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Summary
OSIsoft recently held its 29th annual user conference, “PI World,” in San Francisco, California. The event, the company’s largest to date, attracted 2,700 people from 54 countries. The customer 
presentations and case studies, product updates, and new development features focused largely on digital transformation and the value it brings to people. Industries represented included traditional process industries like oil & gas, chemicals, power generation, mining & minerals, water & wastewater, food & beverages, and pharmaceuticals. But we also saw presentations by discrete manufacturers as well as presentations on smart cities, renewables, microgrids, battery storage, transportation, and logistics. All in all, there were more than 70 presentations in nine, industry-specific tracks.
Topics covered business and industrial data, analytics and machine learning, industrial data use cases, and new solutions that include new sensor platforms and data health technologies and connected data management services leveraging streaming data, edge computing, new vision features, product technologies, and new integrators/connectors.
Key takeaways from the event include:
- Technology is important for digital transformation, but the value comes from the people who work with the technology.
- OSIsoft’s expanding capabilities include new packaged product technology solutions
- Opportunities for sharing data go beyond traditional boundaries with suppliers or partners
- Managing data and data quality in context is more important than ever
- Data scalability, data connection, and analytics are critical for digital transformation
- Open source applications are being integrated to the PI system to maximize development resources and value to users
Expanding Partner Ecosphere
OSIsoft enables partners and application providers through its partner ecosphere. At the conference, partner ecosystem marketplace booths ranged from advanced analytics, to unique data solutions, data applications, open- source technologies, system integrators, automation suppliers, and other technology solution providers.
The company continues to invest in infrastructure technology and new products.
New initiatives and products include PI Vision 4.X for visualization; a new PI Health solution for data quality management; new PI Integrators for Business Analytics; new product technologies (e.g., PXiSE for microgrids, FogLAMP for integrating sensor data using Raspberry PI and edge computing); integration with MATLAB, Python, and R; and new connected data management cloud services. The new PI Integrator for Business and the PI Integrator Business Analytics add streaming data, allowing updates to data lakes and warehouses, multiple cloud platforms, and processing engines. The PI Integrator technology enables people to use industrial analytics to transform their operations while ensuring “one version of the truth,” through its ability to synchronize data.
Digital Transformation
In his keynote address, Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and Founder, OSIsoft, spoke about smart devices, Big Data, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Industrial IoT. He emphasized that digital transformation has been OSIsoft’s mission for over 38 years and that digital transformation and IoT are changing the way companies do business and use their data. OSIsoft has been working with companies to support shared data, storing data directly on the edge or in the cloud.
Customer Advisory Board Initiatives
The company continues to work with clients and partners to provide new ways of doing business. Dr. Kennedy told the audience that OSIsoft is focused on developing technologies that align with its clients’ needs based on recommendations from the OSIsoft Customer Advisory Board. The top ten recommendations that OSIsoft addresses relate to:
- Ensuring data quality
- IT issues, including security, reliability, redundancy, and latency
- Improved advanced data analytics tools
- Community data sharing tools
- Data infrastructure support for enterprise applications
- Legacy migration support
- Support for open source applications
- Joint R&D and standards
- Mobile worker support
- Support for innovation
IoT “Lighting Up” New Data
Dr. Penny Gunterman, Product Marketing Lead, discussed how IoT is lighting up new data with new sensors and new tools. According to Dr. Gunterman, “Machine learning and artificial intelligence and advanced analytical tools help you identify how much something is deviating from normal.” She believes that technology and artificial intelligence should complement natural human intelligence.
She described a use case involving a water utility in Tennessee. The utility was approaching 80 percent of plant capacity and had considered expansions, but the estimated $20 million capital expenditure was exorbitant. Instead, the utility installed additional flow and pressure sensors to identify leaks and combined the information with PI System data collected from multiple SCADA systems to monitor the flow volume and create a mass balance. This enabled the utility to quickly find and remediate costly water leaks and defer the even more costly capital expansion.
Tools for Pervasive Data Collection
Chris Nelson, VP Software Development, discussed how OSIsoft has extended its infrastructure to the edge to be able to share community data with OSIsoft Cloud Services (OCS) to “light up” dark data.
