With the release of our Ignition Conversion Tool in 2023, Corso Systems paved the way for migrating from stagnant, legacy SCADA systems faster, cheaper, and with much less hassle than ever before. Many companies have now been able to migrate from outdated systems to Inductive Automation’s Ignition, a state of the art platform that can grow with them.

We’ve observed some common reasons for why companies need or want to upgrade—and some of these reasons pay for themselves immediately, and that’s including licensing PLUS the cost of the automated conversion!

The biggest reasons companies want to upgrade their legacy SCADA systems include:

Ongoing licensing fees getting out of hand
The legacy SCADA system has reached EOL, is unsupported, or the software has been purchased by another company (again) with uncertain support
The outdated SCADA system is unable to integrate with new technology—preventing the company from gaining an edge on competitors
It’s difficult or impossible to find people who can support the outdated software—and/or the ONE person who supported the SCADA on site is retiring
Compatibility issues with new production equipment
The company is relying on precarious aging hardware that could crash at any moment with no hope of recovery

Ignition solves all of these problems, from a technical perspective, a corporate values perspective, and from a system design perspective.

Diagram showing multiple legacy SCADA systems that Corso Systems can convert to Ignition — Don’t see your legacy SCADA system listed? We can probably still convert it! Contact Us for more info.

Ignition’s Costs and Longevity

When you buy an Ignition license from Inductive Automation, you have the option to make this initial license purchase your only cost for the system. Of course, to receive upgrades for future versions, you will need to add a Basic Care support package at minimum. However, this is not a required purchase or obligation. The cost of upgrade protection will be a fixed percentage of your overall license total, so there will never be any surprises from Inductive Automation.

From day one, Ignition has had an Unlimited License model. This means you won’t need to keep spending more money each time you add another client to your plant floor, add a new production line, or even keep track of how many historical tags your system collects. You can do it all with one Ignition license.

Inductive Automation is also a privately held company—and has said time and time again they have no interest or plans to sell to a larger entity. This is a very unique stance in the industrial automation marketplace, especially compared with what we’ve seen with Wonderware, Citect, Indusoft, and many other legacy SCADA platforms.

Inductive Automation invests a lot of resources to continually develop the Ignition platform. In fact, Ignition 8.1 has had monthly updates for nearly the entire time since its release. So, you will never need to wait very long to take advantage of new technology. This also means that Ignition isn’t tied to aging hardware, and can easily overcome any compatibility issues you may face over the life of your system.

Converted Ignition Screen by Corso Systems

But, My Operators Like What We Have Now

Operators who know and like the system they’ve used for many years may argue against a migration or upgrade to Ignition. The idea of training staff on a new system to accomplish the same task (from the operator’s point of view) can be a significant hurdle for a company to overcome before migrating to Ignition.

Fortunately, with our Ignition Conversion Tool we’re able to address these concerns by design. Our tool takes your existing system and converts it to Ignition. This gives you the functionality you had before while unlocking the power of Ignition for your entire company.

If you want to keep the legacy look and feel of your screens the same to eliminate operator frustration, we can do that! We can also keep the same layout while updating the screens to use a more modern graphical aesthetic.

Our conversion tool also lowers the total cost of ownership of when moving to Ignition from a legacy SCADA system. This is because our approach speeds up the manual conversion process by orders of magnitude, reduces complexity, and makes validation an easier process.

Start Your Ignition Migration Today

Getting started with our Ignition conversion tool has never been easier!

To get started, we only need a backup of your current SCADA system.

Once we have your backup, we’ll run it through our analysis tool. Then, we can give you an exact breakdown of what can be automatically converted, what will require manual intervention, and what elements might need development work in Ignition to replicate the functionality you need.

From there, we’ll send you a detailed proposal and timeline, and explain the process for your project. Typically, we will upgrade screens to modern graphics and return a fully validated solution ready to deploy for your process, but we also can give you a 1:1 version of what you have now with the same look and feel.

Corso Systems has helped many companies leverage Ignition to take their business to the next level, and we’d love for you to be next!