Invensys and Microsoft Join Forces to Deliver Cloud-Based Manufacturing Solutions

Grazed from Arc Advisory Group. Author: Peter Reynolds.

Invensys Operations Management and Microsoft recently collaborated on a series of Executive "Eye Opener" seminars intended to promote the potential business benefits of applying cloud computing, virtualization, and analytics in manufacturing. ARC Advisory Group participated in these seminars, which were held last month in Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. Over 100 companies registered for the seminars and attendees included a cross section of representatives from manufacturing IT, operations and maintenance management, and IT management.

The goal of the multi-city seminar was to provide greater understanding of the business benefits and applicability of Microsoft Azure Cloud Technology in industrial automation and how proven technologies like virtualization can offer a clear pathway to additional benefits…

Industry and solution experts from Microsoft, Invensys Operations Management, ARC Advisory Group, and Sarla Analytics participated in these interactive, half-day seminars. Specific topics included:

• Is cloud computing an "all or nothing strategy," or can industrial users make incremental investments to help mitigate risk?
• Microsoft’s roadmap for bringing cloud computing to industry
• How the cloud impacts manufacturers
• Current mobile solutions for cloud-based reporting and KPI management
• Invensys’ near-term product plans for collaboration and reporting in the cloud

The seminars provided ARC with an opportunity to dig a little deeper into Invensys’s cloud strategy and expanding portfolio of cloud-based solutions.

IT Challenges at the Plant Level
While today’s modern plant automation is largely comprised of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, plant engineering and IT staffs still often have to deal with high complexity, poor data integration, and siloed applications. In many cases, the individuals in manufacturing and other industrial plants that are responsible for supporting automation have not had these roles adequately defined and/or are unclear about how to interface with other IT teams across the enterprise. This often leads to poor coordination, cyber security and other risks, and increased costs.

This overall lack of interaction has created an additional risk burden for operations and sends an unclear message to business and plant owners about technology investments. Many process automation engineers and plant technicians don’t think their IT-related work adds real value to the manufacturing operations and believe that their time would be better spent optimizing the plant assets and processes and working with operations.

Many plant staffs today view the following issues as top priorities:

• Security and availability of applications
• Not enough physical space to accommodate ever-increasing computing requirements.
• Lack of trained staff to support the infrastructure.
• Increasing overhead costs and high cost of new IT hardware and software assets
• Need to demonstrate a return on investment of six months or less to get projects approved

Invensys Operations Management’s Cloud Strategy

Invensys Operations Management believes that a combination of increased flexibility and lowered cost of ownership will drive adoption of cloud computing for plant-level applications, since the cloud offers the potential to address all the above concerns. (Earlier this year, Invensys announced an alliance with Microsoft for migrating selected Invensys Operations Management applications to the Windows Azure cloud platform.)

Invensys and ARC have a similar take on the technology: the cloud can allow users in manufacturing and other industrial plants to get started quickly and then scale up as demand changes. It reduces IT management and server administration tasks, can provide organizations with a high-availability architecture, and enables collaboration by increasing accessibility to knowledge and visibility across the enterprise. The cloud addresses key user pain points, including IT costs, application lifecycle management (version control), patch management, and application monitoring. It also helps foster faster adoption of new products and technologies in situations where customers may not have the appropriate infrastructure.

Invensys has discussed its cloud strategy with key customers. The company believes that the initial customers that will benefit from the technology will be those that operate geographically distributed assets or plants, such as those found in the food & beverage, paper, utilities, and oil & gas industries, as well as solar farms and municipalities.

Invensys discussed the following three initiatives involving the cloud:

SmartGlance Software as a Service (SaaS)
SmartGlance, a visualization and reporting application for mobile devices, connects to the Wonderware Historian and other data sources. Invensys released a cloud-based SaaS version a year ago to simplify data connectivity and administration. Moving the connection to data sources from the client to this solution enables data delivery anywhere, any time. During the recent seminars, the company mentioned that it has 50 SmartGlance customers and 450 devices in subscription.

Wonderware Historian in the Cloud
A cloud-based version of Invensys’ tiered Wonderware Historian product offers users a combination of in-plant and cloud services. Invensys sees the benefits as greater enterprise access to data with lower total cost of ownership. The company also envisions applications where customers will find value from separating historical data from in-plant control networks.

Skelta Business Process Management (BPM)
Invensys is currently rolling out its Skelta BPM Workflow product to customers "in the cloud." This will support collaboration between people and systems. As with all software products designed for corporate deployment, Invensys’ challenge is to develop a good pilot program that is both collaborative and visible, so that all corporate stakeholders have input and buy-in to the pilot development process. Invensys believes that, in addition to the regular cloud benefits, the cloud will speed up Skelta deployment and offer a single point of administration and workflow management after the rollout.

Conclusion
While the cloud might make technology deployments and support less complicated, the complicated, legal contracts that need to be negotiated with cloud service providers can still be complex and difficult for automation experts to understand. Similarly, cloud providers may not fully understand the unique nuances of real-time plant operations. As a result, the detailed service level agreements (SLAs) for its cloud-based solutions that Invensys offers as an extension to its existing services should provide users with some peace of mind that, when things go bump in the night, a single supplier (Invensys) will assume responsibility for managing both cloud performance and availability.

Invensys is promising simplicity, reliability, availability, managed utility based costs and completely elastic and expandable resources that may take the long awaited burden off the plant IT staff dealing with "IT infrastructure", and tasks that many end user companies already view as not value added activity.

Clearly, moving key process information and manufacturing applications to the cloud would have a tremendous impact on plant architectures. For decades, manufacturing companies have relied on their plant automation suppliers to help architect and secure their plant systems. While many end users have trepidations about trusting their sensitive plant applications and information to the cloud, since trusted automation companies (like Invensys) appear to be moving in the direction of using well-proven cloud suppliers (like Microsoft), they can now rest a little easier when adopting a cloud approach.