Tatsoft has no affiliate program to Intellic Integration, and the opinions expressed in this interview weren’t part of a commercial deal. Walker Reynolds is President of Intellic Integration, a full-service systems integrator specializing in automation, SCADA , and MES solutions. Zack Scriven is a video and podcast creator extraordinaire.
At 2019’s CSIA (Control System Integrators Association), Walker Reynolds and Zack Scriven sat down with Marc Taccolini, Dave Hellyer, and Jennifer Lemker from Tatsoft and discussed the FactoryStudio platform. Here are some highlights of the interview.
The interview started with founder and CEO Marc Taccolini’s explaining some of his inspirations as to why he created FactoryStudio. He talked a bit about his experience founding Indusoft, a successful and traditional SCADA HMI company that was purchased by Wonderware and is still a part of their legacy portfolio today. After doing Indusoft for more than 10 years, he wanted to do something designed better, based on new technology and a different paradigm than the legacy automation software that were in the market. He knew how to overcome their limitations because these automation software products were created not only using legacy technologies but legacy concepts as well.
So that’s when he decided to start from scratch with Tatsoft and the product FactoryStudio, to create a platform or Industrial Operating System, that could work beyond these limitations – that would truly work as a Data Hub, supporting more advanced data models. Tatsoft, Marc explained, had the input of a talented team that had over 20 years’ experience, and that saw the importance of upgrading and modernizing technologies – especially now that we have a complete new environment. ‘That’s not only a new operating system, it’s a complete set of interconnect technologies. We’re not able to leave that alone. You learn that the only way to really leverage that new environment is to start from scratch”, clarified Marc.
Dave Hellyer, head of Sales, explained FactoryStudio is “includes a fully integrated development environment, that everything comes with it. (…) You get visualization, data collection, alarming, reporting, networking, all that stuff with it.”.
Longevity is key with industrial automation software, they discussed the advantages of using a .NET product, as it runs across any Windows platform and how Tatsoft supports new web standards like HTML5 and Javascript on the client side, but still uses the .NET on the server side, to create a powerful, robust, secure, and stable environment. With Tatsoft’s FactoryStudio you can develop a single application for all your uses – HMI, SCADA, mobile, etc. Applications created with FactoryStudio are fast, FactoryStudio has visualization’s updates of 10 to 100 cycles per second. Zack Scriven made the comment that “Walker says all the time that the software is just Blistering Fast” and Marc just smiled and said “Yes, it is”. FactoryStudio also has a native app for iOS clients, iPads and iPhones.
Walker Reynolds, from Intellic, called FactoryStudio “Ignition in .NET”, referring to Inductive Automations Ignition software,. He said that one of the big advantages of FactoryStudio is the ability to use Intellisence. Everything is an object in FactoryStudio. He also said they “envision FactoryStudio long-term as being the Data Hub in most enterprises”. He went on to discuss the importance of having an agile company in this ever changing environment, and how Tatsoft exemplifies that by, in fact in less than a year, introducing support for MQTT and Python, both things requested by integrators. Tatsoft is in a unique position to be able to develop customizations to the software based on specific customer or market needs.
Walker also expressed how impressed he was at how easy and fast it was to put together an application – after receiving the demo, after three hours he was able to fully migrate one of his existing templates from Ignition into FactoryStudio, and the official training only showed him more possibilities the platform could offer.
“You give developers every possible tool they need to build solutions”, said Walker. “If I need to do it purely database-driven, I can do it with FactoryStudio. If I need to do it purely tag-driven, I can do it in FactoryStudio. If I need to do it MQTT-driven, asset-model-driven, if I want to write everything custom in .NET, if I want to write everything custom in C#, if I want to write everything in Python, I can do that now. That is the future of the industry. It’s placing no restrictions, especially in software, placing no restrictions on the developer’s capability to develop a solution the way that they want to. That’s ultimately what sets you guys apart.”.
You can watch the full interview below.