I have decided to move away from ignition, and have a bunch of Edge licenses.
Am I allowed to sell them, or return them in for a refund ?
Thanks
huh, not sure I've ever seen this asked before.
According to Inductive Automation Master Software License Agreement the answer might be no, at least not without permission from IA (ask your sales rep? no idea).
Moving away from Ignition. Never heard that from anyone. It's always the other way around. I'd be curious as to why.
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Full Ignition is expensive and it’s hard to convince someone that they don’t need more than 35 days of Historian or that the 2 Edge clients will be enough. That and email-only notification. We have a way to notify operators of alarms using another piece of hardware, but at that point we may as well also use our own internal cloud-based visualization software that also provides remote access to the site at the same time.
Hi Virgar,
Your post caught my eye because I’m actually moving in the exact opposite direction!
I’ve spent the last 15 years as an engineer in the Solar and BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) industry, but I recently decided to pivot my career entirely into Industrial Automation. I’m currently investing all my focus and resources into the Ignition ecosystem—I just recently completed my Core Certification—as I see it as a cornerstone for the future of the field.
Purely out of professional curiosity, what motivated your decision to move away from Ignition? Did you run into specific technical hurdles, or did you find another platform that better fits your requirements? Hearing from someone who has been deep enough into it to own multiple Edge licenses would be incredibly insightful for me as I start this new chapter.
Best of luck with the licenses and your next steps!
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Expensive? Have you ever priced out Wonderware/AVEVA System Platform? The Ignition licenses for our one customer are less than $40k for the perpetual license with unlimited clients, historian, reporting, alarm notifications, redundancy, ABB Totalflow drivers, and premium support. The closest equivalent for WWSP for 2 redundant local clients with historian and access anywhere for remote access is $60k/year plus an additional $8k/year for Kepware to talk to everything. Plus SQL Server licensing. They didn't have any reporting or alarm notification with WWSP. That makes Ignition a steal.
Edit: I'm also wondering if they're migrating entirely off of Ignition or just moving from Edge to Standard. OP makes it sound like entirely off of Ignition.
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I feel like santa clause when I migrate systems from Wonderware/AVEVA to Ignition. Not only are they saving a ton of money on activations but it works better and has more flexibility. It’s an easy sell. The only hangup seems to be that Wonderware/AVEVA customers often think it’s too good to be true. Then when you execute it they see it’s just how it is.
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AVEVA, yes that is ridiculous. We don’t use AVEVA at all. The main competitor is FT SE which has gotten more competitive lately. Don’t get me wrong, I highly prefer Ignition but my project estimator does not.
My other selling point is that I can develop and test the project in probably half the time in Ignition vs FactoryTalk or Wonderware. Considering we're charging $180-200+ per hour, it can add up fast.
I also think that all the other HMI/SCADA software is just archaic. They've been around so long and just keep trying to add features to an aging code base without breaking old projects. IA tries to adapt and improve their product beyond just bolting on some new GUI. 8.3 is a testament to that where the entire backend and the gateway interface was reworked to be more modern. Wonderware is still using InTouch but with a prettier toolbar and menus then before in WindowMaker. FactoryTalk is just an improved version of RSView32 from way back in the day (now I'm aging myself). They did do rework when it switched to FactoryTalk, but it hasn't changed much since. Yeah they still all work, but you can install something that looks and feels the same as it did 20 years ago but takes an hour to install or Ignition that's way more modern and takes less then 5 minutes to install.