Summary
We have covered OSIsoft's evolution from historian to a more integrated cross-enterprise data architecture. At PI World, its user-group event in Barcelona, there was a continuation of that evolution, with OSIsoft positioning itself as a bridge between OT and IT with edge and cloud systems. In breakout sessions and keynotes, it brought in many customers to share their experiences with PI and digital transformation, and announced a new partnership with Dassault Systemes.
The 451 Take
OSIsoft's drive forward and outward from its historian place in OT is impressive. It has a consistent story to tell, and is acting in a developer-friendly way as it opens up its cloud microservices to partners. The announced partnership with Dassault Systemes should expand OSIsoft's reach. Dassault is in the forefront of the digital twin wave that is coming to IIoT, and that will place OSIsoft in the mix as a core data provider to link the detailed 3-D models with the actual data models. OSIsoft then becomes a real-time system feed rather than a post-event data store to be examined after the fact. Augmented reality is the user interface for IoT, but it needs the visual elements and the data linked to be meaningful. It faces challenges from IT companies becoming increasingly OT-aware but bringing their own data solutions to projects, but its OT reputation should stand it in good stead.
Context
The PI System (originally Plant Information System) has been around since OSIsoft was formed in 1980. It now is at 19,000 sites in 127 countries, where it monitors 1.5 billion industrial sensor-based data streams. At its core, it has been an industrial historian system, used to capture time-series data close to where it is generated – now termed the edge in IIoT. It is aiming its services and software at pulling together the many silos of data in enterprises into a unified view.
Products
OSIsoft set out its product and services roadmap for the coming year at PI World and split it into three areas – all under the banner of extending infrastructure from edge to cloud. Pervasive Data Collection (PDC) is focused on extracting data from IIoT devices and assets. This includes the OSIsoft Message Format (OMF) and FogLAMP, an open source microservices toolkit to connect sensors to PI servers. The PI System continues to evolve in the critical-operation space at the heart of the plant, pulling from the assets and pushing into the enterprise, including more advanced visualization with PI Vision, PI System Directory and PI System Health Monitor. Finally, OSIsoft cloud services build on enterprise and community needs, making it easier to expose the data, enabling data science processes and providing remote operations monitoring.
Partners
Dassault Systemes, a €3bn ($3.4bn) company based in France with 250,000 customers, was announced as a new partner at PI World. Dassault is a market leader in 3-D data and information in product lifecycle management. It is moving toward detailed digital twins, including the data representation, via OSIsoft, and combining the 3-D design and operational models.
OSIsoft has strategic alliances with SAP, Esri, Microsoft and Cisco. It has an extensive partner network, including Seeq, which was a gold sponsor for the PI World event. Seeq offers an advanced analytics solution with full integration to PI Data Archive and PI Asset Framework. Other partners include BSquare, Yokogawa, Siemens and Trendminer (recently acquired by Software AG).
Customers
Gestamp is an €8bn-revenue Spanish company that makes critical components for the car industry. The company presented its approach to using OSIsoft, with an initial pilot gathering data from one operation on one UK chassis line at the end of 2016. In 2017 it moved up to more complete collection from two chassis lines in the UK and Germany. After one year of operation, it analyzed the results, seeing a reduction in scrap, as well as fewer dedicated resources and less investment needed to ensure quality, since it is an ongoing real-time approach. Gestamp signed an enterprise agreement with OSIsoft for a full rollout. It is measuring over 8,000 variables per welding line at 40ms intervals. It is looking to gather data through the PI System from 68 lines in 19 plants across 10 countries by the end of 2020.
Power Factors builds systems for renewable-energy companies to manage operations. It combines OSIsoft (for data collection and management of plant and metering) with Microsoft Azure cloud functions and Salesforce CRM applications. Using its knowledge of the industrial processes in renewable energy, it worked with Cypress Creek Renewables to optimize its operations, especially relating to its field force and their efficiency.
Michelin, the tire company, has €21.9bn in net sales, with 69 plants in 171 countries. Its manufacturing process is complex, with 150 steps and 200 raw materials, and spans continuous, batch and discrete processing. The company has embarked on a new digital platform initiative to attempt to improve its measurement, focusing on cycle time monitoring and on quality. In this long-running project, the company has started to create a central asset template repository to describe the data across all plants for particular processes. Its operations mix using Talend data integration and OSIsoft to create common data assets, and merge that with Oracle functions in a corporate data lake. It uses OSIsoft PI Viewer to see real-time information and for some exploration. In its initial trials, it identified a 3.5% loss in cycle time, which equated to 75 tires lost per shift. In its quality-monitoring pilot, it now has 1,500 product and process characteristics available in real time for quality technicians to work with.
Competition
While OSIsoft is a known provider in many OT parts of an organization, the wrangling and movement of data, and its unification into a trusted real-time source, are often part of the value the large IT companies (IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Google and Oracle) look to own by providing the analytics services on those data sources. Other companies, such as RTI with the Data Distribution Service system, take a different approach to data. Splunk seeks to pull data sources together across the enterprise, too.
