OSIsoft: Enabling Actionable Insights for Operational Efficiency

Cloud computing and the "Internet of Things" (IOT) is finally coming together to create new possibilities for industrial control systems and monitoring devices. It’s an effort to squeeze better performance and efficiency from industrial operations. It involves everything from computer-controlled manufacturing equipment to gas turbine engines and power plants. Using data generated during daily operations, analytics software can take decisions about logistics, plant configuration and other operational details with little human intervention. However, managing time-sensitive data streaming from sensors brings new challenges as well as opportunities. Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, an industry veteran saw new opportunities in these challenges. He recognized that organizations usually spend a couple of months in collecting and streaming time-sensitive sensor data, spend weeks in analyzing them and take indefinite amount of time to execute and take any decision. His experience in connecting people, processes and data in real-time to operational decisions and analytics motivated him to incorporate OSIsoft in 1980. The company provides streams of sensor-based data that furnishes operational insights, and enhances efficiency, quality and security of the process.

OSIsoft strongly believes that accurate data can help transform businesses. OSIsoft’sbusiness-analytics integration tools provide out-of-the-box capabilities to companies to use a portfolio of best-of-breed database technology and analytical tools. OSIsoft’s PI System software is a critical enabler of analytic initiatives. The software provides governance, allowing enterprises to combine both business and operations data together.

By creating standards based and hierarchical relationships of data across operations, it enables companies to combine data using common keys. This self-serving environment facilitates engineers to derive real-time insights into their operations and get immediate results. Besides, it also delivers enterprise data infrastructure in a readily consumable format for advanced analytics and visualization.

The integrators enable time-series data to be gathered from the PI System which is then filtered, cleaned and processed using technologies such as SAP HANA, HADOOP or Oracle for enterprise analytics initiatives. Other integrators enable individual users with no prior IT experience to feed data into visualization and analytical tools such as TibcoSpotfire, Tableau or ESRI ArcGIS. OSIsoft’s expertise in managing time-series data allows real-time Operations Data to be created everywhere and used by anyone in the organization. Patrick states, “By coupling PI System with PI Integrator for Business Analytics, our customers can efficiently and securely query large volume of historical records and align.” The product then transposes the data into a row-column format that most BI, Data Warehouse and Big Data systems can natively ingest and analyze. It ensures that context and governed data are put through analytics engine consistently and accurately.

“OSI soft’s business analytics integration tools provide out- of- the – box capabilities to companies to use a portfolio of best-of-breed database technology and analytical tools”

Patrick reiterates, “For decades our systems have scaled across enterprises to deliver data infrastructure and we have received Microsoft Partner of the Year award for the category of Business Intelligence.” It has been deployed solutions across 17,000 sites in 125 countries and across 65 percent of the Future 500 industrial enterprises in Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Utilities, Metals and Mining, Pharmaceutical, Chemical Manufacturing and others. In its testimony, CEMEX, a global leader in the building materials industry says, “With OSIsoft’s BA Integrator, we can prepare data within minutes, unlike beforeand so we can utilize the time in discovering new insights.” With IoT to feed more data in future, OSISoft is going to bolster its growth plans and extend its products ecosystem.