Looking for guidance on selling a product built on Ignition

Ignition
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I've spent the last few years developing an MES system using Perspective for a plant that produces automotive pinions. The company now wants to sell this system to others, and I'm being asked to help figure out how to make this happen. There's already one other startup that has ties to us that has been using it for the past year or so, and we've seen that as a kind of trial run. They've been hosting a copy of the MES on their own server, running their own licensed copy of Ignition. That gives them direct access to the code, something we don't want our customers having, so our plan is to move it to a server we will host over here, while continuing to have it point to a MySQL instance on their server.

Each customer would presumably require their own instance of Ignition, and we're wondering if this is something we want to try housing here physically, or if there is a way to make use of Cloud services to run them.

If anyone here has thoughts or recommendations on how to go about this, I'd love to hear them. I'm the only software engineer working on this project, and have little knowledge of commercial software deployment or licensing.

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  • Multiple tenants for a single Ignition instance is allowed. However, you cannot effectively restrict designer access to single tenants. That means you must take care of all UI customization, unless you build UI tools to configure your UIs.

  • If you cannot do that, you will need to move intellectual property into actual 3rd party modules with IA licensing (showcase account). Jython code and gateway configuration and UI designs cannot be locked down. Java code and UI components can.

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The current design will not allow running more than one tenant on a single instance of Ignition. As long as we host each instance for the customer, we don't need to worry about protecting the IP. We would be providing it as a service, and anything I can't make configurable via the UI, I would set up myself (like the tags tied to each machine, though I should be able to eventually get that automated via the UI).

I like the idea of developing it as a set of 3rd party modules, but I have yet to build my first one, and they're wanting to start selling what we already have.

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