Industrial IT developers increasingly incorporate standard IT infrastructure. Rather than send platitudes about the mythical “IT/OT Convergence,” some actually just do it. Integration with Kubernetes exemplifies one such technology.
This news comes from edge orchestration developer ZEDEDA. The short list of benefits from edge orchestration solutions with Kubernetes.
Simplifies edge operations by delivering consistent app management across distributed locations, minimizing expensive manual intervention at each site
Automates large-scale edge infrastructure and application deployment—enforcing desired state for thousands of edge clusters, even with unreliable network connectivity
Optimized AI processing close to operational data sources reduces expensive data backhaul to the cloud
ZEDEDA announced the first full-stack edge Kubernetes-as-a-Service solution that extends a cloud-native deployment experience to distributed edge environments. This new solution, ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes App Flows, automates the edge application lifecycle—from packaging and configuration to delivery and observability—eliminating the need to manage cluster and application orchestration infrastructure. Edge Kubernetes App Flows supports the bare-metal and GPU compute required for edge AI applications, such as automated detection of manufacturing flaws and predictive maintenance.
Built on ZEDEDA’s proven edge platform, the new integrated Kubernetes solution extends the platform’s zero-trust architecture and offline resilience—keeping tens of thousands of devices and Kubernetes instances running continuously, even in demanding field environments with physical vulnerabilities and intermittent connectivity.
ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes App Flows combines GitOps-based delivery with ZEDEDA’s zero-trust edge platform—letting organizations focus on applications, not infrastructure.
Key capabilities include:
Application Definition and Marketplace: Deploys customizable application definitions consistently across distributed edge locations.
Application Packaging and Distribution: Builds and distributes manifests tailored for edge requirements.
GitOps-Based Continuous Delivery: Automates deployments through approved Git workflows for full auditability.
Adaptive Observability: Monitors deployment and performance, even with intermittent connectivity and limited bandwidth.
ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes App Flows is built on and integrates with all the leading security and scalability capabilities of ZEDEDA’s proven edge platform, including:
Zero-Trust Security: Continuous validation of edge devices, applications, and communications.
Offline Resilience: Graceful handling of intermittent connectivity and disconnected operations.
Edge Scale: Support for tens of thousands of clusters and unattended edge devices.
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Inductive Automation unleashed Ignition 8.3 during its Ignition Community Conference in September. It included many significant updates. Trying to be “IT-friendly” since it founding, this tagline of “The OT-IT Bridge of the Future” draws ever closer. They call Ignition 8.3 a unified industrial integration platform that makes it easy to bring your OT and IT environments into one system.
I’ll bullet a few examples of new tools and end with a link to a cool use case for Ignition from the Ukraine.
Centralized Events Management
Use the new Event Streams Module to handle and manage tag changes, database events, alarms, and more from a central location.
Event Streams
Easy Enterprise Orchestration
Connect or manage configuration across enterprises using standard IT technologies with Ignition’s self-documenting REST Web API.
World-Class Security
Protect enterprise data with first-class security features like Secrets Management, with extensibility to integrate with third-party secrets management platforms like HashiCorp Vault coming soon.
Secrets Management
A Stable, Long-Term Foundation
Since 8.3 is a Long-Term Support release, you’ll get improvements and fixes for a minimum of five years.
Git Compatibility
Use Ignition 8.3 with Git to collaborate better on big projects and gain complete version control.
Check out the Hebron Project presented at the Ignition Community Conference. This application should get you thinking outside the box searching for cool applications of your own.
(Note: Inductive Automation is a long time sponsor of The Manufacturing Connection. This post is purely my own writing/editing with no additional compensation.)
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I find it sort of amazing that the head of product development at the manufacturing company where I was working in a position sort of like a combination of manufacturing engineering and materials management plucked me out of the factory to assume a role a manager of data.
That was 1976. The problems I attempted to solve 50 years ago are the same problems (albeit on a much larger scale) that executives face today. Multiple silos of proprietary data. Insufficient insight into the company’s operational health. Buried risks to enterprise decision-making.
ADIF (Asset Data Interoperability Framework) working group is a dedicated research group of industry experts and academia that is committed to fostering open, vendor-neutral, and standards-based solutions for achieving data and systems interoperability for assets intensive industries.
