Colby Clegg

Chief Executive Officer Inductive Automation

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Colby Clegg is Chief Executive Officer of Inductive Automation, the Folsom, California company behind Ignition, a software platform for SCADA, industrial data and plant-floor applications. He has been with the company since its formation in 2003, when he met founder Steve Hechtman as a UC Davis student, and he is one of the original creators of Ignition. After running the company’s software engineering and technology functions, he was chosen by Hechtman to become CEO in 2022. He now leads a business whose integrator network passed 5,500 firms in 2026 and whose annual Ignition Community Conference drew more than 1,800 attendees in September 2026.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of Inductive Automation since 2022, selected for the role by founder Steve Hechtman.
• One of the original creators of Ignition, the industrial automation platform Inductive Automation released in 2010.
• Previously Co-Director of Software Engineering and VP of Technology at Inductive Automation.
• Has been with the company since its formation in 2003.
• Led the company into its Ignition 2027 release cycle, previewed at ICC 2026 alongside a strategic partnership with Tiger Data, the creators of TimescaleDB.

Professional Journey

Clegg’s route into industrial software was accidental. As he tells it in a company podcast, he was a UC Davis student in 2003, moving in the university’s computer science circle, when a friend offered him a summer job building a website for a small Sacramento industrial automation firm. The owner was Steve Hechtman, who had worked as a systems integrator since 1985 and wanted to use open-source and freely available technology to challenge the high cost and dated software of the industry. Clegg spent a day on the website, then got talking with Hechtman about the software idea, and stayed.

Steve and Wendi-Lynn Hechtman founded Inductive Automation that year. Clegg was part of the team that built its products and is one of the original creators of Ignition, released in 2010. The company, which describes itself as integrator-founded, built its growth around a network of system integrators and markets Ignition as “the unlimited platform”. Over the following years he held a series of leadership roles, including Co-Director of Software Engineering and VP of Technology.

In 2022 Hechtman selected him as Chief Executive Officer. The company describes the role as overseeing strategic vision and execution against the goals set by the board, with the long-term aim of keeping Ignition as the platform of choice for industrial software. Since then Inductive Automation has opened its first international office, Inductive Automation Australia, formed in 2023 by acquiring the assets of its Australian distributor, iControls. More than 30,000 engineers had earned an Inductive University credential by 2025, and in 2026 the integrator programme passed 5,500 companies. At ICC 2026 in Sacramento, the company previewed Ignition 2027, including a framework for working with AI inside Ignition and a new enterprise historian module built with Tiger Data.

Outside work, he said in the same interview that he took up cycling in 2015 and has come to appreciate the roads around Folsom, and that he also plays golf and, occasionally, guitar.

Education

University of California, Davis

He attended UC Davis, where he met Steve Hechtman in 2003. No degree or graduation year is stated in any source read.