AVEVA World 2025: Unifying Legacies and Forging Ecosystems for the Industrial AI Era

As Director of Research for Industrial AI at ARC Advisory Group, attending AVEVA World 2025 in San Francisco offered a valuable opportunity to assess the trajectory of one of the industrial software market’s key players. The event, themed “Accelerate your Industrial Intelligence,” highlighted AVEVA’s growing momentum in advancing its strategic vision—moving beyond the complex but necessary phase of portfolio integration toward enabling a connected industrial ecosystem powered by its CONNECT platform. For ARC, the main takeaways centered on AVEVA’s measurable progress in unifying its extensive legacy assets, its strategic focus on partnerships—most notably with Databricks—and its accelerating efforts to lead in the rapidly evolving Industrial AI space.

Key Product Announcements Signal Acceleration

AVEVA World 2025 featured several significant announcements underscoring the company's focus on embedding intelligence and enhancing usability across its portfolio:

• AI-Powered CONNECT Enhancements: New AI tools were unveiled for the core CONNECT platform, designed to assist users in processing and summarizing large datasets more efficiently, alongside features aimed at improving visibility across multiple operational sites. The platform also features an Industrial AI Assistant for conversational insights.

• Generative AI in Domain Applications: Moving beyond platform-level AI, AVEVA demonstrated specific GenAI applications, notably within piping design, claiming significant reductions in project setup time (up to 70 percent) and installed cost savings (15 percent). This practical application within a core engineering workflow highlights a focus on tangible productivity gains.

• Hybrid Operations Control: Further advancements in hybrid solutions were announced, facilitating the deployment of Industrial AI capabilities across an asset's lifecycle by bridging on-premise control systems with cloud-based intelligence via CONNECT. This pragmatic approach acknowledges the reality of industrial operations.

• Core Platform Roadmaps: Updates and future directions were shared for foundational elements like the AVEVA PI System™ & PI Data Infrastructure, AVEVA Unified Engineering, and the HMI/SCADA/MES portfolio, reassuring customers of continued investment in these critical areas even as CONNECT becomes the central hub.

Unifying Legacies, Forging Ecosystems: The CONNECT Strategy

AVEVA’s current position is rooted in a series of significant acquisitions and mergers. A major turning point came in 2018, when Schneider Electric merged the bulk of its industrial software portfolio—including assets from its 2014 acquisition of Invensys plc, such as the extensive Wonderware installed base, along with Schneider’s own offerings like Citect—into AVEVA through a reverse takeover, resulting in a 60 percent equity stake. This was followed by AVEVA’s landmark $5 billion acquisition of OSIsoft in 2020-2021, adding the industry-defining PI System™ to its portfolio. In January 2023, Schneider Electric completed its ownership by acquiring the remaining equity, making AVEVA a wholly owned, yet operationally independent, subsidiary.

While these moves resulted in a portfolio of unmatched breadth, they also introduced significant integration challenges and technical debt—the inherent cost and complexity of consolidating diverse software architectures, data models, and codebases.

From ARC’s perspective, AVEVA’s approach to managing its legacy portfolio is anchored in the CONNECT platform. Instead of undertaking a full-scale rewrite of deeply embedded systems like PI or System Platform, CONNECT serves as an abstraction layer and integration hub. It offers shared cloud-based services for data aggregation (CONNECT Data Services, previously known as AVEVA Data Hub or OSIsoft Cloud Services), visualization, analytics, and AI. This strategy enables AVEVA to retain the strengths and customer base of its legacy products while accelerating innovation at the platform level—supporting SaaS delivery and AI enablement.

This platform-centric approach inherently calls for an ecosystem strategy. The recurring theme of “Radical Collaboration” throughout the event underscored this shift. AVEVA is positioning CONNECT not merely as a vehicle for its own product delivery, but as an open, neutral platform intended to integrate partner solutions and enable secure data sharing across the industrial value chain.

Deep Dive: The Databricks Alliance—A Catalyst for Industrial AI

Perhaps the most significant partnership highlighted—and one ARC views as especially critical to AVEVA’s Industrial AI ambitions—is its strategic alliance with Databricks. This collaboration tackles one of the key challenges in scaling Industrial AI: unifying siloed IT, OT, and engineering data in a way that supports advanced analytics without resulting in unusable “data swamps.”

