Unlimited Tag SCADA

Unlimited tag SCADA pricing is often being used for costing purpose, but also abused by some vendors as sales gimmick. What’s the catch for “unlimited”? You better be alert whenever someone offered you with “unlimited of this and that”, because that could well mean “untested of this and that.

We often receive inquiries asking about pricing for unlimited tag SCADA, and when we revert back by asking the customers for the biggest size project that have deployed, or would possibly have in future, the answers are they often might just need 2000 tags or the most 4000 tags. Nothing is good when trying to go for extreme, the toughest act is to strike the balance. Or optimize for the best outcome. Simply calculate what you need and just factor in the cost accordingly.

Some users are worry about future expansion, this is again unnecessary, because by the time the software reaches limit, a newer version already available. You might as well upgrade to get more benefits with more features. Software is like hardware requires continuous maintenance, for the minimum, you should keep on update to newer version for security patch.

Understandably, nobody will design a system with limitation, so usually a new product will claim to have unlimited this and that. We often hear “virtually everything is unlimited”, but it’s also very well mean that “virtually everything is limited”, in the rare case that not limited by the application itself, at least limited by the external environment.

Those vendors conveniently claimed to have unlimited tags and clients and so on and so forth, simply because they haven’t tested the system to the limit. It seems more often than not, the innocent developers didn’t design the system to be free from limitation. Or in another word, they didn’t design the system to be scaleable when reaching the internal or external limit.

So, what’s the recommended tag count for Ecava IGX project? Ecava IGX were designed for small scale to high scale project, and we set the I/O range from smallest license at 32 tag to largest license at 32,000 tag. And the maximum license tag count is only slightly more than 30% of the total tested tag count, while Ecava applied for TUV certificate, whereby the stress test is performed successfully with 100k tags. So user shall scale with another set of license if the project size is larger than 32k. For instance, a 38k tags project shall be split into 32k+6k tag count, and needs costing for 32k + 8k tag license. So the second project can be hosted on another machine for scalability.

We have explained that different price range apply according to tag count or I/O size is fairer for user. Similarly for large scale project, it’s fairer to share the margin together since the technical support would usually heavier as well.

We do state “unlimited tag” in our marketing collateral as well, reason is simple: Not many users care about technical aspect like you. But they are misled by the market and wanted unlimited in the price list. In the end we will explain unlimited requires scaling some how.

IGX is flexible and versatile, download a free copy and start enjoy the benefits!