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What is Software Defined Automation?

Software Defined Automation (SDA) is an Industrial DevOps platform that brings modern software engineering practices to operational technology (OT) environments. It provides version control, CI/CD pipelines, and lifecycle management for PLC code, HMI configurations, and industrial automation assets — enabling manufacturing teams to develop, deploy, and maintain automation software with the same speed, safety, and traceability as modern software development.

What is Industrial DevOps?

Industrial DevOps applies the principles of DevOps — automation, continuous integration, version control, and collaboration — to industrial automation and manufacturing environments. It bridges the gap between IT and OT by giving automation engineers structured workflows for developing and deploying PLC programs, reducing manual errors, enabling faster rollouts, and creating a full audit trail of changes across the factory floor.

What problems does SDA solve for manufacturing companies?

SDA addresses three core challenges in industrial automation:

1. Version control chaos — most factories have no structured versioning for PLC code, leading to lost changes, undocumented modifications, and production risk.

2. Slow and risky deployments — updating automation software across multiple machines or sites is manual, error-prone, and often requires unplanned downtime.

3. OT/IT silos — engineering and IT teams work in disconnected toolchains, making collaboration, compliance, and change management difficult. SDA unifies these workflows into a single platform purpose-built for OT.

Which PLC brands and automation systems does SDA support?

SDA supports a wide range of PLC platforms and industrial automation vendors, including Siemens TIA Portal, Rockwell Automation / Allen-Bradley, Beckhoff TwinCAT, Schneider Electric, Mitsubishi, and others. The platform is designed to be vendor-agnostic, allowing mixed-vendor environments — which are the norm in large manufacturing operations — to be managed within a single unified pipeline.

How does SDA differ from traditional backup tools like versiondog or octoplant?

Traditional backup tools store snapshots of PLC programs but offer no active pipeline for development, testing, or deployment. SDA is additive to backup: it delivers the full DevOps workflow on top of your existing backup strategy — including branching, merge conflict resolution, CI/CD pipelines, browser-based editing, and session recording.

While backup tools answer "what changed?", SDA answers "how do we develop, review, approve, and deploy changes safely at scale?"