From September 22 to 24, our CTO & Co-founder Isidro Nistal and SVP of Sales & Partnerships Tony Bryant joined the Ignition Community Conference (ICC) in California, to show how Ignition can be deployed, managed and updated across hundreds of distributed edge devices from Barbara's platform, ensuring high availability and operational resilience.

Sacramento became the meeting point for the global Ignition community as ICC brought together more than 1,500 automation professionals, system integrators, manufacturers and technology providers for three days of sessions, demos and conversation around where industrial automation is heading. For Barbara, it was an opportunity to connect directly with the people building and running Ignition deployments every day, at Booth 30, alongside other companies on the exhibit floor such as Highbyte, HiveMQ, Solace and Velasea.

Running Ignition beyond a handful of gateways

At the booth, Tony and Isidro walked visitors through the same question we keep hearing from Ignition users as they grow from a single plant to dozens of sites: how do you run this across every site, not just one? Ignition works brilliantly at the plant level, but scaling across multiple sites brings a different set of challenges: deployment, updates, security, availability and day-to-day operations. The demonstrations showed how Barbara addresses all of them from one platform — including a live one that stopped a lot of people in their tracks: deploying Ignition to 20 sites, with 20 different configurations, in 20 minutes. We call it the 20-20-20 Principle. The same platform rolls out updates across hundreds of sites in a single action, and keeps gateways available with automatic failover if something fails.

Familiar faces on the show floor

Booth 30 wasn't Barbara alone. Two partners we know well were right there with us: Advantech, next door at Booth 31, and Velasea, at Booth 23, represented by Jimmy Hunt, Kevin Cosbey and Peter Pikulski — both companies, like Barbara, building on the Ignition ecosystem, and a good reminder that running Ignition at the edge reliably takes certified hardware and a software layer that can manage it, together. It also made for an easy walk between conversations, and we had plenty of them.

Kevin McClusky, Chief Technology Architect at Inductive Automation, stopped by the booth on day one, which is always a good sign — and one of many conversations over the three days with system integrators and operations teams sizing up what it takes to scale Ignition beyond a handful of gateways.

A first anniversary, and a lot to show for it

ICC also carried extra weight for us this year. This past August marked the first anniversary of our partnership with Inductive Automation. Over the past year, Ignition joined Barbara Marketplace in four ready-to-deploy versions — Ignition, Ignition Edge, Ignition for Cluster and Ignition Edge for Cluster — turning what used to require an IT team into something an operations team can spin up on a remote edge node in a few clicks. The result: real-time SCADA reaching substations, plants and refineries across energy, utilities, manufacturing and oil & gas, all provisioned, updated and secured from a single control plane.

Looking ahead

A year in, our partnership with Inductive Automation keeps proving out the same idea: Ignition and Barbara are stronger together at the edge. Thank you to David Grussenmeyer, Travis Cox, Azra Burden, Kevin McClusky and Madison Knowles, and the entire Inductive Automation team, for the trust and the shared ambition this first year. And thank you to Advantech and Velasea for the good company on the show floor, and to everyone who stopped by Booth 30 to talk about scaling Ignition across the edge.

We leave Sacramento with new conversations, a year of partnership behind us, and plenty more ahead.

Let's keep building the future of industrial automation, together.