Every Seat at the Ignition Table
What does it actually look like to work at every level of the Ignition ecosystem? Kyle Van Eenennaam has — and the map he draws changes how you think about starting out.
Kyle started at Inductive Automation in support, fielding calls from integrators, end users, and new engineers trying to work out where they fit. He became a trainer, teaching Ignition to teams across the industry and contributing to the ICC conference. He now builds Ignition systems at BW Design Group, contributes to the community forums, and writes practical guides on getting started with the platform.
In this episode, Kyle maps the four “buckets” of the Ignition world — integrators, end users, big consulting, and Inductive Automation itself plus its partner ecosystem — and explains why understanding that map matters more than most people realise when they are starting out.
He also breaks down his ICC 2025 presentation on the history of industrial automation: five revolutions, from the spinning jenny in 1712 to the still-forming Industry 5.0 — and why the time between revolutions keeps shrinking. Then the conversation turns to what it takes to learn Ignition in 2026: install it first, open the designer, and build something alongside Inductive University — don’t just watch videos. From there it is Ignition 8.3 and Git, CI/CD pipelines for SCADA teams, and where AI fits into a platform that already asks so many hats of a single developer.
Kyle Van Eenennaam — Software Engineer II, BW Design Group; former trainer and support engineer at Inductive Automation. Kyle has worked at virtually every type of organisation in the Ignition ecosystem. After several years at Inductive Automation — first in support, then in training, where he taught Ignition classes and contributed to the ICC conference — he moved into software engineering at BW Design Group. He is a regular contributor to the Inductive Automation community forums and the author of a widely-shared guide on how to learn Ignition from scratch.