The usual summer provides little news after the June rush of conferences. This year I think AVEVA alone could have kept me supplied with news and thoughts. There were at least two digital events. Twice I was up (well, actually my normal time) early for a 6 am breakfast roundtable discussion. Not complaining. It was all good.

While I have watched an IT company pivot to an “as-a-service” company after cloud became quite common, in the OT world cloud has just become a “thing.” And here we are thinking about AVEVA’s embrace of the cloud. I could say “about time”, but in the industrial world we tend not to rush things. So, here is an update on the company’s “Cloud-First” strategy.

AVEVA has unveiled ‘Cloud-First’, a key component of its long-term software portfolio strategy to focus on providing core services in the cloud to ensure high uptime and availability, user management, and the flexibility to try new solutions. The strategy includes the introduction of scenario-driven integration between products for rapid time to value.

To operationalize this strategy, AVEVA has also announced advances to AVEVA Connect, AVEVA Unified Engineering, and AVEVA Insight Guided and Advanced Analytics.

AVEVA Connect, designed to securely host AVEVA software solutions in the cloud, currently enables more than 1,900 customers and over 25,000 users. Cloud computing facilitates improved user management across all assets as well as the capability to monitor usage of subscription credits across the entire AVEVA software portfolio.

“The new normal has required a shift in business focus and imperatives,” said Ravi Gopinath, Chief Cloud Officer and Chief Product Officer, AVEVA. “Moving forward, businesses will witness reduced capital investments, changing working processes, a heightened need for visualization tools and much greater agility and responsiveness across the value chain to minimize value leaks and optimize production to maximize profit opportunities.  Organizational focus has shifted to demand increased flexibility, much more real time collaboration, intelligent applications and a more streamlined user experience. AVEVA Connect will serve as a ‘one stop shop’ for all these requirements.”

AVEVA Unified Engineeringdelivers a collaborative data-centric environment with a single source of accountability across the engineering lifecycle. Multi-discipline teams across owner operators and EPCs can now collaborate to execute greenfield and brownfield projects with high traceability in a secure cloud environment that can be set up in days to accelerate time to value and reduce total installed cost.

AVEVA Insight Guided and Advanced Analytics are now available in the Cloud for advanced pattern recognition to augment automated analytics and condition monitoring. The solution enables customers to start on a predictive analytics-based Asset Performance strategy without the need for complex modelling or data science. This solution allows the user to create easy-to-deploy models targeting specific assets, providing reliable anomaly detection with minimal configuration.

From operating information analysis and low-code application development to complex engineering visualization, AVEVA Connect’s functionality allows easy trials for new capabilities.

‘Cloud-First’ includes the introduction of scenario-driven integration between products for rapid time to value. Later this year, AVEVA will also introduce software development kits to enable partners to provide their solutions within the AVEVA Connect platform in order to increase the range of capabilities available to customers.

“The shift to the cloud isn’t a matter of choice but something that must aggressively be pursued. The tremendous advantages of deployment and ownership costs, the ability to flexibly consume purely based on need and the removal of localized barriers to allow unprecedented levels of work efficiency and collaboration mean that we will continue to add to the rich domain content of our portfolio, because this is not just about technology, but about the realities and specifics of our customer’s business,” concluded Gopinath.