The Inductive Advantage — Training, Support, and the Community Behind Ignition
Ignited: Striking Industrial Automation ConversationsShow Notes
Great software only creates value when people know how to use it. And in industrial automation, where the stakes include uptime, safety, and production output, the difference between a successful deployment and a frustrating one often comes down to the resources behind the platform — not just the platform itself.
In this episode, Travis and Tom welcome Dave Fogle to explore something that doesn't get talked about enough: the full ecosystem of enablement that Inductive Automation has built around Ignition. From Inductive University — one of the most comprehensive free technical training platforms in the industrial software space — to the Ignition community forum, the Ignition Exchange, and world-class support, this conversation is about what it actually takes to empower integrators and end users to do their best work.
Dave brings a practitioner's perspective on how these resources are used in the real world: what new integrators lean on when they're getting started, what experienced engineers reach for when they hit a wall, and how organizations use Inductive University credentials to build team-wide Ignition competency. The conversation is honest about where the learning curve exists and how to navigate it — and genuinely excited about what becomes possible when an organization is fully invested in the Ignition ecosystem.
Tune in for Episode 3, where we go beyond OPC to explore MQTT, Sparkplug B, and the edge compute revolution with two of the people who helped build those standards.
Subscribe to Ignited for upcoming episodes featuring real-world case studies of digital transformations built on Ignition — the stories that show what's possible when great technology meets great enablement. In the next episode we're diving into OPC and OPC UA with a guest who helped build Ignition's standards foundation from the ground up.
More from Ignited: Striking Industrial Automation Conversations
Most manufacturers have more data than they know what to do with, yet none of it speaks the same language or reflects how the factory actually operates. When operational issues arise, teams are often left calling specific individuals who hold critical system relationships entirely in their heads. In this episode, Travis and Tom sit down with Jeff Knepper and Graeme Welton from Flow Software, alongside Ryan Crownover from Vertech, to explore what it takes to build an industrial data architecture that goes beyond basic connectivity and dashboards. They discuss how a true knowledge model maps real-world relationships between assets, processes, people, systems, and events, fundamentally transforming raw operational data into actionable enterprise intelligence.
Traditional industrial historians often struggle to scale across modern, multi-site enterprise environments without introducing support risks or performance bottlenecks. In this episode, we talk with Mike from Tiger Data and Colby from Inductive Automation about their joint partnership designed to deliver an enterprise-grade time-series data backend for Ignition. They share the story behind TimescaleDB’s open-source adoption, the production challenges of running unsupported databases in mission-critical manufacturing, and how their new commercial solution provides high availability, enhanced Hyperfunctions, and scalable deployment options from edge to cloud.
Over 1,900 engineers, integrators, executives, and builders gather at ICC 2026 in Sacramento, California, for what is shaping up to be the biggest Ignition Community Conference ever. To hear what the community is actually thinking, Travis and Tom set up a live studio right at the conference to interview eight community members across various backgrounds. Asking every guest the same set of questions, this episode captures unfiltered insights into why people keep coming back, what caught their attention this year, and what they love and look forward to in the world of Ignition.
Digital transformation initiatives rarely fail because of the software, they fail because the underlying data structure wasn’t built to scale. In this episode, Travis and Tom talk with Dylan DuFresne, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Abelara, about building industrial architectures designed for long-term viability. Dylan shares a practical, field-tested perspective on the Unified Namespace (UNS) as a core strategy rather than a buzzword, explaining how true data ownership, proper context, and bridging the gap between execution and strategy separate successful manufacturers from those left with disconnected systems.
Connecting plant-floor hardware is a solved problem; the real challenge is making that data act intelligently. In this episode, Travis and Tom sit down with Remus Pop, head of Concept Reply’s industrial AI practice, to discuss his ”Factory Brain” architecture. Remus explains why simply building dashboards isn’t enough, how knowledge graphs bridge the gap between raw data and contextual intelligence, and how emerging tools like MCP and large language models are transforming plant operations. Discover why setting up robust data infrastructure on Ignition today is the key to unlocking AI tomorrow.