I recently attended the AVEVA World Conference in Orlando to gain an insight into what are the latest innovations coming from our trusted, long standing supplier. I wasn’t disappointed.
The agile development methodology they now live and breathe helps them to adapt quickly to the ever changing trends that we see in our landscape, responding to the most pressing challenges our customers face on a daily basis.
The Wonderware solutions we have known for so long were still at the heart of the conference and will continue to be the driving force for monitor and control, information management and operations management. It's great to see the software vendor AVEVA fully immersed in the Wonderware world, they bring a wealth of experience in developing and promoting software products, this has started to shine through with the solutions we all know and love.
The conference itself attracted an impressive number of system users, mainly from across America (over 1,000). Having spoken to a few of them, attending was a no brainer due to their past experience of these events and gaining the understanding they needed to get more from their systems, more throughput, less downtime, greater efficiency and overall, a better ROI.
Attendees were extremely well looked after with some of the best and inspiring keynote speeches I have ever seen, also the customer appreciation night where we got to spend the evening riding some of the best rollercoasters Orlando had to offer.
Roadmap for the future
There was a focus at the event of the up and coming 2020 releases for InTouch, Historian and System Platform which are set to be delivered early next year.
Among other key elements, we heard about simpler application development / conversion for InTouch OMI, write capability to the already impressive InTouch Web Client and additional ways of retrieving data from our flagship Historian solution, making it even easier to return the ever increasing amount of data we are storing from our systems.
Another focus was everything cloud!
This wasn’t to say that everything is moving there, as the importance of edge processing was still very apparent for our real-time systems. But anything in relation to data can be deployed on-premise, in a hybrid configuration or fully in the cloud.
So what does this mean and what are the benefits?
We expect more from our data, like the ability to predict failures, linking to maintenance systems which may already be cloud based or even just understanding which assets are more prone to downtime so we can increase efficiency.
The resource requirements for these types of scenarios are more intensive so provisioning and maintaining a solution that would have previously been on-premise for these ever increasing systems becomes much more labour intensive. Cloud resolves these problems because they are automatically provisioned in the background and nothing is required on site to be maintained.
The conference showed AVEVA deploying even more “frictionless” Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions making them a likely partner of choice for those customers who have a cloud strategy.
The reality of anything data related in the cloud is that it also doesn’t need to be real-time so accessing historical information form a web browser is more than sufficient and tools they have in place in the edge solutions deal with internet interruptions.
Exciting times ahead and it is great to see the positive impact that AVEVA are having in already well-established, long standing solutions.