He explained that companies are deploying IoT devices and sensors, through IoT platforms, with new data collection patterns that bypass the existing IT infrastructure and traditional control networks (DCS, SCADA, PLC) to store data directly on the edge device or in a cloud platform. However, like on-site data silos, this creates IoT platform silos. OSIsoft is enhancing the infrastructure to capture the data and bring it back to the user to help eliminate these IoT platform silos.
The company is deploying four components that expand its infrastructure to enable pervasive data collection:
OSIsoft Message Format (OMF) - based on the RESTful message architecture approach for ingesting data into the infrastructure – either the Edge Data Store, PI Server, or OSIsoft Cloud services. OMF is lightweight and available for any hardware, operating system, and development tools that use web services.
Open source applications - for increased flexibility with newer applications like FogLAMP (an open source toolkit for collecting data into the PI System), ARM (open source community of developers), and Mbed (an IoT platform ecosystem of 250 developers) to connect and manage devices across a network connected to cloud for scalable IoT solutions.
Edge data store - with multiple data ingress options, and application platform at the edge for local operational tasks.
PI Connectors and PI Interfaces - with over 450 off-the-shelf, cyber-secure connectors in an expanding library that now extends to the edge and the cloud.
New Scheduled Product Releases
OSIsoft is releasing components that monitor the system and empower companies to expand their infrastructure to the edge and cloud and lower the labor requirements for managing the infrastructure. Components and other enhancements scheduled for release in 2018 include:
PI System Directory component allows users to discover where the infrastructure is running, what node it is on, what software is running on the node or server, and the software version to simplify cybersecurity.
Pi System Health component runs on the PI System Directory to illustrate the health of the infrastructure. The initial version for release in 2018 focuses on data flow.
PI Vision 4.X will take advantage of web technology, and new capabilities that expose infrastructure and data to more colleagues for pervasive data collection to help increase natural human intelligence.
OSIsoft Cloud Services (OCS) is extending the company’s data infrastructure through the edge and towards a community vision. OCS will enable data science at scale using an operational data ecosystem that connects customers and the community of vendors and partners with best-in-class analytics.
The initial OCS cloud services offering will include remote operations management, data science (DS) enablement, and a connected community to connect and collaborate with the ecosystem of providers and applications through operational data sharing.
The company also announced new streaming PI Integrators for accelerating data science (for iterative workflows), PI Integrators for streaming Business Analytics, and PI Integrators for continuously pushing data into the cloud with Amazon Web Services and more.
OSIsoft Awards
OSIsoft announced the inaugural winners of the first-ever PI World Awards to recognize organizations that use PI System data technology to drive operational excellence and transform operations. Four companies received awards:
- City of Riverside Public Utilities (for Digital Innovation)
- National Institute of Health (for Digital Sustainability)
- Sempra Renewables, Nokia, and SenseOps (for Digital Community)
- Aera Energy (for Digital Impact)
Duke Energy Digital Transformation Strategy
In his end user keynote presentation, Chris Heck, VP and CIO at Duke Energy spoke about how the PI System has contributed to that company’s digital transformation. With approximately 7.4 million electric customers, 1.5 million gas customers, 295,000 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines, and 50 GW of generating capacity (including more than 3 GW of wind and solar) in 14 states, the company has been on a path to drive change and increase information sharing with employees and its customers.
OSIsoft has been working with Duke Energy since 1984. Duke has made a lot of improvements using the data, including implementing vibration analysis and condition-based maintenance.
Mr. Heck told the audience, “You cannot empower employees without alignment, and this requires a clear strategy and getting information down to the users who know the process and know how to execute.” Significantly, he noted that, “We could not be successful in our digital transformation without a partnership with OSIsoft.” This same theme permeated many other user presentations.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is about data and extending the infrastructure. OSIsoft continues to evolve and adapt from a data management and operational intelligence company to provide technology that enables its customers to succeed in their respective transformations.
By continuing to develop new applications and solutions, OSIsoft has demonstrated that it can help end users across a wide spectrum of industries collect, organize, store, visualize, analyze and contextualize their data to be able to use both natural and artificial intelligence to make better decisions, reduce costs, and increase profitability.
For additional information on the presentations, readers can visit:
https://www.osisoft.com/presentations/?year=2018
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Keywords: OSIsoft PI World, Digital Transformation, IIoT, Time-Series Data, OSIsoft PI System, ARC Advisory Group.