I will be in College Station next week to moderate a panel discussion on standards—perhaps discussing how so many standards can work together. The panel includes luminaries Markus Stumptner, University South Australia, Alan Johnston, MIMOSA, Micheal Wiedau and Reiner Meyer-Rossl, DEXPI, Peter Townson, CHIFOS, and Chris Monchinski, ISA 95.
There is still time to register and come. I will probably have some live reports for those who cannot make it.
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AVEVA updated its software offering by converging all data into its Connect platform.
AVEVA is converging all data onto CONNECT industrial intelligence platform. Through enhancements to AVEVA Asset Information Management, AVEVA System Platform and AVEVA PI Data Infrastructure, AVEVA can enable the visualisation of engineering and operations data in one interface. This offers organisations the ability to scale digital twin solutions more flexibly and reduce IT overhead.
At this year’s Schneider Innovation summit, AVEVA is showcasing its solutions and vision for its industrial digital twin.
For AVEVA Asset Information Management, the new enhancements will bring together trusted asset contexts, accessible through the CONNECT visualisation offering a single flexible and unified UI to visualise trusted engineering, asset and maintenance data. From P&IDs, drawings, and documents to real-time sensor readings, process events, and historical performance metrics, teams can view and analyse all relevant data in one place.
Meanwhile, AVEVA PI Data Infrastructure is an ever-advancing modern and flexible foundation for rapidly connecting, contextualising and acting on industrial insights from operations data. Its sophisticated data management capabilities continue to drive value across enterprises and new enhancements ensure enhanced hybrid connectivity, visualisation and analytics for AVEVA’s industrial digital twin.
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“This is my eighth ICC, and this is by far the best.” I asked a customer this morning how he was enjoying this year’s edition of the annual Inductive Automation Ignition Community Conference.
I concur completely (although I’ve attended more than eight). The Harris Center in Folsom had long since proved to be too small to house the community’s growth. Executives agreed to move the venue to the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento. They planned for doubling the size from 800 to 1,600, but the organizers told me that doing this the first time encompassed so many unknowns that they couldn’t breathe easily until half-way through the first day. This one reminded me of the automation company user groups I once attended.
I’m writing this in the hallway. The energy from conversations certainly keeps my energy up.
Part of the attraction this year emanates from the ability to house more breakout sessions. New also this year are Walker Reynold’s Prove It! Sessions. I sat in one with HighByte where the task is to prove to the audience that their solution really works.
Colby Clegg and Carl Gould ICC 2025
It helps when company executives have something good to say. And CEO Colby Clegg and CTO Carl Gould certainly rocked the conference with the huge advances in the latest Ignition Release—8.3.
The original vision I heard some 23 years ago focused on building an HMI/SCADA using IT-friendly technology from the ground up. Oh, and coming from a background as an integrator for another software company, the second focus concerned the pricing model designed to make the software more affordable and pricing more transparent.
Reading through just the bullet points I have below shows how far “IT-friendly” has come. The foundation for Ignition ties even more deeply into technologies familiar to all IT developers. With the hit of the show saved for previews of coming attractions when Colby and Carl announced coming in a few months—Model Context Protocol (MCP), thought of like an API for Agentic AI. MCP is so new and powerful that Inductive Automation may be beating IT developers to the game.
Inductive Automation Releases Ignition 8.3
Ignition 8.3 is such a comprehensive update that I’m surprised that it isn’t 9.0. Inductive says it provides tools for building solutions in SCADA, IIoT, MES, HMI, and more. It’s so much more that if I were an analyst paid $50,000 to do things like this, I’d give the category a new name.
This update (actually a significant technology foundation update) to Ignition 8.3 delivers major advancements in data processing efficiency, security, management, and development speed in order to elevate operational technology (OT) to modern IT standards and meet the speed and scalability needs of modern enterprises. These updates continue in the vision of the founder I first heard 22 years ago about developing OT software with the latest IT-friendly technology.
“Ignition has disrupted the industry and defined a new paradigm in industrial enterprise integration. With Version 8.3, we have completed our long-standing vision to create the world’s most powerful, most open, and most flexible application development platform,” says Colby Clegg, CEO of Inductive Automation and co-creator of Ignition.
