This episode is brought to you by Cirrus Link Solutions and Canary Labs.

Cirrus Link: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

Canary Labs: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Arlen Nipper — MQTT co-inventor and President & CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions — returns for his third appearance on Unplugged.

Twenty-five years after co-inventing MQTT to connect an oil pipeline over a satellite link in the Middle East, Arlen walks through the current state of the protocol: 15 million tags in a single deployment at millisecond SLAs, a UNS market that has grown to $2B+, and why data centre operators are choosing MQTT 3.1.1 over MQTT 5.

Topics covered:

- The UNS market arc: from cryptic tags to $2B+ and what changed

- 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA: report-by-exception at scale

- Nextera Energy: 524 solar, BESS and wind sites in one Remote Operations Centre

- How data centres became AI factories — and why MQTT won

- A large customer's white paper rejecting MQTT 5 entirely

- The AI + UNS framework: decouple, define the UDT, train AI on the live feed

- Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT and event pipelines

- The ProveIt! Lifetime Award and the NVIDIA acceptance speech

- ICC 2026: what to expect from the AI-first year

Guest: Arlen Nipper — President & CTO, Cirrus Link Solutions | MQTT co-inventor

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-60-mqtt-sparkplug-unified-namespace

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

05:00 Co-inventing MQTT in 1999

12:00 From cryptic tags to $2B+: the UNS market

18:00 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA

25:00 Nextera Energy: 524 sites in one ops centre

32:00 Data centres become AI factories

40:00 AI + UNS: the single source of truth

47:00 Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT

52:00 MQTT 3.1.1 vs MQTT 5

57:00 The ProveIt! Lifetime Award

61:00 ICC 2026

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Cirrus Link Solutions: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

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This episode is brought to you by Canary Labs, and Cirrus Link.

Canary Labs — The industrial historian platform that captures your plant and process data the moment it's generated and makes it instantly accessible across your entire operation.

Learn more: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with Kyle Van Eenennaam (BW Design Group) to explore what it actually looks like to work at every level of the Ignition ecosystem.

Kyle has taught Ignition at Inductive Automation, presented at ICC, and now builds systems at BW Design Group. In this conversation, he maps the four types of organisations in the Ignition world, walks through the history of industrial automation from IR1 to Industry 5.0, and gives a practical guide to learning Ignition from scratch in 2026 — including what Ignition 8.3, Git integration, and AI tools are changing for SCADA engineers.

Topics covered:

• The four Ignition ecosystem buckets: integrators, end users, consultants, IA/partners

• Kyle's journey from IA support and training to ICC presenter to BW Design Group

• The cold call that turned into a full Ignition transformation

• A brief history of industrial automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0

• How to learn Ignition in 2026 — install first, use the Design Challenge, build with the designer

• Ignition 8.3 and Git: managing the full gateway in version control

• What CI/CD really looks like for SCADA teams starting small

• AI in Ignition development: MCP servers, automated commits, and the dream of closed-loop delivery

• CSS, Perspective, and what Kyle is learning next

Guest:

• Kyle Van Eenennaam — BW Design Group

Resources:

• How to Learn Ignition From Scratch: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-QOARK7izqJnXgIr6ITT3ysxw9usIrxsKCHQhJX_dc

• ICC 2025 presentation: https://inductiveautomation.com/resources/icc/2025/history-of-industry-from-00-to-50

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-59-every-seat-ignition-table

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:00 The four buckets of the Ignition ecosystem

08:30 Kyle's career journey

10:00 The aha moment

14:00 History of Industrial Automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0

23:00 Learning Ignition from scratch in 2026

31:00 Ignition 8.3 and Git

36:00 CI/CD for SCADA

43:00 AI in Ignition

48:00 Phil's prediction

50:00 CSS and what's next

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Cirrus Link Solutions — MQTT and Sparkplug software that connects OT to IT and cloud systems. Visit: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link