JRW said:
Again...just food for thought.
How many employees do they have?
Look what happen to Wonderware (great product by the way..easy to use..etc..) but they were bought out several times right?
Look what happen to Wonderware InControl. That product is stalled..no updates are planned. I have several customers looking to replace InControl. They have complete process lines controlled by it.
Of course, anything can happen. Even the big companies phase out product lines that cause huge inconvenious and expense for others (S5 says hello), but it's just the nature of the controls business.
And that's why I did research, and IA was by far the best choice for me. For one thing, the one thing that I have always hated with every scada package is no longer an issue: licensing based on tag counts. I was evaluating Indusoft at the same time, and it turned out that my requirements were right at the border of the next step in licensing. But IA? It doesn't matter. I can have 200,000 tags if I want, all for the same price. I can design my project without even giving it a thought.
Another thing I researched was tech support, and I can say that no one else even comes close. It's beyond my wildest expectations. What could be construed as a disadvantage (being a small company), is a huge advantage because I can actually talk to the guys in development. And if one of us (the users) have a good idea for a feature, low and behold it's in the next update a month later.
The third thing I looked at was performance. I have seen projects based on every scada package ever made, and my screens are just as clean and "snappy" as anything out there. And, I probably did it with far less development effort.
A package like WinCC has its place I guess (like, when you're forced to use it
), but IA lets me be much more competitive. I don't even know what the comparative base cost of the two packages are, but the speed in which I can develop using IA really seals the deal.