Key Ignition 8.3 features include:
The new Industrial Historian Solution Suite, which includes the Historian Core Module, the SQL Historian Module, and a new Historian API for custom historian implementations.
The new Event Streams Module, which enables mapping and directing of event-driven data by creating a communication pipeline between various sources (such as tag changes or Kafka topics) and handlers (like scripts or database tables).
Perspective Module improvements, including a new Drawing Editor with native vector illustration tools, a form generator, and an offline mode for data entry and storage.
The redesigned Ignition Gateway, featuring a faster, more powerful web interface, integrated search capabilities, enhanced customization and visual organization, and consolidated configuration and diagnostic tools.
Next-level security that aligns with modern IT standards, including a new Secrets Management system, and Google Protobuf for faster, more secure communication between clients and gateways.
Long-Term Support (LTS), receiving regular updates and enhancements through the next five years.
Ignition 8.3 also features enhanced store-and-forward capabilities, improved enterprise deployment management, built-in REST API, new Gateway deployment mode, version control and collaboration with Git, simplified containerization, and much more.
Ignition Solution Suites, which include collections of Ignition modules and optional support plans that provide Upgrade Protection. Ignition Solution Suites simplify the Ignition purchasing process so that users can buy and deploy the precise solution they need more quickly. Five Solution Suites are currently available, and they align Ignition’s capabilities with common industrial use cases: The Application Building Suite, The Industrial Historian Suite, The DataOps Operations Suite, The Alarm Management Suite, and The Enterprise Integration Suite.
Every year the company recognizes significant and unique applications developed with Ignition. This year the company also recognized outstanding efforts in educating students about industrial automation with the Educational Engagement Firebrand Award, and honored contributions to the Ignition user community with the Community Impact Firebrand Award.
2025 Ignition Firebrand Award Winners:
Concera (End user: Sibanye-Stillwater)
Insight Engineering (End user: Haymes Paint)
SAGE Group (End user: Sydney Airport Corporation)
ASE Global
National Renewable Energy Lab
2025 Community Impact Firebrand Award Winner: Nick Minchin, Senior System Engineer at SAGE Automation, who dedicated much time to answering questions and helping people on the Ignition Forums.
2025 Educational Engagement Firebrand Award Winner: HebronSoft / Hebron IT Academy. These students from the Ukraine developed a process of custom fabricating prosthetic hands for soldiers who lost limbs in the war.
This news concerns unstructured data management. I wrote about Datadobi several times in 2021 and 2022. Not much since. They have released a new version of their StorageMAP, its “heterogeneous unstructured data management solution.”
StorageMAP 7.3 enables organizations to create policy-driven workflows, act on data more precisely, and migrate between S3-compatible platforms while maintaining compliance.
StorageMAP 7.3 introduces policy-driven workflows that allow administrators to define tasks executed by its workflow engine in response to specific triggers, such as a time schedule. A “dry run” feature facilitates reviewing the scope of a policy before full execution.
These new workflows support a wide range of use cases, including periodic automated archival, creating data pipelines to feed GenAI applications, identifying and relocating non-business-related data to a quarantine area, and more. Once policies are published, StorageMAP runs the workflows on schedule without requiring manual supervision.
In addition, StorageMAP 7.3 adds support for granular file-level deletes. Administrators can identify files that match specific criteria and save them as input to a targeted delete job, which StorageMAP will execute. Each delete job generates a report that documents the job’s details and outcome.
This functionality addresses situations where a coarse-grained directory-level deletion is not possible due to the presence of both relevant and disposable data. By enabling precise file selection, StorageMAP ensures that administrators can apply accurate and effective deletion policies.
Object migration enhancements
StorageMAP 7.3 also enhances its core object migration functionality by supporting the migration of locked objects between S3-compatible storage systems. This allows compliant data stored in a Write Once Read Many (WORM) format to be relocated across different vendor platforms while retaining its retention date and legal holds.
To support cost and performance objectives, the solution includes the ability to select the S3 storage class during object migration or replication. By specifying the desired storage class at the time of the job, organizations can avoid unnecessary post-migration lifecycle policies and ensure data is written directly to the appropriate tier.
