Category:Company and Product News
Ignition 2027 expands AI, visualization, historian, connectivity, and enterprise capabilities while adding stronger cybersecurity and compliance support.
Inductive Automation has released the public beta of Ignition 2027, expanding the industrial application platform with AI, historian, visualization, connectivity, enterprise architecture, and security capabilities. General availability is targeted for February 2027. The release arrives approximately 18 months after Ignition 8.3 and builds on architectural changes introduced in that version.
Major additions include the Ignition Catalyst AI framework, 16 new Perspective chart components, and a new Enterprise Historian Module based on TimescaleDB and developed in partnership with Tiger Data.
Introducing Ignition Catalyst
Ignition 2027 introduces Ignition Catalyst, an AI framework integrated directly into the platform through Catalyst Core and Catalyst Agent. Catalyst Core adds AI-assisted functionality to engineering workflows within the Ignition Designer, including support for scripts, expressions, SQL queries, user-defined types, application development, project-level chat, and plain-language Gateway diagnostics.
Ignition Catalyst assists with creating a user-defined type definition within the Ignition Designer
The framework supports multiple AI providers, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as self-hosted options such as Ollama for organizations that require local or air-gapped deployments. Catalyst Agent extends the framework toward user-defined autonomous agents for operational technology workflows, with support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a low-code MCP server for exposing OT data to external AI tools, and embedded AI chat within Perspective applications.
The approach reflects Inductive Automation’s broader effort to integrate AI into engineering and operational workflows while allowing organizations to retain control over model choice and deployment architecture.
Expanding Perspective Visualization
Perspective receives a significant charting update in Ignition 2027, with 16 new chart components. The additions include updated line, area, bar, and scatter charts as well as more advanced visualization types such as radar and Sankey charts. The update is intended to expand the range of operational analytics and visualization applications that can be built directly within Perspective.
Power Chart 1.5 also introduces improvements to tag browsing, filtering, pen configuration, X-Trace functionality, engineering units, and quality-value display. Other Perspective updates include improved translation management and native customizable on-screen keyboards for touchscreen and kiosk environments.
New Enterprise Historian with TimescaleDB
Ignition 2027 also introduces the Enterprise Historian Module, developed with Tiger Data. The module uses TimescaleDB for Ignition, a high-availability edition of the time-series database that will be sold and supported by Inductive Automation.
In Inductive Automation benchmark testing using 2.1 billion data points, the Enterprise Historian delivered more than 10 times the ingest throughput and query speed of the standard SQL Historian running on PostgreSQL, while using less storage. The Core Historian introduced with Ignition 8.3 is also being expanded with redundancy support, historian backup management, scheduled backups, and custom aggregates for faster historical queries.
These additions strengthen Ignition’s position as an operational data platform as industrial organizations manage larger time-series datasets and increasingly connect historian data with analytics and AI workloads.
Connectivity and Enterprise Architecture Updates
Ignition 2027 includes several additional improvements to industrial connectivity and distributed architectures. A new Beckhoff ADS driver provides direct communication with Beckhoff TwinCAT PLCs, while OPC UA redundancy adds automatic failover between primary and redundant OPC UA servers. The release also supports native subscriptions to OPC UA events through Event Streams.
Additional updates include Excel-based tag import and export, expanded REST APIs for tag and history data, and new Enterprise Administration Module capabilities for managing large multi-site deployments. EAM Distributed Controllers will allow Enterprise Administration Module controllers to communicate with one another, supporting centralized management across distributed environments, while a new Redundancy Advisor is intended to reduce the risk of split-brain conditions in redundant architectures.
Partial Gateway import and export through a new .gwex format will also support non-destructive hot imports for multi-gateway and staged deployment environments.
Security and Compliance Improvements
Ignition 2027 is designed to meet the requirements of the European Union Cyber Resilience Act. Security enhancements include improved audit logging, including capture of previous values for tag writes and configuration changes, as well as support for multiple identity providers on a single Gateway.
Inductive Automation is also changing its Long-Term Support model. Beginning with Ignition 2027, a release will receive LTS designation one year after initial general availability. Ignition 8.3 remains supported as an LTS release through September 2030, while Ignition 2027.15.0-LTS is targeted for the first quarter of 2028. Every Ignition release beginning with 2027 is expected to receive security updates for five years after general availability, regardless of LTS designation.
Related ARC Insights
ARC has been following Ignition’s evolution from a SCADA platform toward a broader industrial application, data, historian, and AI-enabled automation foundation.
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Inductive Automation: Ignition 2027 Adds AI, Historian, and Connectivity Capabilities
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ICC 2026 Signals Ignition’s Shift from SCADA Platform to Industrial Application Foundation
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ICC 2026 Shows Ignition’s Evolution into an Industrial Application Platform
The Ignition 2027 beta expands on the direction outlined at ICC 2026 by moving several previously announced capabilities into a testable release, including embedded AI, higher-scale historian options, richer visualization, improved enterprise deployment tools, and stronger cybersecurity and compliance support.
