Summary
OSIsoft held its 2011 user conference at the end of March in San Francisco. This, the company's twenty-second user conference, was its largest ever, attracting more than 1,300 attendees from around the world. This year's theme, "Turning Insight into Action," concisely expresses users' need for actionable information. OSIsoft executives discussed industry trends, new product and the latest updates, product roadmaps, and key technology partnerships. Prominent users and strategic partners also demonstrated innovative features and uses of the PI System for meeting the changing demands of the increasingly connected world. The conference also featured numerous product demonstrations and training sessions.
Several speakers spoke about the increasing number of devices being connected to the Internet and how the amount of data being streamed and processed increases exponentially. The growth in data makes it difficult to comprehend what is happening in real-time and relate that to business issues that affect a desired outcome without the proper analytic tools. OSIsoft has transformed the PI System into a real-time information infrastructure that allows organizations to turn timely insight into appropriate action. Through its strategic partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Cisco, OSIsoft extends the functionality of the PI System to improve the data collection, storage, contextualization, analysis, and presentation of real-time information.
Throughout the conference, several presenters showed the value of the PI System in turning insight into action, thus supporting key initiatives like sustainability, energy management, condition monitoring, real-time performance management, and the Smart Grid.
Too Much Data, Not Enough Actionable Information
The proliferation of connected sensors, automation systems, IT, and other devices can overwhelm today's users with data. Just a few years ago, companies were starving for data. Now, the situation is reversed. Companies are drowning in it.
Companies collect copious amounts of data on various aspects of their business to gain insight into how assets and operations are performing and to identify areas for improvement. The amount of new data created is growing so rapidly that it's becoming difficult for companies to make sense of the data in a time frame necessary to make good decisions and take action. Users need ways to analyze the data properly.
The PI System allows companies to collect, store, find, analyze, deliver, and visualize critical, actionable information across their enterprise. Through its strategic partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Cisco, OSIsoft extends the functionality of the PI System to improve processing large amounts of data and to improve access, visualization, and context to turn insight into action.
Thought-Provoking Keynote Addresses
Bernard Morneau Provides Company Overview
In his welcoming remarks, President of OSIsoft Bernard Morneau provided an overview of the company status. OSIsoft now has 750 employees and generated more than $210 million in revenue in 2010. Mr. Morneau discussed the $135 million minority investment by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). The minority stake by TCV and KPCB provides OSIsoft with additional resources and industry expertise to expand into growing markets and continue to invest in improving the PI System to serve its customers better.
Mr. Morneau stressed how important it is for the company's users to quickly obtain insight and turn this insight into action. This concept is so important that it forms the foundation for sustainability, innovation, and is vital to maintain situational awareness.
Pat Kennedy Gives Vision of Energy Strategies of the Future
Dr. Kennedy, OSIsoft's founder, talked primarily about electric energy strategies of the future. He stated that managing electric energy is challenging because electric energy is not stored, load changes quickly, prices fluctuate dramatically, and more variable energy sources such as wind and solar are being brought online. He stated that power companies typically operate very conservatively as reliability takes priority over efficiency to make sure the lights stay on. To balance production with consumption, utilities rely increasingly upon smaller, microturbine and peaker units to balance out the variability associated with wind and solar production. However, these units are less efficient than larger base load units.
A fundamental problem occurs because electric energy is not being stored. Wind blows strongest at night, but the load is lower and covered by base load and nuclear power units. It is not practical to back down these units at night. Getting the balance correct is the real issue.
Dr. Kennedy envisions that users will play a greater role in the future. Industrial users can store energy as high-valued products. Paper mills, for instance, receive materials into the mill and grind up and store these to be used later. By feeding this material into the paper machine at off-peak times, a paper mill's storage capacity can, in effect, emulate power generation of about 100 MW.
Dr. Kennedy indicated that everyone must work together to improve energy generation, delivery, and usage. The key is to balance generation with consumption and storage. This is a multi-industry problem, requiring collaboration. The solution is not a technical problem. Standards will play a key role in facilitating collaboration to solve this tough problem.
