ICONICS or Citect

I can backup Walt's statements -- I have worked with him since joining Citect and believe he manages Control with high integrity and is driven to add value through articles that are not just "vendor tricks"... the customer point of view is the key to Walt as well as making sure the articles will be of value to the readers.

I appreciate the supportive comments of the Citect solutions. I am happy to say our customers tend to be very loyal (as do our employees) as well as satisfied and supportive of our solutions. We also add strong value with our Professional Services team and Integrator abilities as we have numerous resources with great experience and knowledge of many key verticals and customer needs when it comes to complex and mission-critical operations.

Darren Trumeter

Dear Sirs,

If your looking for SCADA package with all the functionality of the big corporate systems which is in an off the shelf package I would suggest looking at ClearSCADA distributed by Control Micro Systems.

This is a new product that has some really nice features such as drag and drop config, full online configuration, integration with MS products, in built historian, etc. etc. etc.

definitely worth a look.
Have used both packages and neither have the features, power or value for money of the ClearSCADA.

Go for Intellution, this is the best SCADA package available at the best possible price.

GENESIS32 from ICOINCS is the clear choice here. From one development system you can build HMI\SCADA applicatins and deploy them, to the WEB, Wireless Pocket Devices, as well as cell phones. The only charge is for runtime systems keeping the total cost of ownership low.

I second the ICONCS choices.

Iconics is a great front end it's easy to learn and maintain and provide excellent flexibility for the end user to customize. I've found from a number of head to head evaluations we done for clients that over all ICONICS is a great product for the investment.

I have done research on both products and I found them fairly similar with some more advantages on the Citect side.

Your selection will be right on any one of them.

I just want to bring your attention that Citect might be acquired by Schnieder Electric.

This will greatly impact the product becasue it will follow Frensh style of management with lots of limitation. I have worked with Schnieder Electric and my experience was really bad. The methodology of sales and support will change. Schnieder thinks by implementing the same model of work in all area. A successful model in one country could be a failure in another.

My personal advise will be to wait till Citect decision is clear for the acquisition. If they approve it, I would strongly recommend to go with ICONICS, Otherwise you can go with anyone of them.

Bubba Sal

Dear Sirs,
First off I am a veteran citect programmer and plc programmer with over 20 yrs of experience in both fields. There are MAJOR differences between citect and iconics genesis 64 systems.

Citect does not support true 3d applications like Genesis 64 does. Citect HAS native drivers built into it like ones that will talk directly to a lot of different PLC brands. Gen 64 is already Vista and Server 2008 (64 bit version) compatible and citect is not..(getting there in beta but not in a released product yet)...

Gen64 is ALL OPC based, which is the industry standard but none the less that means another layer of software to purchase and manage. So there are MAJOR technical differences between Citect and Iconics... just depends upon which one you like the feature set of.

One GREAT advantage that citect has is the ability to data backfill in case of communication losses which Iconics does not have at the moment.

(It is possible with some highly specialized code but requires specialized programming to do it)One advantage that iconics has is that it will import 3d designs from "Blender" which is an open source 3d modeling software directly and you can use the attributes in Gen64 to control these 3D objects natively. So each package has it's own pluses and minuses... these are just a few.

J.jolly

There is an other Siemens product called PVSS, very stable and also available for Linux.

Do you realize that you've basically resurrected a 4 year old post? There are many SCADA vendors and products these days. Much depends on your requirements.

In general I recommend Inductive Automation - particularly if you're looking for a powerful system on a budget or a cross platform (Java) solution. They're also strong with enterprise integration (working with databases), distributed or fault tolerant systems (clustering/retargeting), and reporting.

-----
Nathan Boeger, CISSP
http://notanotherindustrialblog.blogspot.com