Expanding from a Process/ Plant to Holistic Landscape will fuel the debate of “on premise vs off premise”!

I had an an editor speak to me this week about “the shift to Multi Plant view across the industrial landscape, then he mentioned cloud is a dream in Industry”. Quickly correcting him that it should not be a shift to multi plant view versus an expansion on top of the existing local/ remote operational view, and “cloud” is truly real especially with virtual teams, and multi site. This confusion is common at the moment with some vendors and consultants pushing the Enterprise Historian view that really focuses on only one perpective in operations, that of the analyst performance team. That does not mean there is a swing to a new architecture, the architecture must support at least the two communities of interest with different views:

• Operational day to day teams: requiring a view focused on limited time span e.g.| 7 days and view one process or plant
• Planning, Management, Performance / optimization teams and expert support teams : wants to look at broader view across sites, and broader time span of months and years usually offline for analysis, and strategic thinking.

The expansion to holistic view will also push the debate of the industrial architecture, to a combination of:

• On Premise computing: The local plants with real time needs and short time spans will often have the required information and capability local on premise. This can apply also apply in a remote operational center infrastructure which is still local to the remote site, or on the site and just virtualized to the center.
• Off Premise computing: The shifting of data, analysis, and actions to an off premise computing, either specialised data center, or “cloud” etc, private or public, freeing up the local operational day to day infrastructure from this heavily lifting. Providing also the ideal opportunity merge and consolidate a view and capability across the industrial landscape of a company, this will involve storage, but also realtime model of the production, and operational awareness activities across the different teams.

In the blog on 2020 the following characteristics were expected:

· One in three employees will be working casual, part-time or project base vs career in a company.

· The average tenure in a job / role will be 2.4 years

· One in four workers will be working remotely and virtually.

The ability to see information and data in a near realtime, view according to my focus is key no matter what current device or location being used. The ability to connect, collaborate and share advice is key to decisions in the now and the ability share knowledge when the average experience in a role will be less than 2 years The holistic view will drive many parts of the architecture “off premise” into a managed service.

Three times in a week one in mining two in food, from companies across the world, I was asked to comment on an “End to End” view of information, and especially state. One for operational effectiveness and agility, the other for reduction in delayed time in achieving a “positive release” of products to customers. In both cases the company IT and thought leaders raised both “cloud” and “big data “ techniques. As I mentioned last week, the acceleration in acceptance of these technologies is astounding in the last 6 months.

The mixed reaction to last week blog many agreeing, many debating the reality, but for the second camp, I think they unaware of cost, technology updates, and the expectation of the new generation for doing things fast. Also, there is a shift to be able to buy this holistic capability as  services  vs total up front.

I fundamentally believe that, within 2,  years,  we will laugh at this debate of “on premise” vs “off premise” in the industrial landscape, the modern aligned and agile business will have  an industrial/ operational architecture that naturally applies both On and Off premise computing. “On premise” computing reducing to “only required data/ computing to satisfy the limited operational time span, e.g.| 7days even shorter” everything else will be “off premise”. The landscapes will enable users to view content device independent and across the landscape, but drilling to a plant and process, collaborating across the virtual team from site to corporate to worldwide experts.

Certainly over the next 2 years the expansion in Invensys’s portfolio capability spanning local to enterprise landscape, and include both “on premise” and “off premise” as well as managed services as not a specialty but a natural way to grow value from your systems.

Cloud in the Industrial Landscape

I am struggling and understand why there is a debate on Cloud in the Industrial Architectures.The Cloud is here, it is real, and most of us use it many ways today. Many of us had a similar concept in past architectures with main frames, for central data storage. The Cloud technology provides a natural fit to many Industrial Operational Landscapes, in order to address multi site, the roaming user outside the plant, and sharing of information across the industrial enterprise.

For the past year, I have talked about the evolving the Industrial Enterprise, with multiple sites, and the need for standards, in KPIs, data structures, objects layouts etc. How to achieve this without a central repository? With the infra structure increasing both in networks both wired and wireless, 3G/ 4G that all devices can leverage this growing infrastructure. Even in remote places on distributed gas fields, people are designing the industrial architecture to leverage the 3 G mobile networks, providing  10 mb with a dual modem, so why not?

Certainly as we access the changing "jobs to be done" or increased scope knowledge workers are responsible for across sites, the increased data/information access, we see Cloud as a natural part of the architecture both public and private, or within a plant site, but still managed from outside service. Things are changing too quickly on the IT side for people to keep up, and the need for common.

So you will start to see historians be sold in the cloud, already Enterprise Asset Management systems are sold as a service hosted in the cloud running across multiple sites.

In small businesses (e.g.| Companies/ sites with small employee counts and often not It or engineering resources on site),  the concept of MES, information systems, historians, and even HMIs be hosted or sold as a service is logical. You maybe laughing at the HMI as it “must” be local, yes, but I went to 3 small business sites last week, and all would prefer not having any PCs / servers on their site. Already their ERP and back office (Microsoft Office) hosted outside, so why not HMI, Historians and MES? With “thin client technology, virtual machines”  there is no need to put a PC on the shop floor, it is easier to have a thin client that enables independence of the Operating System.

Standards such as report templates, KPIs, Knowledge based systems all need to be central, and the cloud technologies like MS Azure enable the infrastructure out of the box.

At Invensys we are assuming the Cloud as an option in solution architectures as people go forward, that does not mean it is required, but people can start with an " on premise" and evolve latter on the technology should allow this. The industrial applications should evolve with the architecture, allow companies to expand and evolve, even having different architectures for the large plants vs the small plants, but still achieving the unified industrial landscape.

Instead of saying, it will not apply in the industrial world, this technology provides the opportunity to solve some of the remote operational challengers end users are facing with standard technology, in a secure way. Instead of asking “WHY WOULD WE USE CLOUD in INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS?”. We would should be asking “WHY NOT USE THE STANDARD OFF THE SHELF CAPABILITY SUCH AS CLOUD?”