Dan Reed Discusses Growing Number of Interconnected Devices and Cloud Computing
Dan Reed, Corporate VP of Technology Strategy & Policy and XCG at Microsoft, talked about the consumerization of IT and, with it, the proliferation of connected devices. Currently, 35 to 50 billion devices are connected to the Internet, producing a staggering data flow. A significant amount of interaction will not be device-to-human, but rather device-to-device and process control. Consequently, sophisticated data analytics are needed to process the information.
There was a time when data was scarce, but now it is abundant. Only a short time ago companies were happy to have data tables with 20 rows and 50 columns, but today companies have to deal with digesting 30 mil-lion rows and 50 million columns of data. The real challenge today is finding the needle in the haystack. How are organizations going to deal with "big data?"
According to Mr. Reed, the answer may be in the cloud! The cloud computing revolution is happening right now and Microsoft is developing tools in the cloud to deal with big data. Today, data centers are bigger than the entire Internet was a decade ago. A good fraction of the world's knowledge now resides in these data centers. Extracting information from them is a major challenge that Microsoft is addressing.
Mr. Reed indicated that everything we have done with computers is based upon a forty-year old model. Interaction with devices is passive, like cell phones or computer. The user must take action to use them. The interfaces such as menus, keyboards, pointers, and mice are becoming obsolete. Interacting with data is changing too. Software-based systems and devices have embedded predictive analytics to anticipate and respond to our desires. Like a good personal assistant who makes travel arrangements, they learn our preferences and book our favorite airlines, hotels, rental cars, and restaurants.
The world of embedded systems and process controls is meeting the world of natural interfaces. Together, they will transform the way people and enterprises interact with computing systems. Context data and predictive behavior will allow systems to take steps before mediation is necessary.
Laura Ipsen Discusses Connected Energy
Laura Ipsen, Senior VP and General Manager at Cisco, talked about the future of networking and communication as related to energy and sustainability. By 2050, the population is expected to grow by 50 percent, while the demand for energy is expected to increase 151 percent. Meeting the growing demand will be difficult, but increasing connectivity and communications will have a profound effect on energy management and the grid.
Ms. Ipsen believes that within the next five years or so there will be more than a trillion devices connected to the Internet. The grid is going from a one-way flow of data to an N-way flow of information. The question is how to get and use the information needed in real time.
Converging energy technology with information technology will trans-form the way energy is delivered and managed. It is about weaving the information technology into the grid and gaining access to real-time data. It's also about weaving business architecture into a technology architecture.
The grid is evolving in a way similar to the way computing developed. It is going through four waves. The first wave is with smart metering for better demand monitoring and off-loading to match consumption with production. The second wave is a significant increase in clean energy generation such as solar and wind. The next wave is with the Internet of Things and N-way connectivity for bi-directional communications and includes things like electric cars. The final wave is perfect power. Energy will come from different sources in the appropriate amounts with high efficiencies.
Cisco is working with OSIsoft to enable real-time data measurements to more effectively watch the network traffic across the grid and manage it in real time to balance loads.
Product Roadmap
OSIsoft's Ray Verhoeff, Ray Hall, and Mark Hughes talked about the past year's product developments, current product development projects, and future product roadmap. Recent accomplishments included releasing a 64-bit version of the PI System, the PI Server 2010, with many new features such as AF scaling and an AF builder, PI Notifications, PI ACE, StreamInsight PI Adapters, PI Webparts, PI DataLink, and several PI data access improvements.
OSIsoft is developing PI Coresight, an intuitive and easy-to-use visualization tool. The company is also working on scalability so that the PI System can handle larger data sets. OSIsoft is also developing a data analytics package to facilitate large numbers of configured calculations and Event Frames to categorize data according to events and store it away in a different database for indexing and quick searches. As always, the company is working on more connectors. In the area of servers, OSIsoft is working on improving security and scalability. Both are relevant to the smart grid.
With the increased volume of data, users need to analyze it more efficiently to turn it into action. OSIsoft is developing configurable analytics that roll up to take advantage of structure associated with the data.
In discussions about the future roadmap of the PI System, we learned that the company will remain focused on further improving this core offering, rather than looking to expand into new areas. OSIsoft is thinking about the next logical evolution architectural change of the PI System and thinks it might include the cloud. Data sharing, PI monitoring, and other service like analytics are ideal applications for the cloud. The cloud offers several advantages including orders of magnitude leaps in scalability and the potential to make it easier to manage data and applications centrally.
