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Duffanator

Citect Vs. Iconics Genesis32

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Hey all, We have an aging Citect system at our plant (redundant servers running Citect v.5.4) that we haven't payed a service contract on for years.... Now I'm looking into either upgrading or replacing this system. One option that I recently looked into is the Iconics Genesis32 system but I don't know much about it and from what I've seen on their site it looks very similar to the Citect environment but I was wondering if anyone had any experience with both that could shed some light on it. I'm mostly interested in these key points: 1) How does pricing compare with both service contracts and licencing? 2) How easy would it be to update to the newest version of Citect versus starting over with a different product? 3) We use floating network keys for our Citect system, does the Genesis32 system have something similar to that? 4) Are there any major features that Citect has that the Genesis32 system does not have, or vice-versa? I'm also open to other suggestions as well, if anyone has any knowledge they would care to share it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

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You're probably best off contacting your local Iconics representative for that information. 1) Sales rep 2) It's a totally different product. I haven't heard of a conversion utility going to Iconics. You'll probably have to develop your system from scratch. 3) Sales rep 4) From what I've seen at shows and forum posts, Iconics has been heavily pushing in the way of advanced Microsoft technologies. Their 32 and 64 bit versions appear to be heavy on DirectX eye candy. If nobody here has Iconics experience, you might ask on the PLCTalk forums.

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Iconics is being used in Heathrow Terminal 5 as the front end for everything: CCTV, door access control, fire alarm system, services (boilers, steam etc) and HVAC. All of this is via OPC servers (Matrikon if I remember correctly) However, the front end looks appaling because of design choices - square box plus triangle to represent a CCTV camera for example. BUT.... we had a 4 screen display for every workstation: Alarms, Overview & Navigation, Specific screen of your choice and another screen of your choice. It worked well and coped with a tremendous amount of data but in an installation of this size, dividing up the load was an important consideration. I didn't work on behind the scenes scripts so I have no experience on passing variables/tags through to generic popups etc but if it was good enough for T5....

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You can update your Citect to the latest version for the cost of 3 years support. The latest version has been 'Schneiderised' though - some good and some bad. For example, the only PLC bitmaps available in the latest version are Schneider PLCs - kept all my old bitmaps thankfully. There are new very high resolution templates (WUXGA) and TAB templates which are really nice. Geniies are also extremly useful. The 'Schneiderisation' has included new icons for various things - looks pretty but the opperators have to get used to it. The sad thing is that there are a number of things that many of us asked for years ago that have not been done. They obviously have a different aganda and do not take notice of their users anymore. I have not even looked at Genesis for years but my last view was that I did not like it at all. Updating to the latest Citect will save you a lot of time as you can convert the old application, with modifications, and not have to re-invent the wheel. Despite all the above I still prefer Citect overall.

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Thanks for the responses guys, I appreciate it. Actually after talking with a bunch of reps and testing out a lot of the different software I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with Inductive Automation's Ignition platform. It's much easier to use than a lot of the other software and for half the price of getting our Citect licensing up to date I can purchase a fully redundant system with unlimited vision clients and unlimited tags. Citect would be my second choice just because I'm familiar with it and it's treated us well for a long time but their annual maintenance fees are pretty rediculous (which is why we stopped upgrading a long time ago). I was not impressed at all by the Iconics stuff, it was the most difficult to figure out and use for me. It seemed to me like they were more interested in getting in bed with Microsoft than making a nice easy to use HMI/SCADA application. Every major, minor and outdated feature that Microsoft has come out with in the last 15 years is crammed into their package and it makes it a nightmare to manage. The Ignition platform, on the other hand, is OS independant. Since it's all written in Java you can run it on any OS that has Java on it. There are a lot of things that are different that take some getting used to but once I started actually programming with it and setting it up I have to say that it's the easiest of all of the HMI/SCADA applications to create, edit and setup (my opinion of course...) The other thing I like about it is there is no proprietary history, trend or alarm databases. Everything is SQL based; Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL are all supported and it uses the database for all trending, alarming and history functions. If I wanted to I could create a report in our crystal reports system and access everything that was recorded with Ignition very easily (not that I'd have to do that as Ignition has a reporting module as well).

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If you are still looking for input, there is a very new product from Tatsoft named FactoryStudio. Check them out at www.tatsoft.com. It's redundancy support is built into the product, as was Citect's, and unlike the additional modules (and licensing fees) needed with ICONICS. Their price point for a fully unlimited redundant system is also half of the Citect and the configuration is completely unified, with support for iPhone/iPad as well, which is really amazing. If you really need to run in multiple Operating Systems, FactoryStudio is a good selection, but if not, the past history of USData, which one time was the leader on that market and now is completely gone, teaches that when you put the requirement for multiple operating systems, it is inevitable you will not get the maximum on one specific target platform as the product must support the lowest common functional capabilities across the OS's.. If you consider using the .NET Framework, WPF graphics or C# and VB.NET, the Tatsoft FactoryStudio is the natural choice as it was natively created on those technologies. It also follows the current trend or creating the historian on any SQL database. For small and medium projects you don’t need to install Oracle or SQL Server, as the system ships with an embedded SQL database out-of –box; the ease of configuration using a web-style client application is also key. Finally, besides some advanced WPF graphics that would not be easily reproduced in Java, I like its feature which allows distributed engineering with configuration traceability, and the cloud option for remote collaboration between the System Integrator and the end-user. Besides OPC, it has also direct drivers to Rockwell, Siemens and other PLCs.
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