3 posts tagged with "scada"

GE's iFIX has been a staple of manufacturing automation for decades. As part of the Proficy suite (now under GE Vernova's banner), it's installed in thousands of plants worldwide for supervisory control and data acquisition. But SCADA systems designed in the 1990s were built for a fundamentally different era — one where "analytics" meant trend charts and "connectivity" meant serial cables running to a control room PC.

Today's manufacturing challenges demand more. Unplanned downtime costs automotive manufacturers an estimated $22,000 per minute. Predictive maintenance, edge-to-cloud analytics, and remote multi-plant monitoring aren't nice-to-haves — they're the difference between competitive manufacturing and a shrinking margin business.

This comparison evaluates where GE iFIX still delivers value and where MachineCDN's modern IIoT architecture offers a fundamentally better approach.

Ignition by Inductive Automation has been a favorite among manufacturing engineers for over a decade — a powerful, developer-friendly SCADA platform with an unlimited licensing model. MachineCDN is a cloud-native IIoT platform that connects to PLCs in minutes. Both give you visibility into your machines, but they represent two different eras of industrial software. Here's what matters for your decision.

AVEVA, now part of Schneider Electric following the $14 billion acquisition completed in 2023, is one of the oldest names in industrial software. Their portfolio spans process simulation, SCADA/HMI, MES, historian, and enterprise performance management — serving industries from oil refining to pharmaceutical manufacturing.

MachineCDN approaches industrial intelligence from the opposite direction: a purpose-built platform for manufacturing operations that prioritizes rapid deployment, predictive maintenance, and operational simplicity over process simulation and DCS integration.

This comparison examines where each platform delivers value, the realistic costs and timelines involved, and which manufacturing environments best suit each approach.