Dan Prudhoe spent 15 years building industrial systems at a large chemical manufacturer — scaling from beta Ignition in 2009 to 70+ gateways across 30+ sites. In this ICC 2025 conversation, he walks through replacing a legacy Unix MES with Ignition, adopting Spark Plug B and MQTT, hitting MQTT's limitations, and building an enterprise event mesh with Solace that streams millions of tags from edge to cloud.

About the Guest

Dan Prudhoe is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Solace. Previously he spent 15 years at a large chemical manufacturer leading Ignition adoption from beta, building a standardized platform across 30+ sites, and architecting an event mesh for millions of historized tags.

Key Topics Covered

• Ignition from beta (2009) to enterprise-scale across 30+ plants
• Building modular, upgradeable standards across diverse sites
• Spark Plug B and MQTT: decoupling systems, lightweight data collection
• MQTT limitations for transactional and guaranteed delivery
• Event mesh with Solace: edge to cloud, multi-protocol, guaranteed messaging
• Self-service analytics with Seeq
• UNS debate: centralized semantic layer vs. composable hierarchies
• Graph databases and industrial data modeling
• The path: self-service → automated → autonomous (agentic AI)

Key Takeaways

1. Start with analytics, not SCADA — lower risk, proves value fast, builds political capital for mission-critical systems later.
2. Build standards designed to flex — the first few deployments will break your standard, and that's expected.
3. The path to autonomous manufacturing: self-service (SMEs solve their own problems), automated (event-driven workflows), then autonomous (agentic AI investigates and prescribes).

Notable Quotes

• "We wanted to build a standard that's meant to have flexible standards." — Dan Prudhoe
• "Instead of we don't have enough data, they're almost like oh my god there's so much data." — Dan Prudhoe
• "We were able to allow them to start solving their own problems." — Dan Prudhoe

Timestamps / Chapters
[00:00] — Who is Dan Prudhoe?
[01:06] — Ignition beta testing in 2009
[02:20] — MES 101
[05:10] — Scaling to 70+ gateways across 30 sites
[08:53] — In-house vs. system integrator
[11:01] — Ignition becoming enterprise-grade
[12:00] — From Spark Plug B to event mesh
[15:14] — MQTT's limitations
[16:51] — Solace: edge to cloud architecture
[20:55] — Self-service analytics for SMEs
[26:31] — Predictive maintenance data provisioning
[28:30] — The UNS debate
[32:08] — Graph databases and ontology
[33:42] — Wrap-up

Links & Resources

• Solace: solace.com
• Dan Prudhoe LinkedIn
• Ignition: inductiveautomation.com
• Flow Software: www.flow-software.com
• Spark Plug B: sparkplug.eclipse.org
• Azure Data Explorer: azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/data-explorer