ARC Attends OSIsoft User Conference

People with Data Can Transform Their Worlds

I was fortunate to attend last week’s OSIsoft User Conference 2017 with two ARC Advisory Group analysts.  Opening Day Keynote presentations were kicked off with the OSIsoft mantra, "People with data can transform their worlds!" 

Jenny Linton, OSIsoft President, stated there were over 2000 registrants from 600 companies plus hundreds of OSIsoft attendees. 

OSIosft’s strategy is for customers to extend their OSIsoft infrastructure which stimulates customer success and in turn fosters a successful community.

Founder Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy said he believes Industrial IoT will stratify into four levels:

(1) Control & Analytics will be local.

(2) A Data Aggregation layer (where PI started) serving Operations.

(3) A Company/Enterprise layer (where the focus is money).

(4) A Community layer (your company and all others you interact with). 

This progression is being inspired by Digital Transformation with "digital intensity". 

Martin Otterson, Senior VP Customer Success, said Digital Transformation enables Operational Excellence that increases revenue and lowers costs through product innovation and new services.  To further enable OSIsoft customer satisfaction and success, Sales and Support is now one team at OSIsoft. 

David Mount of Kleiner Perkins Caufiled Byers presented research which confirmed industrial companies who digitize do better than their competitors.  

Rapid fire short presentations by customers and key partners followed.  Each presenter spoke about results they have achieved by working with OSIsoft. 

The morning concluded with a Keynote presentation by Billy Bean of the Oakland Athletics baseball team whose groundbreaking baseball career was portrayed in the movie "Money Ball".  Billy was the innovator who introduced analytics to identify players with unrecognized potential who could be signed with low dollar value contracts and made the team a winner.  His presentation demonstrated that organizations of all kinds who embrace data and analytics are on the road to success.

The days that followed were a parade of customers showing off what they have accomplished by working with OSIsoft and its partners.  My favorite presentation was by a small water utility which replaced old round-chart recorders at 27 remote locations with a PI-based SCADA system at a total cost under $100K.  Next was an oil company using OSIsoft PI with real-time analytics as a feed to SAP’s HANA which identifies hidden problems and provides the information necessary to act on them.  This impressive PI system collects 700K data points from multiple sources with 1 to 15 second scan-times which feeds 14,000 updates per second to Hana.

If your company is a PI user, or you have a potential application large or small, and you haven’t attended an OSIsoft User Conference, put it on your To Do list.  There is even a page on the OSIsoft web site on how to justify your trip.