The integration links AVEVA CONNECT Data Services with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Crucially, it leverages Databricks’ Delta Sharing protocol—an open standard that enables secure, real-time data sharing across platforms without the need for costly, complex, and often context-eroding data replication or ETL processes.

Here's why this is a game-changer from ARC's perspective:

1. Context Preservation: AVEVA CONNECT, leveraging the rich contextualization capabilities inherited from the PI System's Asset Framework (AF), structures and adds meaning to raw OT data before sharing. Delta Sharing ensures this vital context is maintained when the data is accessed within Databricks. This directly combats the “data swamp” issue where contextless data becomes unusable.

2. Governed, Secure Access: Rather than relying on bulk data transfers, Delta Sharing enables fine-grained, governed sharing of specific, curated datasets. When combined with Databricks’ Unity Catalog for data governance within its platform, this approach helps ensure data quality, security, and appropriate access control.

3. Accelerating IT/OT/Data Science Collaboration: The integration establishes a common, trusted data foundation accessible through familiar tools tailored to each team’s needs. OT teams maintain data sources and context within AVEVA systems; data science teams work with live, analysis-ready data directly in Databricks notebooks; and IT teams oversee infrastructure and security. This significantly reduces friction and time spent on data wrangling, allowing teams to accelerate the development and deployment of AI models.

This ready-made integration positions AVEVA CONNECT as a credible cornerstone on the factory side of industrial-grade data fabrics—delivering the essential, contextualized OT data that enterprise AI platforms like Databricks require to generate meaningful industrial outcomes. Real-world examples, such as Michelin using the joint solution for energy tracking across multiple factories or Drax applying CONNECT data for predictive modeling, highlight its practical impact.

Picking Up the Pace: Innovation Beyond the Legacy Debt

Integrating the vast portfolios acquired and merged over the years has undoubtedly been a monumental task for AVEVA, requiring significant effort to manage the resulting technical debt. Yet, AVEVA World 2025 highlighted a marked acceleration in innovation, with particular momentum around the CONNECT platform and AI-driven capabilities.

The strategic choice to position CONNECT as an abstraction layer is yielding clear benefits. It enables AVEVA to deliver new offerings—such as the Industrial AI Assistant, domain-specific generative AI tools, and enhanced cloud/hybrid solutions—at a faster pace, without being constrained by the need to simultaneously modernize every legacy system beneath the surface.

This increased tempo is critical. The industrial sector is actively looking for partners and platforms capable of driving real digital transformation and scaling high-value Industrial AI use cases. AVEVA’s emphasis on unifying its expansive portfolio—spanning engineering, simulation, operations, and performance—through CONNECT, along with strategic ecosystem partnerships like the Databricks alliance, positions it well to meet this growing demand.

ARC Advisory Group Perspective

AVEVA World 2025 reinforced ARC’s perspective that the company is making meaningful progress in its transformation—from a federation of powerful yet fragmented software assets to a unified platform provider built for the Industrial AI era. At the center of this evolution is the CONNECT platform, which serves as both the integration backbone for AVEVA’s legacy portfolio and the foundation for future innovation.

The strategic alliance with Databricks stands out as a key development, directly addressing the long-standing challenge of IT/OT data unification. This partnership enhances AVEVA’s positioning as a credible enabler of scalable Industrial AI and demonstrates a clear commitment to delivering value through ecosystem collaboration.

Although the work of managing and modernizing legacy systems is ongoing, the acceleration in innovation is unmistakable. With its platform-centric and ecosystem-driven approach, AVEVA is well-positioned to support industrial organizations as they navigate the complexities of digital transformation and unlock the full potential of Industrial Intelligence.

Engage with ARC Advisory Group

For ARC Advisory Group recommendations for Navigating the AI Wars, Closing the Digital Divide by embracing Industrial AI, assembling your Industrial-Grade Data Fabric, and governing and guiding major decisions about enterprise, cloud, industrial edge, and AI software, please contact Colin Masson at [email protected] or set up a meeting with me, or my fellow Analysts at ARC Advisory Group.