Kanoa at ICC 2025 - Levelling Up and Proving It

If there’s one thing that always gets us energized, it’s seeing software come alive in a real environment — and that’s exactly what ICC 2025 offered. From connecting Kanoa MES to the ProveIt virtual factory to walking the show floor and witnessing some major platform breakthroughs from Inductive, this year’s conference felt like a turning point.

Diving Deep with ProveIt: Show Don’t Tell

The highlight, hands down, was participating in the ProveIt sessions. Instead of PowerPoints, this format demands working software. Walker Reynolds and the 4.0 Solutions team gave us a virtual factory environment and challenged us to not just integrate — but to run a new MES in just eight weeks. We accepted the challenge.

By the conference, we had fully configured Kanoa MES to drive the ProveIt factory using live data. And we didn’t stop at “just working” — we extended the system to quantify losses across OEE categories (availability, performance, quality). The feedback and engagement were tremendous, and the demo room was packed. Walker even called out Kanoa specifically, encouraging attendees to explore what we built.

We can’t wait to share the demo video once the ProveIt team wraps up their edits — seeing it in action beats any description.

Across the Floor: Conversations, Innovation, and Surprises

Once the demo was done, our booth became home base for countless conversations — with integrators, end users, and fellow tech providers. Some of our most exciting interactions included:

• Systems integrators looking at Kanoa MES as a platform they could deploy broadly

• Manufacturers pinpointing real challenges in their plants that MES could help solve

• Technology partners brainstorming integrations to add value to mutual customers

One standout was our partner Cedar Tech, who built an AI-driven simulation demo on top of Kanoa. Using a Unity-driven engine, they simulated process data, fed it into Kanoa, and ran a prediction engine to forecast faults before they happened. That demo drew a crowd, and we’re already planning a joint webinar to bring that to everyone who couldn’t make ICC.

What Caught Our Eye: Platform Breakthroughs from Inductive

While we were busy proving Kanoa in action, ICC also delivered a number of technical announcements worth highlighting — and many of them align with where Kanoa MES is headed.

Ignition 8.3 Launch & DevOps-Ready Workflows
On Day 1, Inductive dropped Ignition 8.3. This release brings features that simplify deployment and modernization:

• Support for text-based project files and more human-readable configuration formats — a step toward DevOps workflows.

• Expanded architectural changes to better support data processing, performance, and scaling.

• Better alignment for integrating MES and advanced analytics on top of Ignition’s core stack.

For Kanoa, this is exactly the direction we need. Easier, cleaner deployments mean we can iterate faster, support more complex scenarios, and reduce friction for customers adopting MES on Ignition.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) & AI Integration
Perhaps the most forward-looking announcement was the MCP module preview. Inductive described MCP as a standardized bridge connecting AI systems to real-time OT/IT data and context. Even though MCP is still in proof of concept, Ignition 8.3 is already architected to support it with open JSON APIs and configuration that an AI agent can work with.

This is exciting for Kanoa, because it paves the way for embedded intelligence — models that don’t just operate in a silo, but understand the context of production, OEE, quality, and operational constraints. Over the next cycles, we’re already planning how Kanoa MES can act as a domain-aware hub for such AI-enabled workflows.

Closing Thoughts: A Turning Point, Not Just an Event

Looking back, ICC 2025 felt like more than just another conference. It was a convergence: showfloor demos, real software in motion, and a clear direction for the platform ecosystem.

We walked away even more confident in Kanoa MES’s place in this evolving world — plugged into Ignition’s future growth, ready to take advantage of DevOps-friendly workflows, AI integration, and integrator-led deployment models.

Huge thanks to everyone who attended our demo, visited our booth, or engaged in thoughtful conversations. To Walker Reynolds and the ProveIt crew — your format pushed us (and everyone else) to make something real, not just pretty slides.

Stay tuned — we’ll be releasing our demo video and the Cedar Tech AI showcase soon. And we’re already getting ready for what ICC 2026 might bring.