Anyone looked at the new pricing structure for Ignition?
I just received a quote for the Works package ( now called Ignition Pro ) that is almost 15% higher than a price I was quoted 2 months ago.
As an Integrator I price jobs that may take 6 - 12 months to become an order. With a 15% increase in the Ignition price, I am almost giving it away.
I saw that too, a price increase occurred last year as well. If I recall around the same time as ICC.
Probably just start to expect it on a yearly basis until proven otherwise. I have to try and bite my tongue because of how good the software is, but it isn’t perfect and yearly pricing/structure changes will start to make it difficult for an integrator to maintain accurate quoting to their clients. When I first purchased v7.7 “The Works Limited” in May of last year it was $6750. Today with the new pricing and having to customize the purchase to get the same modules to match what you got with “The Works Limited” package originally, you now pay $10,646, a 57% increase.
Looking at the ‘Works Critical’ (with redundancy) that came in at $26,950, now it’s $33,893 a 26% increase.
The changes with the integrator program compound my feelings even more. I just maintained my ‘Core’ certification and let my ‘Gold’ certification lapse. Core was a lot of time and effort, and since I was grandfathered in I didn’t pay the $1000 fee. To expect 100% correct answers on IU and on the exam, I probably spent 60+ hours on it.
I understand that there is a reason for the increase, and hope it’s to pay their people what they are worth and for the continuous improvement of the product. But I would really like to seem them put some hard numbers to their business and show everyone just how well they are doing in the market rather than bouncing around that question by saying their product is so different that they can’t really compare themselves to anyone else in the market.
At the end of the day, New SCADA or not, your competitors are FTView SE, Wonderware InTouch/Sys. Platform, iFix, GE Cimplicity, WinCC. Cut back on the marketing BS and put the cards on the table, you have a great product, lets see the results after 5 years.
We have quoted 2 large projects in the past year where we have lost the bid, because the Inductive Automation solution was actually higher in cost than the FactoryTalk SE solution provided by others.
Hi everyone,
Hope I can clear up some things and explain some changes in the pricing.
Yes, the pricing changed. I wouldn’t expect this every year, but this year we did make quite a few adjustments, as you all noticed. We felt that the improvements to the Reporting module warranted an increase in the price. However, I would draw your attention to the fact that we dropped the price of the Vision module by more than the increase to the Reporting module. We also split the Tag Historian and SQL Bridge products in order to drop the entry point for a number of types of packages, allowing us to offer the new Foundation package at a sub $10k price point, a package with no limitations whatsoever. We also dropped the price of alarm notification module. We’ve decided to start charging for drivers in order to help fund development of more protocols, so make sure your new quotes don’t include drivers you aren’t going to be using. I hope this demonstrates that prices were adjusted, up and down, all around, this wasn’t a general price increase.
Also, I think you may have missed one of the major new changes: the price of redundancy dropped significantly. Redundant gateways are now priced at 50% of the primary gateway! This means that a Redundant Pro is less than Mission Critical Works was.
I think you may also be reacting to a change in how the pricing is presented. We used to list our package discounts on the pricing page. We’ve changed to simply listing everything in retail. So if you are used to seeing post-discount prices, the retail prices of course look a bit higher.
As for being outbid for large projects, I’m not sure what to think about this, it seems hard to believe. Perhaps you could share what kind of architecture you were talking about? I’d be curious to get some more context.
Carl,
Im trying to better understand the split of tag historian and sql bridge. if we elect to go with just the tag historian module, do we still have the ability to add multiple database connections, use system.db in scripting? are we just losing the transaction group functionality?
Hi diat150,
Database connections and system.db.* functions are not part SQL Bridge. They are part of the Ignition platform (free and not part of any Ignition module).
Yep, you are just losing the transaction group functionality.
Best,
Hello Carl, thank you for the great feedback! I hope ICC 2015 was a huge success!
I have no doubt that pricing and adjustments had complete justification, and by the continued improvement of Ignition it’s clear that there is constant re-investment in the product, and your team is always trying to meet the needs of the integrator and end users. It’s much appreciated on all levels.
