Stuttgart, Germany – October 12, 2026. i-flow GmbH announces it is working with Inductive Automation, the makers of the Ignition industrial application platform, as a technology provider in the Ignition Technology Ecosystem Program. Together, the companies help manufacturers make Ignition process data available enterprise-wide through a Unified Namespace (UNS). This creates a modern data foundation for connected IT and OT architectures.
i-flow & Inductive Automation: Better Together
Modern manufacturers need more than powerful systems. They need industrial data to flow reliably across applications, sites, and organizational boundaries. Ignition provides a powerful platform for SCADA, MES, IIoT, and industrial applications. It enables manufacturers to connect, monitor, visualize, and control industrial processes.
i-flow complements Ignition by making its process data available across the enterprise through a NATS-based Unified Namespace. As a result, manufacturers can create an automated data infrastructure that connects shop-floor operations with global IT and OT systems. This infrastructure can scale across systems, sites, and regions.
Together, Ignition and i-flow help manufacturers establish a scalable industrial data architecture.
Turning Ignition Data into Enterprise-Wide Context
With i-flow Unified Namespace, data from Ignition can be structured, contextualized, enriched, and distributed. This happens through a central, event-driven data layer based on MQTT and NATS. In addition, i-flow can enrich industrial process data with context from IT systems. These include ERP, MES, databases, and cloud applications. For example, machine and process events from Ignition can be combined with order, product, material, or serial-number information. This turns raw shop-floor signals into contextualized, business-relevant data.
As a result, OT and IT information come together in a shared data foundation. This data can then be consumed by a broad range of applications. These range from MES and ERP systems to analytics, cloud platforms, AI applications, and other enterprise services.
“For us, a Unified Namespace is about more than moving OT data from A to B. The real value emerges when we combine real-time process data with its business context. Together with Ignition, we connect shop-floor operations with information from ERP, MES, and other enterprise systems. This creates contextualized industrial data that can be used consistently across the entire organization.” – Daniel Goldeband, Director, i-flow GmbH
For manufacturers with multiple plants, this approach provides a foundation for standardizing how industrial data is organized. It also creates a consistent way to make data available across sites. At the same time, individual production environments can retain the systems best suited to their operational requirements.
Building Scalable IT/OT Architectures Together
The collaboration brings together two complementary capabilities. Ignition provides a flexible industrial platform for connecting data and building industrial applications. Meanwhile, i-flow provides the data infrastructure to make that information consistently available and contextualized across the enterprise.
“Ignition is built to give industrial organizations the freedom to connect systems and make their data more accessible. i-flow extends that value by bringing operational data into a broader enterprise data architecture. Together, we can help customers create scalable data infrastructures that connect the shop floor with the systems and applications that depend on its data.” – Travis Cox, Chief Technology Evangelist, Inductive Automation
Customers can use the combination to:
- Connect shop-floor data with enterprise IT and OT applications through a Unified Namespace
- Enrich Ignition process data with business context from ERP, MES, databases, and other IT systems
- Reduce complex point-to-point integrations between industrial and enterprise systems
- Establish standardized data structures across machines, lines, plants, and regions
- Make contextualized, real-time industrial data available to analytics, cloud, AI, and business applications
- Scale industrial data architectures from individual sites to global manufacturing networks
Ultimately, the collaboration gives manufacturers a practical path from connected operations to a scalable, enterprise-wide industrial data architecture. To learn more about how Ignition and i-flow work together in practice, read Ignition and MQTT in the Unified Namespace.
