Aveva Expands Cloud Offerings to Visualize Complex Operations

Last year, when Schneider Electric and Aveva announced the merger of their industrial and engineering software businesses respectively, it set the stage for the duo to help capital-intensive industries with their digital transformations. But just having a combined portfolio of Aveva’s design, engineering and construction capabilities with Schneider Electric’s simulation, visualization and operations management is not enough. There needs to be integration and end-to-end visibility to make a digital difference.

To fulfill such a vision, the technology suppliers—united under the Aveva brand—recently announced that all of the monitoring, control and information management software will be available in the cloud, in addition to its traditional on-premise offering. The ability to run in a hybrid mode adds edge-to-cloud integration, visualization tools and access to advanced applications and analytics across its software portfolio, including InTouch HMI, InTouch Edge HMI, System Platform, Historian and Aveva Insight products. This not only provides added insight into operations but adds a subscription pricing model that provides customers with greater flexibility in licensing, configuration and deployment while reducing total cost of ownership and infrastructure complexity, the company said.

“There are complicated operation environments that are diverse and that go through continuous change. Our intent is, through [the use of] data, information and knowledge, to improve the performance of operations in the context that the user needs it,” said Aveva CEO Craig Hayman during a press conference at the ARC Industry Forum if February. “It means taking all of the disparate data, presenting it in a single view, and using analytics to turn [it] into actionable [information], which could mean preventing unplanned downtime. It’s our idea of digitization in a pragmatic and concrete step.”

Specifically, with these capabilities available in a hybrid cloud model, customers can quickly bridge OT and IT requirements, create reusable industrial applications with rapid time to value, and drive operational efficiency with increased visibility across multiple levels of an organization. For example, using real-time and historical data with machine learning capabilities, a manufacturer can predict possible faults or failures and take pre-emptive action through automated workflows supported by augmented reality tools.

According to Hayman, Aveva has been working on this for the last year, using 150 scrum development teams to make it possible for customers to easily migrate to the hybrid offering. Aveva has done a lot of work around security to integrate with the directory systems the end users are already using, to take the pain out of the upgrade, he said. “We are also trying to simplify the pricing model in way that is authentic and gives customers flexibility and certainty.”

While this initial deployment is focused on a company in the oil and gas segment, Aveva caters to variety of industries including chemical, food and beverage, life sciences, power, water wastewater and infrastructure.

“Aveva is committed to partnering with our customers to achieve maximum value from industrial digital transformation,” Hayman said. “The latest enhancements in our monitoring, control and information management portfolio perfectly illustrate how we are empowering our customers with edge-to-enterprise visibility.”