Jon Peterson Points to User Examples
Jon Peterson, VP of Marketing, expressed OSIsoft's commitment to provide tools to help users turn insight into action and introduced several high-profile customers who are doing just that.
Dave Olsheski of the Wood Group Gas and Turbine Services provided numerous example of how this independent service provider is using the PI System to monitor, diagnose, and improve performance of assets in the power industry. Using the PI System for remote monitoring of assets, the Wood Group showed it saves companies significant money by diagnosing problems early to prevent unscheduled downtime and improve efficiency in equipment. The company also showed how it saved an energy producer $50K per month with a dispatch model derived from PI on the best way to get 500MW into the market by considering fuel costs and energy prices.
Brian Dower of Dow Corning illustrated the power of using Event Frames to develop and rollout corporate-wide OEE type calculation to support real-time operational decisions.
Rick Smith of International Paper discussed the power and ease of use of Coresight, the new data visualization application OSIsoft is developing.
OSIsoft Demonstrates Coresight
OSIsoft demonstrated Coresight, its innovative, soon-to-be-released data visualization product. OSIsoft describes Coresight as the fastest, easiest, and most intuitive way to visualize data. From the demonstration, we can see why they make such a bold claim.
The focus of the product is to provide ad-hoc analysis through exploration and discovery. Coresight has integrated search to find help find tag-based and other data.
Coresight's home screen automatically displays the last six screens displayed. Creating a display is a drag-and-drop function. The displays can be as simple as a value, or more complex gauges and charts. The gauges are preconfigured and color-coded to indicate the state of the variable.
Users can change display types easily via menu choices and find the data to create a display with the search function. Users can drag and drop an entire AF object from the search results to create a table of its constituent parts automatically. The table shows the name, description, values, min and max, etc. Users can sort the table by fields just by clicking on it. From the table it is easy to create trend lines. Preview or pop up screens are available to compare different trends. Coresight automatically saves users actions so they can bring displays back up at any time.
The displays have detailed analysis functionality built in. Users can save displays by dragging them to the "cart" for quick viewing later. They can also share displays with others by clicking on the "share" button. Other users can use the display in read-only mode or modify the display and save a copy as their own. Displays are dynamic and can be viewed on a variety of viewing devices such as LCD panels, smart phones, and tablets. The displays can incorporate KPIs and alarms.
Breakout Sessions and Demonstrations
Users from a variety of industries including fossil, nuclear, and renewable energy; cement; chemical; oil & gas; pharmaceutical and biotech;, and pulp & paper came to share their experiences with the PI System across a wide range of applications. Topics covered varied from fleet energy management to data center performance and energy monitoring, energy management in various industrial plants, monitoring oil & gas assets, asset management in power generation facility, and process and performance monitoring in pharmaceutical and pulp & paper plants.
The sessions were well attended, with many lively and interesting discussions. The number of attendees and presentation from the energy sector make it obvious that OSIsoft's PI system is well embraced by that industry.
Panel Discussion and OSIsoft's 30th Anniversary Celebration
The conference wrapped up with an expert panel session, including industry experts from OSIsoft, eBay, Alcoa, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and California Independent System Operators to discuss innovation and how data and information are part of the innovation process.
OSIsoft also celebrated its 30th anniversary with tributes from its first, third and more recent customers. The testimonials attested to the popularity of the PI System and the loyalty of PI System customers. As Pat Kennedy commented, "Provide products customers what they want and you will be successful."
Conclusion
The OSIsoft user group meeting attracted its largest attendance ever. A good percentage of attendees were from the energy sector, demonstrating the success the company is having in that sector and especially in the Smart Grid area. Given the makeup of the audience, it was fitting that much of the program centered on energy.
OSIsoft's alliances with Microsoft and Cisco extend the functionality of the PI System to turn insight into action. In addition, OSIsoft continues to innovate and to improve data collection, access, analysis, collaboration, and visualization.
The user conference provided attendees with a perspective on industry trends and the latest developments from OSIsoft. It also provided a venue for them to learn from fellow users of the PI System.
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