs you already run.
HillPoint builds SCADA on Ignition 8.3: Perspective, MQTT Sparkplug B, and a Unified Namespace, sitting on the Allen-Bradley and Siemens controllers already in your panels. Based on Florida's Space Coast, serving Central Florida.
What an Ignition SCADA system integrator does
SCADA is the software that shows you what the plant is doing and lets you run it from a screen. Tags, trends, alarms, the historian sitting behind them, and the reports pulled off that history. An Ignition SCADA integrator builds that layer on Inductive Automation's platform and wires it back to the PLCs on the floor.
The word specialist matters here. A shop that lists Ignition as one of a dozen platforms has run a handful of projects on it and reaches for whatever the last vendor sold them. HillPoint builds on Ignition on purpose and knows where the platform is strong and where it bites. Eighteen years in industrial controls, on aerospace and space programs, went into knowing the difference.
The PLC side stays vendor-agnostic. Allen-Bradley ControlLogix and CompactLogix, the older SLC 500 and PLC-5, Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500. Ignition talks to all of them with standard drivers, so the SCADA layer does not care whose processor is in the panel. That is the whole point of doing it this way.
When you call HillPoint, the engineer who writes the tags and draws the screens answers the phone. One person, no account manager, no ticket queue, no handoff to a junior once the contract is signed.
Ignition 8.3: Perspective, licensing, and the Unified Namespace
Perspective is Ignition's web client. Screens run in a browser or on a phone, with no per-seat runtime to install and nothing to push out to every workstation. An operator pulls up the same HMI on the control-room monitor, a laptop in the MCC room, or a phone in the parking lot. The screens are responsive, so one project serves a 24-inch panel and a 6-inch handheld without you drawing it twice.
The licensing model is the part that surprises people coming off iFIX or Wonderware. Ignition is licensed per server, not per tag and not per client. You pay for the platform once and build on top of it:
MQTT with Sparkplug B is how Ignition moves data without polling everything from one place. Sparkplug is an open spec that defines how a device announces itself, reports by exception, and flags when it drops off the network. Ignition ships as an MQTT broker, a publisher, and a subscriber, so a remote lift station or a packaging line can push its own data to a central broker over a thin cellular link instead of a poll engine hammering it every second.
The Unified Namespace is how you organize all of that. Instead of every system pointing at every other system, you stand up one broker as the single source of current state, and every producer publishes into a structured tree that mirrors your plant. The historian reads from it. So do the dashboards and the MES. Add a system next year and it subscribes to what it needs, with no new point-to-point integration to build. Ignition 8.3 and Sparkplug B are a clean fit for a UNS, and it is worth standing one up before the integration count gets out of hand.
- Unlimited tags. Add 500 or 50,000 and the license does not change.
- Unlimited Perspective clients. Every operator on a screen, no per-seat runtime.
- Unlimited screens and projects on the one server license.
- You pay for the modules you use (Perspective, the SQL historian, MQTT), not per point.
Ignition on top of your existing PLCs, no rip and replace
Replacing SCADA does not mean replacing controls. This is worth being clear about, because a lot of quotes bundle the two and charge you for both. Your PLCs, your I/O, your field wiring, and the logic that took years to tune all stay. Ignition sits on top and talks to the processors you already own.
Ignition has native drivers for Allen-Bradley and Siemens, plus OPC UA for everything else. A ControlLogix rack keeps running its program while Ignition reads and writes tags over Ethernet/IP. An S7-1500 does the same over its own protocol. Nothing in the PLC changes to put a modern SCADA in front of it.
Here is what Ignition connects to without touching your controls:
That makes the cutover safe. Stand the new system up next to the old one, point both at the same PLCs, and run them in parallel until operators trust the new screens. Move one area at a time. If something looks wrong, the old system is still live. The plant keeps making product the whole way through, and nobody signs off on a weekend where the whole thing goes dark and hopefully comes back.
- Allen-Bradley ControlLogix and CompactLogix over Ethernet/IP, native driver.
- Legacy SLC 500 and PLC-5 over their supported paths.
- Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 over the native S7 protocol.
- Anything else over OPC UA.
Migrating off iFIX, Wonderware, FactoryTalk, and legacy SCADA
Most Ignition projects start because the old system has become a liability. iFIX or Wonderware on a Windows XP box nobody dares reboot. FactoryTalk View with a per-display license and a maintenance bill that climbs every renewal. A SCADA package from a vendor that got bought twice and no longer answers the phone. It runs, right up until the day it does not, and then there is no support and no spare.
Migrating means rebuilding the SCADA layer on Ignition while the plant keeps running on the old one. The tag database gets rebuilt against the live PLCs. Screens get redrawn in Perspective, usually cleaner than the originals, because you are not carrying twenty years of patched-in workarounds. Alarms and setpoints come across. Then you run both systems in parallel and switch over area by area.
Historical data is the piece people forget to ask about. If your old historian holds ten years of trends, that history can be brought into Ignition's historian or kept reachable so a trend query does not dead-end at the cutover date. You keep the record of how the process behaved before the migration, which matters the first time someone asks why a number looked different two years ago.
Historian, alarming, and reporting
The historian is where SCADA earns its keep after the screens are built. Ignition logs tags to a SQL database you own, whether that is Postgres, SQL Server, or MySQL, not a proprietary file only the vendor can open. Query it with plain SQL, pull it into a report, or hand it to a data team. The tag history is yours, in a format anything can read, for as long as you keep the disk.
Alarming is only useful if operators trust it. Most plants have the opposite problem: a few hundred nuisance alarms a shift, so the one that matters scrolls past with the noise. HillPoint sets priorities, deadbands, and suppression for known plant states, so an alarm means act now. Notifications go out by email, text, or voice on a schedule, so the right person gets the 2 a.m. call and nobody else does.
Reporting comes off the same database. Daily production numbers, compliance reports, downtime summaries, generated on a schedule and mailed out, pulled straight from history instead of keyed by hand off a clipboard. When an auditor or a customer wants the raw data behind a number, it is one query away. A Central Florida municipal water utility and a Space Coast supplement manufacturer with no controls engineer on staff both run on that kind of setup: the reports take minutes, and the raw record is right there when someone asks.
From the PLC to the ERP, one data path
SCADA sits in the middle of the stack. Below it are the PLCs and the process. Above it are the systems that plan and account for what the plant makes: MES and ERP. Ignition fits well in the middle because it speaks both directions. Down to the controllers over their native protocols, up to a business system over SQL, REST, or a message broker.
HillPoint has tied Ignition production data into ERP, including NetSuite, so a finished batch on the floor shows up as inventory in the books without anyone retyping it. The Unified Namespace helps here too. When current plant state lives in one broker, the MES and the ERP both subscribe to it instead of each one polling the PLCs directly. Fewer connections, less to break, and one place to look when a number is wrong.
Stuck on a SCADA nobody supports anymore?
Fifteen minutes with an engineer, on the phone. Bring the iFIX box on XP, the FactoryTalk license bill that keeps climbing, or the Wonderware project you want off. If there's a straight answer, you get it on the call. If Ignition isn't the right move for you, I'll say so. Call (321) 378-0424, or book a slot and I'll call you.