It’s been a long time in the making, but The Singularity has finally arrived – month by month, a growing majority of AVEVA customers are migrating from traditional licensing to AVEVA Flex packages with CONNECT Cloud platform capabilities, and everybody is asking ‘what can I do now’?
If that’s you, why not grab a fresh cup of coffee, set aside ten minutes and ponder this question with us.
Here are the most popular features our customers are exploring today:
Experiment with AVEVA Advanced Analytics
In terms of brand-new features, AAA is by far the most popular. Think of it as a more feature-rich equivalent to PI AF, a treasure trove of tools for building advanced calculations with branching logic:
In fairness, – when customers reach its native limits the answer for ‘can it do this?’ is typically ‘no, but we can extend it to do that’.
In AAA, the answer to all the familiar questions is ‘Yes’. We’re still getting our heads around the sheer range of features, but we are pretty impressed by everything we have found so far. Better yet, we can leverage existing elements and attributes mapped in PI AF to build and scale AAA models based on trusted asset models created on-prem.
Take a peek:
The product includes standardised Machine Learning models built for operational use cases. It’s got a model factory, a data factory, data streaming pipelines and alerting.
ITI Group’s analytics and data science specialists already have full access to AAA and a CONNECT tenant, so if you want us to experiment with a POC for you, it’s now easier than ever to securely share a few streams across to us and see what we can do – so if you’ve got any bright ideas you wanted us to test out for you, we’d love to help!
Share data with partner organisations
Until now, sharing data with other organisations has been difficult, and painful. It involves IT teams, digital security, and networking teams. It can involve external attack surfaces, VPNs, PI to PI Interfaces, new servers, web APIs, custom scripts, exports, imports, UFL, cloud storage mediums, and all sorts of other marvellously creative ways of getting data from point A to yet another point A in another network, ensuring you remember to use the right name, description, compression settings and so on.
Going forward, all that changes thanks to Community Data Sharing using CONNECT. It’s as simple as PI to CONNECT, share the stream to a partner organisation, and then CONNECT to PI again. We have even set up data sharing for customers sharing to a partner who does not have CONNECT, leveraging the CONNECT API in PowerShell.
If you’ve set up data transfer solutions before, you might wonder how resilient CONNECT to PI really is. During the 2024 AVEVA Partner Games we did a lot of weird things with our PI data – creating, removing, updating and deleting in the past and present, and CONNECT to PI was rock solid. Never missed a beat. It’s hardier than PI to PI, that’s for sure.
And whilst we’re on that note, why not surface data directly to enterprise platforms such as PowerBI, Databricks or your own custom ML solutions?
Optimise your architecture
Until now, customers have had their architectures bound by licensing and platform capabilities, which has caused many to adopt solutions which are… sub-optimal. Some have giant PI Servers because they didn’t want to pay licensing for multiple smaller servers. Others have multiple smaller servers because a single server didn’t have sufficient capacity or wasn’t able to authenticate users across AD boundaries. Large organisations have been penny-pinching their tag counts across many small servers.
In the new world, every PI Server is twice as powerful, has richer authentication options, and thanks to Flex’s aggregate tag licensing model you’ve just got one tag count across however many servers you need. Perhaps you’ll even skip PI altogether and lift data direct from Adapters to CONNECT! The components are more flexible, resilient and capable than ever before. Every single customer I’ve spoken to in the past six months is reassessing their architecture and finding options to do more with less – a rare gift.
When I say architecture, I don’t just mean servers either – some customers have struggled with access for contractors, other business units, or JV’s, because these ‘external’ users are recognised by the AD tenant hosting the PI System. OpenID authentication is a game changer because it allows you to serve up PI System access to users beyond the bounds of your AD tenant, and tie in with non-Microsoft ID providers.
So depending on your old and new contract options, you may discover all kinds of goodies in the new bundle – you might have new options to upgrade from PI Interfaces to Adapters or Connectors, decom on-prem SQL Servers in favour of Azure/AWS SQL, migrate Trusts to OpenID Authentication, implement TLS where it was previously unavailable, or make use of your free test PI Server license.
A Brave New World
This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the new things that you can, could or should do with the new tools and capabilities that you’re about to get your hands on. Don’t forget about experimenting with the new features in PI Vision 2025, and watch this space for some exciting developments in 2026!
As always, if you’ve got bigger challenges and want a fresh perspective, we’d love to have a conversation with you and your team to see what kind of value we can unlock for your business together. Please get in touch using the contact form below if there’s anything you’d like to chat about in more detail with one of our specialists.