While ‘unlimited’ is a great advantage for Ignition there are plenty of projects where ‘unlimited’ simply is overkill, or the overall project budget simply can’t support it to be of any value add. If someone is shopping for sub $10k licensing, chances are the project simply won’t have the budget for the additional hardware and infrastructure required to support more than a few clients. So ‘unlimited’ is simply marketing at that point. I would be surprised if the project budget would support infrastructure required to utilize alarm notification (but I’m sure you’ve gotten feedback otherwise). SQL Bridge and Reporting previously available sub $10k really made a package that could be put in place, proven in the field, and provide an obvious jump to ‘unlimited’, ‘redundancy’, ‘alarm notification’ …etc in a future expansion. It also made for a compelling argument to management that Ignition had enough advantages, at a low-risk price point to justify moving away from ‘traditional’ SCADA packages.
By stripping features out (SQL Bridge, Reporting), and raising to $9950 ‘other’ SCADA vendors can compete on price for 2-3 client systems because there simply is not enough features to differentiate Ignition from the ‘other’ guys anymore. Had this change occurred a year ago, I would have lost the Ignition argument to my management team.
And what about single client projects?
A lot of our projects are single client: our customers just need to control a process in a plant with a PLC and a dedicated PC. Looking at the prices, the single client licenses needed to suite our needs will cost (prices in Euros):
Vision Module Limited (5 clients, I don’t see any 1 client offer) €3,500
Tag Historian Module €1,800
Siemens Driver €200
Total €5,500
This is almost double the cost of most SCADA for a single client with the same capabilities!
I’m afraid we will change SCADA for our next projects and it is a pity, as I spent a lot of time to adapt Ignition to our way of programming PLCs.
Yeah I think a 1 license client makes sense. I would imagine a 1 client license turns into an unlimited more times than not, so you end up getting the money anyway.
It’s important to point out that we haven’t changed our policy at all in regards to selling single client versions of Vision. We can and do. We don’t really want to put ever single option on the pricing page, because it would become overwhelming. This may be misguided on our part, but we assume pretty strongly that if someone needs something that’s slightly derivative of what’s published (1 vs 5 client, for example), they’ll actually contact us and ask about it.
On a different note, the fundamental problem of having an “introductory product” (that is, from the perspective of integrators, trying to get their foot in the door) is something that we’ve been working on. We have an idea, that we were originally going to release before the conference, but had to delay. However, at the conference, we spoke with many people about it, and got very good feedback. It would be something of a “tasting plate” version of Ignition with a wide range of functionality (limited in various ways) at a very good price point. We’re just trying to hammer down the final balance of numbers, and most importantly, when we can actually make it available. But as I said, feedback has been good, so it shouldn’t be too long. Of course, even that product won’t satisfy everyone, but that’s how it goes.
Regards,
It is true that we push for “unlimited” pretty hard. This is because we have seen so many times customers who initially think, “oh, I only need a few clients” put in unlimited Vision, and then the real magic happens when they realize that anyone can view the information available in their project.
Now, that said, we recognize that there are plenty of legitimate uses out there for smaller installations. Did you all see this part of the pricing page? Perhaps it is too hidden.
Now, as for a 1-client version, this is in the works! It just didn’t make it for the 7.8.0 release. We plan on bringing back the “Panel Edition” that we used to have, but this time it’ll be a more fully thought-out product, with 1 local, 1 remote client, 500 tags, and 1 or 2 weeks of local history, for about $1,000. (Disclaimer: this isn’t out yet and details may be adjusted by the time we release it).
^- haha, turns out we were both responding at the same time. Now you get two parallel opinions at the same time!
How about a separate name for the starter version to distinguish it from the full product? I vote for ‘Igniter’!
Al coined “Igniter” at the conference. Brilliant and catchy. I second his vote.
I suggested “Fuse”… or “Fuze”. Just to be argumentative 
That’s unlike you Phil
Plus, I’m tired of 'I’s. iPhone -this and iPad -that and iPods and iWatches – yada yada yada. Give me another letter of the alphabet, please!
Igniter is too close of spelling, I think.
Maybe something like ‘Spark’: It’s a lilttle Ignition. 
I had the same thing in mind... I'll count that as another vote!
What about “Smoulder”
