Hear about Opto 22's top takeaways from this year's virtual Ignition Community Conference.

Last week our engineering team attended ICC 2020—the annual Ignition Community Conference hosted by Inductive Automation. This event has been growing in size ever since 2013, but became a virtual event as is the norm in 2020. If you missed it, read on for some of the highlights.

One of the benefits of hosting the conference virtually is that it reached an even more diverse, worldwide audience and record registration numbers. This year's "Envision" theme drew attention to the innovation that is abundant in the community.

As Inductive Automation's Don Pearson mentioned in the keynote address, the Ignition community is where you see great ideas turn into reality. It brings together engineers, system integrators, plant managers, field technicians, C-level executives and IT professionals for collaboration that is applicable in almost any industry.

You can watch it on-demand and see what community sessions you're interested in. Of course, we highly recommend you spend some time watching Opto 22's presentation. Benson Hougland gives you a step-by-step demo of "The Quickest and Simplest Method for Publishing Sensor and State Data Directly to Ignition".

For a quick recap of the event, some of Opto 22's own Ignition experts weighed in on what they considered to be their
top 3 takeaways from the conference:

Josh Eastburn, Director of Technical Marketing - 

1. Inductive Automation made the event seem like it had been planning a virtual experience all along. It was great content in a great format. The conference had a unique look, smooth registration, and diverse lineup.
2. There was a jam-packed gallery of user projects and continuous interaction on their Discord Server.
3. groov RIO got a chance to shine in an impressive interactive demo with Ignition Perspective.

Dan White, Southeast Regional Sales Engineer - 

1. It was interesting and exciting to see all the activity around blockchain technology. The amount of engagement on Discord was really cool, and it was easy to follow along.
2. Seeing groov EPIC in the Sepasoft demo was awesome!
3. I was impressed that sessions were also available in other languages.

Terry Orchard, Technical Marketing & Developer - 

1. Inductive Automation has put big emphasis on switching to remote work, creating accessible support, online resources like remote training, and additional documentation. These changes have revealed how much customers and users value these options, so there's also a strong intention to keep this up long-term.
2. As a show of community support, Inductive has released and continues to support Ignition Maker Edition to encourage more activity in the home-automation/hobby space and education of the next generation to encourage innovation and growth.
3. Release Ignition 8.1 puts the new features of 8.0 like Perspective into long term support (LTS) as well as other big features still to come; the support and software improvements we expect from IA will continue.

Garrick Reichert, Senior Applications Engineer - 

1. The digital format was very appealing as it allowed for many people who wouldn't normally have the ability to attend ICC to participate and engage, specifically international attendees.
2. Exciting edge technologies and functionalities are right on the horizon, specifically Edge OEE via Sepasoft. Plus, every year continues to show an increase in customers leveraging MQTT in their applications.
3. The only disappointment was not being able to join friends for a drink at the Fat Rabbit post conference. :)

We hope you also enjoyed your time at ICC, or can take some time to catch up on some sessions this week. We want you to be a part of this evolving community!

As you can imagine, being a part of the Ignition Community is an important part of Opto 22's product development. Opto 22 is recognized as being one of the first Ignition Onboard partners and works closely with Ignition engineers to ensure optimal performance of our groov EPIC and groov RIO products. Running Ignition software on the EPIC and RIO gives you access to data at the edge of your network, and can help you simplify, secure and maintain your systems.