One problem we always had with SCAN1000 / Saturn SCADA products was pricing. In 2012 we had interest from a company suppling the automotive industry with rivets and associated production line hardware. They had a German customer who required all data processing systems on the production lines to be Windows based but the company only had American designed Linux based systems! Approaches to the 'big' SCADA suppliers all proved problematic as products were sold on a license by license base and the company wanted many dozens of systems! We offered an alternative pricing approach - we would give the software away and charge only for project design and support through maintenance contracts. This worked well and we have been installing and supporting the design for the last ten years with installations around the world monitoring up to 600 'drives' (automated rivet guns on robotic arms) at a time. This involves distributed copies of the HMI on upto 32 data logging computers coupled to a central server all of which have versions of SQL Server installed. Transfer of data involves in house data transfer programmes using both Modbus, ftp and sql server protocols. Each computer has a website allowing remote monitoring and data collection and reduction techniques give management level data at the server whilst retaining engineering level data at the data logging computers.
Our pc based products, SCAN1000 and Saturn were both designed to be 'badge engineered'. By keeping relevant parts of the software in an isolated library module (dll) it was possible to change the display of both products. With Saturn, we did this to produce a version with a different name for the automotive supplier. Being our own product we were also able to add high speed specific code in C++ to generate display pages which would have been difficult to reproduce in the basic product.