PI World Sees OSISoft Debut AWS, Nokia and Kansai Power Collaborations

With OSISoft’s most recent PI World users’ conference now in the books, the firm’s recent announcements show how the world of real-time data has changed for the operational intelligence solution provider in the past few years of hosting this event.

While just three years ago, IoT-themed attendance was still new at the event, OSIsoft‘s trio of new collaborations this week is telling. The first is with Amazon Web Services (AWS); the two companies will work together to develop services and features to simplify the process of running analytics on the enormous volumes of data generated by OSIsoft’s PI System.

They plan to enhance operational data insights with IoT devices, enable real-time data science and provide integration with AWS services to give customers the tools they need to develop AI, machine learning and visual analytics apps using data from PI Integrator. They plan to also provide seamless connectivity to Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3 and Amazon Kinesis. OSIsoft is also planning to bring enhancements to PI Integrator.

“Thousands of customers rely on the PI System daily to run their operations and serve up insights for improving their competitiveness. This alliance takes those capabilities to the next level. By combining PI System data and technology with AWS’s capabilities, customers will be able to more easily compare the performance of different facilities or predict the financial impact of proposed supply chain changes before they are implemented,” said Chris Nelson, Vice President of Engineering at OSIsoft. “Right now, operations and IT in many organizations operate completely independently. This helps bring these two worlds together.”

See also: OSISoft system powering Hoover Dam updates

The next collaboration is between OSIsoft and Japanese utility Kansai Electric Power. Kansai, based in Japan, will use the PI system to improve operations and efficiency at their thermal power plants and create a new service called the Kansai-Value Creation Service that will provide remote monitoring to reduce downtime and alert on abnormalities in real-time to improve the electric power supply chain.

While the PI system is well-ensconced in the power sector, especially in newer power plant installations around renewable energy, using it for its operational predictional analysis versus real-time production is newer. Kansai Electric says the PI system has saved them millions of dollars in operational costs.

“Kansai Electric Power is at the forefront of the transformation of the utility industry. The company has developed a wealth of expertise and insight into optimizing complex operations and now can share it with others through K-VaCS,” said David Thomason, Worldwide Industry Principal for Power Generation at OSIsoft. “Operational data is an incredibly valuable asset and utilities like Kansai are showing the world how to extract the most out of it.”

Working with Nokia on  IoT integration

The third collaboration is with Nokia. The two companies signed an agreement to develop new business models based on integrating IoT with private LTE. They say combining Nokia’s LTE-based cloud automation technology with OSIsoft’s data infrastructure tech will allow enterprises to deploy predictive maintenance and communication infrastructure.

OSIsoft’s PI System will work with the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud. Nokia’s service will offer OSIsoft’s customers subscription-based private mobile broadband for data transfer and analytics.

Stephan Litjens, head of Nokia Digital Automation, said: “It is a great opportunity for us to work with OSIsoft given their large footprint in the energy market. Our new solution for digital automation will make it possible for OSIsoft to connect to more sensors and machines, collecting data for processing and analytics to make their clients’ business more efficient and productive. One key benefit of the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud is its ability to let users fully control and steer their data and flexibly increase capacity and reach as usage goes up.”

OSIsoft also released a new edition of PI Integrator for Business. PI Integrator for Business Analytics Advanced Edition adds streaming data, allowing updates to data lakes and warehouses, multiple cloud platforms, and processing engines. These updates allow data scientists and machine learning algorithms to work with up to the minute data sets and improve decision making.

“It can take days, even weeks, of custom coding to prepare large data sets for analytics. PI Integrator for Business Analytics Advanced Edition can reduce that to a few minutes,” said Chris Nelson, Vice President of Engineering at OSIsoft. “By slashing the painful busy work of data prep, PI Integrator technology paves the way for people to experiment with industrial analytics and ultimately transform their operations. It also helps ensure that organizations operate from a ‘single version of the truth’ because it is designed to synchronize data across multiple destinations and platforms.”

OSISoft’s PI World user conference is held annually in San Francisco. It wrapped up in late April.