Google Cloud and AVEVA’s OSIsoft serve the industrial sector a new flavor of PI

Across the industrial sector, many digital enablers and disruptive technologies are transforming businesses to be more efficient, profitable, nimble, and secure: smart factories with connected machines, the rise of the industrial internet of things (IIoT), proliferation of sensors and data, and new cloud strategies, to name a few.

Our work with the PI System is designed to help industrial companies modernize their data and take it beyond the operational space to Google Cloud, deriving more insights and business value. Thanks to our partnership with AMD and OSIsoft, now part of AVEVA, customers can effectively, safely, and easily deploy a fully functioning PI System to Google Cloud. Together, we assist customers along that transformational journey through the launch of GCP deployment scripts for PI Core.

The PI System is the market-leading data management platform for industrial operations in essential industries such as energy, mining, oil and gas, utilities, pharmaceutical, facilities, manufacturing, and more. The PI System automatically captures sensor data from every relevant source, refines and contextualizes the data, and delivers it to a broad ecosystem of people, tools, and applications for analysis and strategic planning. It also serves as a single source of truth for consistent decision making.

With the PI System, industrial companies can generate insights from their data, including:

• Analyzing seasonal trends

• Determining if utilities are meeting the demands of production

• Comparing the performance of different lots of raw material

• Determining when maintenance is required on equipment

• Optimizing the utilization or performance of a production line

The new deployment scripts are a natural addition to PI Integrator for Business Analytics, which integrates Google Cloud with PI Core, the on-premises portion of the PI System. PI Integrator for Business Analytics can deliver critical operational data directly to Google Cloud destinations like Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub. It can also be deployed either on-prem or on Google Cloud.

The solution allows customers to take time-series data from one or many of their PI Core deployments and move it onto BigQuery, Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse for analytics. Customers can take advantage of exabyte-scale storage and petabyte-scale SQL queries in this high-speed, in-memory BI engine, enabling cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools that provide deep insights like anomaly detection and predictive maintenance from that data.

Through our partnership, PI Core-based solutions for industrial customers are further protected by Google Cloud’s robust security features, like encrypting cloud data at rest by default, that keep data safe and more secure. What’s more, PI Core is aligned with real-time mission-critical industrial applications, avoiding delays in time-sensitive process automation or discrete manufacturing processes.

Serving a new slice of PI (System) on Google Cloud

GCP deployment scripts for PI Core are the latest achievement in our partnership. We developed these deployment scripts for PI Core on Google Cloud using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with PowerShell and Terraform technologies. With PI Core on Google Cloud, customers can generate business insights through the power of Google Cloud’s Smart Data Platform with AI/ML combined with other contextualized data. The scripts accelerate an industrial customer’s digital transformation and support quick and iterative testing and prototyping. They’re also designed for customers who are considering moving their on-prem system to Google Cloud, or customers who would like to deploy PI Core as an aggregation system to bring diverse on-prem data from multiple PI Systems into one place.