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I'm pretty sure all decent sized utilities and system operators use one of the major vendors, but there are many customizations for each customer. You're right that most vendors go back decades which is a blessing (proven to work for decades) and a curse (lots of feature bloat and dated design decisions).

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Its very rare that anyone goes through a SCADA vendor.

Most SCADA software is done through a system integrator which is the wild west.

And the projects that do go through the original software vendor tend to be massive multi million dollar ones that require significant custom work and new features.

Yep. I generically refer to that as a vendor as well lol.

also some of the ones with a really long lineage are impressively fast and memory efficient since they used to run on such old hardware. Actually dealing with some 80 character length alarm strings right now!

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