How to make money with Ignition?

General Discussion
1

I would like to become a VAR for Ignition. What values can i add and resell to local SI’s?. Which values or service would you expect from a VAR?. Share your ideas. Thanks :slight_smile:

2

I don’t know what a VAR is but this is how we make money with ignition:

  1. Find people who make things.
  2. Show them how ignition can help them make more things.
  3. Profit.
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3

Good luck with that. You could act as an expert resource in the area, but outside of that, I am not sure what you would offer. In the world where the internet exists, I am not sure what sort of value a VAR would add, based on Inductive’s business model.

4

VAR - Value Added Reseller. Technically every SI is a VAR for Ignition because he buys Ignition license, adds engineering value, makes some mark up and resells to his client.

I know around 100+ SI's in my domain. I would like to position myself as a reseller of "Ignition+something else" for these SI's. I don't want to be another SI and competitor for them. I would like to be a partner and service provider for other SI's to help them win projects and implement effectively

I agree that any SI can buy Ignition online and get technical support. But a project may need certain additional components and solutions which may NOT be available within a SCADA framework. For example, integration with a CMMS solution and workflow automation.

In my experience, the best winning proposition for an SI to win over a decision maker is to address the following objectives:

1. Process optimization
2. Asset optimization
3. Maintenance optimization -- CMMS + something else
4. ROI - Within a short time frame.
5. Revenue generation - How client can generate extra revenue from this project by providing some special services to his clients?. This is very addictive for any decision maker :slight_smile:

How to accomplish these objectives with "Ignition+something else" ?. What solutions can i add as a value addition with Ignition to accomplish these objectives and resell it to other SI's?.

5

Be cheaper than the other guy.

6

This is a bottomless pit and already SI’s are killing each other. Many SMB SI’s have gone bankrupt. Instead, how about creating an International PLC-SCADA SI Federation and agreeing upon common minimum pricing(zone wise), wages, bulk procurement and distribution, quality control, standards, guidelines, arbitration, social security etc? :slight_smile:

7

Only if you get Lech Walesa (aka Bolek) to lead it.

j/k.

My story is this. Creating applications has been my passion since my dad got me a Commodore 64 in the late 80s. He also got a small black and white TV that he had to take to the local TV guy and install RCA jacks. I have been fortunate enough to get continue my passion right after high school and since then I have been in manufacturing, creating and maintaining custom applications external to ERP. At my current employer, MacLean-Fogg, I have been “gifted” large VB6 technical debt. When the time came to replace applications that communicated with Rockwell equipment I could not convince myself to recreate it as a .NET application with yet another external dependency that I would have to maintain. .NET’s ClickOnce deployment model was OK when it worked, but the point is that I did not feel like I would be reducing my own technical debt. At this point we owned Kepserver at a couple locations and I forgot the conversation I had with Kepware, but Erik D. recommended I look into Ignition. I downloaded Ignition and immediately fell in love with it. It was a learning curve, like with anything, but Ignition University and the manual laid out the workflow pretty well. (After we purchased Ignition, we worked with Nick M. a couple times to get a more in-depth tour of the environment and his expertise was extremely valuable. I still remember looking at his 1080p remote session on a 720p projector and none of us knew how to reduce the resolution. This was when Windows 10 first came out and, honestly, to this day I have issues with Win10 resolution settings.) The first application we created was basic. A start and stop button to interface with the equipment, wait for a signal, and retrieve torque readings from PLC tags. Our Controls Engineer laid out the tags I needed to interact with, which was actually a quite different flow than the existing VB6 application. For an IT guy, having your own Controls Engineer is invaluable. From start to finish we completed our PoC in less than five hours. We brought the CIO on the floor and demoed our potential solution. We had approval to buy Ignition within five minutes. PoC to a final solution took under one week (keep in mind this was our first Ignition project). Everyone was happy and since then I have been spreading Ignition awareness wherever possible. Something I learned the hard was that I began extending a single application to serve multiple purposes. This was overkill and unnecessary. Since then I have been creating one-off, small Ignition projects that serve a single purpose only. Well, I guess a recent project that I am working on is not that small anymore, but it does only address a single process. Recently, one of our factories upgraded their ActivPlant instance which broke a custom dashboard that ActivPlant created for us. The controls guy there got two quotes, one from ActivPlant for 22K and another, Ignition based solution for 16K. I am meeting with him on Wednesday to review the broken dashboard and most likely recreate it ourselves, avoiding 16K. This will allow me to advocate for another Ignition instance at his location. I think my story ends here, I have to go make breakfast for everyone.

/c

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10

Don't forget that the fundamental money-making function of Ignition is for a manufacturer to run their plant or plants with it, or for some organization to automate business processes with it. All other value-added services must support that fundamental function.